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With all its defects, with all the failures that we can check up against it, the UN still represents mans best-organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

The signing of the United Nations Charter in 1945 was an unprecedented development in the history of humankind. For the first time, the worlds most powerful sovereign nation states came together to create an autonomous organization designed to, in the Charters words, save succeeding generations from the scourge of war [and] reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights. Sixty years later, the UN still doggedly pursues that mandate, albeit not without difficulty and certainly not without criticism.

In The Parliament of Man, the distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy gives a thorough and timely history of the United Nations that explains the institutions roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on the UNs effectiveness as a body and on its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead.

Building on expertise he gained in drafting official reports for the UNs fiftieth anniversary on how to improve the organizations performance, Kennedy makes sense of the many commissions and committees, and how its six main operating bodiesGeneral Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council (UNESCO), Trusteeship Council, Secretariat, and International Courtoperate and interact. Citing examples from the UNs history, he shows how the five permanent members of the Security Councilthe United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and Franceon numerous occasions overcame political antagonisms to spearhead military supervision of aid in humanitarian crises, and how lack of cooperation among the great powers has hamstrung such initiatives as the control of greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbated the deleterious effects of globalization on developing nations economies.

As a body, the UN emerges here for what it is: fallible, human-based, oftentimes dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual senior UN administrators, but utterly indispensable. In The Parliament of Man, Kennedy ably proves that it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN social, environmental, and cultural agendasand no institutions to attempt to put them into practice on the ground. [via]