ABSTRACT
In March 2005, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), Kofi Annan, embarked upon the most radical attempt to reform the UN since its inception 60 years before. And yet the times seemed inauspicious for such an enterprise. Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, the framework of collective
security established decades earlier, and enshrined in the UN Charter, appeared to have scant relevance to the emerging threat posed by international terrorism. The UN had struggled to compose a concerted political and legal response to the threat, leading critics to claim that it was no longer relevant to the conduct of international affairs. The scars borne by the international community, and by the UN, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 had not healed. In a speech early in 2004, the Secretary-General himself had acknowledged that the world organization had experienced acute divisions within its membership, perhaps as acrimonious as any since the end of the Cold War. As he put it ‘Consensus seemed to shatter, even on points of fundamental principle that we thought all nations shared.’1
