Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler opens with these words: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler’. This is almost true. The book is not a novel, and we have already started. Various instructions follow, which may or may not apply. Perhaps there isn't a ‘TV always on in the next room’, and we may not have gone ‘to the bookshop and bought the volume’. We could have borrowed it from a library or a friend. In any case, most of the possible truths soon disappear. ‘You’ becomes a male (still true for some of us) and a full-blown fictional character (not so true), meets a female reader, and by the end of the book is married to her. She says ‘Aren't you tired of reading?’ And you say, ‘Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino.’

There are plenty of fictions where a grammatical second person becomes a character within the story – I think of Michel Butor's La Modification, with its use of ‘Vous’, second-person, to refer to its middle-aged male protagonist. Perhaps every ‘you’ in a text, whether novel or poem or newspaper article, combines an actual address with some sort of fantasy. But it's still hard to think of ‘you’ as the name of a character, and to keep ourselves disentangled from the conversation that is not quite taking place. This is why I am suggesting that Calvino may be quite a good guide to The Waste Land.

I’d like to call on two other helpers, though, before getting down to work. ‘He imposes orders as he thinks of them’, Wallace Stevens says of ‘the maker of fictions’; ‘It is a brave affair’. I take it the irony in the last phrase suggests not that the affair is not brave, just that it is not as brave as it thinks it is. It is what poets and critics do. Or, to follow a distinction made by Frank Kermode, a great reader of Stevens, ‘poets … help us to make sense of our lives’, while ‘critics … attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’.

This chapter introduces the approach taken in the book, which is to focus on the law, not policy. It further clarifies that the book will focus on the legal aspects of the Security Council based on the UN Charter and in the Council’s practice.

This chapter considers some legal issues that arise when analyzing some of the main provisions of Chapter VII. It first considers the binding nature of provisional measures under Article 40, whether a determination under Article 39 is a prerequisite for such a determination, and the temporary nature of provisional measures and their timing. Then it considers the legal framework of measures not involving the use of force under Article 41 and possible limitations on their scope and nature.

This chapter contains short conclusions regarding the legal nature and aspects of the Security Council, as seen in light of the previous chapters.

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.

After the discussion of the powers of the Security Council in the previous chapter, this chapter considers some of the limitations on these powers, real or imagined. In particular, it examines limits deriving from the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations and the norms of jus cogens. Then, it explores some checks and balances on the actions of the Council. Ultimately, our response is that states do not have the right to do this, and would be acting unlawfully if they purported to exercise such a right. But they do, of course, have the ultimate option as a matter of policy of simply disregarding binding obligations imposed by the Council, with all the consequences, political and legal, that might flow from such a course of action. That is why the Council needs to exercise self-restraint and use its undoubted powers responsibly and only where it really is necessary to do so in order to ensure prompt and effective action to maintain international peace and security. This is the most effective check on the Council’s power.

This chapter considers the interaction of the Security Council with other international organizations in relation to the use of force and the role that international organizations may play in implementing Council authorizations to use force. This is an area where the Security Council, the international organizations concerned, and member states have shown great flexibility, with the provisions of the UN Charter (both Chapter VII and Chapter VIII) and of the constituent instruments of the regional and other organizations being developed through extensive practice. A difficult question, however, arises where member states grant regional organizations the authority to carry out such interventions without the target state’s consent to the specific action and without Council authorization, in particualr in light of Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the AU. The chapter concludes that it cannot be said that Article 4(h) of the AU Constitutive Act or similar provisions allow for the use of force without Security Council authorization. The Council remains the body vested by member states with the power to authorize ‘enforcement action’.

This chapter examines the history and nature of the Security Council’s relationship with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the role that this relationship may play in the exercise of the Council’s functions. It briefly recalls the drafting history pertaining to the Court, including its relationship to the Council, the UN Charter provisions governing the relationship between the two principal organs, and the relationship between them – both potentially and in practice. It concludes that a more prominent role for the Court, within the confines set by the Council itself in this context, could strengthen the effectiveness and legitimacy of the Council as an institution. Under the framework set out in the UN Charter and considering the Council’s wide discretion as to how it executes its responsibilities, the Council could and may want to consider and make use of the ICJ as a useful tool within its diverse toolbox for the maintenance of international peace and security.

This chapter looks at legal aspects of the decisions of the Security Council. It addresses certain aspects of voting in the Security Council, before then considering when Council decisions are binding, who is bound by Security Council decisions, and whether binding decisions may be included in presidential statements.