The establishment of a secretariat with a chief executive at its top converts ad hoc intergovernmental conferences into an international organisation. During the Cold War, the failure of the principal political organs to function as originally envisaged placed a disproportionate burden on the shoulders of the Secretary-General (SG). As a result the office became one with little power but considerable influence. The burden of pacific settlement under chapter 6 of the UN Charter as often as not fell on the office of the SG. It was an SG who conceived the novel institution of UN peacekeeping operations and became the lynchpin of their management and the critical channel of communication between the several actors. Because the UN pursues the two great agendas of peace and development simultaneously, it is not surprising that human security, with roots equally deep in both agendas, grew in fertile UN soil. The SG has had an important role to play in promoting the new concept of human security and the notion of institutionalising the prosecution of humanitarian atrocities and crimes against humanity.

Since the end of the Cold War, the SG is looked to in many quarters almost as an alternative voice of dissent in a US-dominated United Nations, when in fact the Cold War ended in a triumph of American values and destroyed the institutional checks on the exercise of US power globally.