The UN system is involved in the wh

The UN system is involved in the whole gamut of issue-areas in international
politics. The second half of this book consists of chapters that focus on the role of
specific international organizations (IOs) in these issue-areas. The first of these
chapters looks at collective security. There are two reasons to begin with collective
security. One is that in many ways it provides the core design function of the UN,
the IO at the heart of the contemporary multilateral system. It is the issue that features
most prominently in the UN Charter, and is probably still the function most
closely associated with the UN in the popular imagination. The second reason is
that many students of international relations are more skeptical of the role of IOs
in the realm of security than in other issue-areas, and those analysts who question
most pointedly whether IOs matter at all tend to focus their skepticism on security
issues.1 Security thus constitutes at the same time a central function of IOs and a
hard-case test of whether or not they matter in international relations.
The core security mechanism of a multilateralist world is the system of collective
security. This is a system in which all participant states agree to forswear the use of
force in the settlement of disputes, and furthermore agree to act collectively against
any state that chooses to initiate the use of force. Such collective action must be
authorized by a multilateral mechanism, in other words, by an IO that is responsible
for defining breaches of international security. Collective security can be contrasted
with more traditional security alliances in that it is inclusive, while alliances
are exclusive. In other words, alliances are usually formed against an outside enemy
(whether current or potential), while a collective security organization aims to
include all states and provide each with security against all of the others.