The United Nations was designed to be the central world institution for peace and security, with the Security Council at its core. This chapter looks at the law and history of the UN’s role in international peace and security, along with the secondary role played by the General Assembly. The Security Council is at the intersection of law, politics, and enforcement in world politics. The chapter looks at the formal powers given to the Security Council in the UN Charter and then examines how the practical life of the Council since 1945 has been both more than and less than what the Charter says. Case studies of mass killings in Sudan, Rwanda, and Syria show the limits of Council power under the influence of the US, Russia, and other powerful governments.

The United Nations Security Council has the authority to adopt binding decisions and to authorise military means to ensure international peace and security. Whereas the Security Council is not typically associated with animal protection, wildlife issues have become an international security concern. Wildlife poaching and trafficking of wildlife products finance criminal networks and armed groups. The Security Council has adopted several resolutions addressing wildlife poaching and trafficking as commodities with implications on international security. Poaching and trafficking of wildlife have also been met with militarised anti-poaching enforcement – on a few occasions in cooperation with United Nations Peacekeeping forces. The militarised responses may contribute to protect wildlife, but they also risk escalating the violence affecting local communities. The chapter argues that the Security Council needs to address wildlife poaching and trafficking broadly, resorting to binding decisions. It should authorise military means only as a last and temporary resort.

This chapter assesses the powers of the Security Council in three stages. First, it introduces the scope of the Council’s powers. They are potentially far-reaching, although within a particular field – the maintenance of international peace and security. The chapter then examines specifically the Council’s practice and discretion with respect to determining the existence of a threat to the peace, breaches of the peace, or an act of aggression, under Article 39. Finally, it addresses whether such determinations are subject to judicial review.

Chapter 5 embarks upon an analysis of the UNSC’s approach to ‘conflict resources’ by considering its use of sanctions, panels/groups of experts, and peacekeeping missions. It will show that UNSC commodity-focused interventions have sought to address the economic motivations for starting and prolonging armed conflict, while failing to bring about the systemic changes necessary to achieve ‘positive peace’. By securitising resource extraction in conflict zones and supporting ‘good governance’ reforms in post-conflict countries, questions of sustainability and more equitable access/distribution of natural resources have been sidelined. Thereafter, through engaging with ongoing debates on the peace and security implications of climate change, the chapter illuminates the limits of existing conceptual/legal frameworks underpinning the practice of the UNSC and the need to rethink what peace and security mean in times of ecological disruption.

This chapter gives an overview of how the phenomenon of illicit trafficking of cultural property has morphed into an international security issue with ISIS at its centre, and the way in which the international community is trying to address this new threat through legal instruments. Section 1 provides a brief timeline of looting of cultural property in history that shows how this practice has always taken place, but for different motives. Section 2 uses the infamous looting of the National Museum of Baghdad of 2003 as a case-study to illustrate how the activity of looting cultural property acquired a difference nuance with the rise of fundamentalist terrorist groups, turning it into a new international security issue. Section 3 describes how the illicit traffic of antiquities works in Syria and in Iraq, and the role that is known ISIS plays in it. Section 4 explains the reach of the different legal instruments that pre-existed this phenomenon or have been put into place to tackle this new threat to international peace and security. Finally, section 5 looks at possible venues for prosecuting persons involved in this transnational phenomenon.