This book, highly praised as an authoritative assessment of the United Nations and its place in international relations, brings together distinguished academics and senior UN officials in a clear and penetrating examination of how the UN has developed since 1945. It examines the UN's various roles in addressing long-standing and difficult problems in the relations of states in such fields as international security, human rights, international law, and economic development.

This extensively revised, updated, and expanded edition takes into account a wide range of developments in a world which remains very much divided: the rapid expansion of UN peacekeeping and election-monitoring activities; the consequences of the collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; the 1990-1 Gulf conflict and its aftermath; attempts at settlement of many regional conflicts; UN involvements in fractured societies, including Cambodia, Somalia, and former Yugoslavia; and the increased focus on the political and resource limits of the UN's capabilities.