The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations.

• Author: McDermott, Anthony

Handbook is something of a misnomer for a work of this genre. The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations' contents and informed analysis are on a scale that makes it invaluable to hand for learned reference. But a handbook, as such, it is not. Rather it contains essays, drawing on the writing skills and participatory experience of 47 well-established practitioners, academics, analysts and writers. Their seams of varied and above all readable knowledge might have filled several volumes. It is, as the editors point out in their introduction, above all a handbook on, not of, the United Nations. It is a tribute to the variety and substance of its content, which makes it hard to read for review. To ease this task, this reviewer has been influenced by a fine idea to help reach conclusions through an informal critical conversation with the well-informed. (1)

The Secretary-General. The timing of the publication was appositely fortuitous, coinciding with the arrival of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He was able to express in a few understandably self-conscious words in the foreword--the first he wrote after taking office in January 2007--that "these essays are diverse and strongly argued, and I may not agree with all of the views". This was an acknowledgement of the weight of his inheritance. This amounts to more than just the legacy of his predecessor, Kofi Annan. Stephen Stedman wrote: "From 2003 to 2006, Secretary-General Kofi Annan pursued the most ambitious overhaul of the United Nations since its inception." (2) It is, as the authors in the Handbook indicate regularly, a burden of multilateral history that stretches back to the period before the League of Nations.

Already, events have moved on. As part of the legacy, Ban Ki-moon has the newly developing Peacekeeping Commission and the Human Rights Council, and the protracted discussion of expanding the Security Council membership, not to mention Africa's civil wars. A year into the job, Mr Ban wrote: (3) "I have not sat still this year. From the very first day that I took office, I have been on the go, engaging leaders in their capitals and across the UN community to push progress on four main fronts" (which he listed as UN reform), "within all three pillars of the UN work: peace and security, economic and social development, human rights", including the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, separating it into operational and logistical departments; climate change, as the Secretary-General's "top priority", with the Bali conference as "the year's key achievement"; the Millennium Development Goals; and human rights, notably the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

On geopolitics and security, Mr Ban noted that he had visited half a dozen peacekeeping missions, from the UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (monuc) to the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (minustah). He said: "The Special Tribunal in Lebanon is on track. ... In the Middle East, [I] worked behind-the-scenes to help launch the recent Annapolis peace talks, particularly in convincing regional leaders to attend. I will continue these efforts within the Quartet. ... No geopolitical issue has absorbed more of my time than Darfur."

Content. The Handbook falls into eight parts. The first, the editors set the scene under the theme of change and continuity at the United Nations, but at the same time underlined that the system also goes through modest cycles of change and adaptation. "The second, under theoretical frameworks, includes the UN political role and legal perspectives. The third, on principal organs, adds the Secretary-General to the six organs in the UN Charter: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council (ecosoc), the near-otiose Trusteeship Council, the Secretariat and the International Court of Justice. The fourth part includes "other actors", such as the regional groups, the Bretton Woods institutions, civil and private sectors, and the media. The fifth and sixth, on international peace and security and human rights, are perhaps the meatiest sections encompassing conflict in all its stages, humanitarian intervention, terrorism, human security and the under-represented and vulnerable--women, children and minorities. In the seventh, on development, a key theme for the future, ecosoc; again makes one of its many appearances.

The last part of the Handbook looks at the prospects for reform. Chadwick Alger's final chapter on widening participation presents perhaps the broadest overall theme to emerge. The tantalizing aspect is that, while broader participation may be inevitable, it is also potentially the riskiest development for the UN system, if handled dogmatically. For the peril is always there, from the Security Council downwards, that it might lead to overstretching, stasis or neglect in the main organs. It puts into an awkward perspective the almost last words in the book, those of Johan Galtung, one of the founders of the International Peace Research Institute Oslo, who concluded in 1980 that "the answer lies rather in having tasks for everybody", in the context of the challenges of multilateralism and global governance. Just seen from the financial aspect with its widest implications, financing will have to come far further than from within the institutions of the United Nations itself. And with money come influence, forced choices and priorities, and potential neglect of the less well-off in their role of recipients of funds and programmes for development and, in the end, political influence.

The adept and swift editing. Professor Thomas G. Weiss of the College University of New York, Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, and Sam Daws, Executive Director of the UN Association-United Kingdom, from their records and experience, have done a remarkable job of editing this volume--part of a larger project called the UN Intellectual History Project (unihp), co-directed by Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly and lorn Weiss. (4) The editing shows in both the characteristics of the chapters and the selection of their contents.

The Handbook was originally suggested some eight years ago by Dominic Byatt, Chief Editor of Oxford University Press (oup), to form part of the OUP Handbook Series. He recognized a gap in the market for something of this kind on the United Nations as an institution. While for oup it was part of a series, for the editors the hope was that it would make a separate and special contribution. Once underway, the whole exercise took only 34 months. In July 2004, the editors had a crucial lunch with Byatt at the National Gallery in London and the work was published in May 2007. Daws was the first link from earlier OUP work. (5) They had not worked together before, but decided to spurn a reading committee and performed the task themselves with some outside consultation. And how does it compare and link up with unihp? Probably in...