The protection of civilians in armed conflict (what we have earlier termed the PoC doctrine) has become a policy of major importance in twenty-first-century global governance. Largely driven by the security council, PoC offers another example of global policy that can be understood as a bricolage of practices and values, with improvisation once again playing a key role. This improvisation is especially apparent in the permanent conflict between the desire to make PoC a more consistent global policy and the goal of avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach. An operational challenge for PoC therefore consists in making continual trade-offs between the different visions of “protection,” as well as between the various conceptions of PoC’s proper place among UN priorities. Rather than following a rational design, the history of PoC has been determined by the shifting balance of global power relations and the vagaries of international circumstances. On one hand, PoC has become highly institutionalized thanks to the mobilization of enormous human and financial resources by the UN, member states, and the NGO community. But on the other hand, as a policy, PoC has developed as a succession of improvised or ad hoc decisions.

This chapter looks at legal aspects of the decisions of the Security Council. It addresses certain aspects of voting in the Security Council, before then considering when Council decisions are binding, who is bound by Security Council decisions, and whether binding decisions may be included in presidential statements.

Chapter three starts from the surprise I felt when I first read a Security Council resolution. What does it mean to begin a resolution by recalling, reiterating, reconfirming or recognizing previous resolutions? In order to make sense of such beginnings, I compare preambles of Security Council resolutions to prologues in theatre plays as well as to preambles in Babylonian codes. Acts of recalling, I argue, are radically different from the decision that follows. The decision constitutes a cutoff in time, a break with the past and a pointer to the future. Decisions, in other words, present a new beginning, a lack of continuity. To recall, reiterate, recognize or reaffirm is to do the opposite: to indicate that resolutions have begun well before they were adopted. In that sense, acts of recalling seek to fill the gap that is created by a beginning, not unlike prologues do. However, preambles to Security Council resolutions cannot escape the dialectics of repetition. They do not innocently present the past as it is, but rather retake it in light of what is to follow. This means they come with their own breaks and gaps, which are filled by yet further acts of repetition.