Ideas and concepts have been a driving force in human progress, and they may be the most important legacy of the United Nations. UN ideas have set past, present, and future international agendas in many global economic and social arenas and have also led to initiatives and actions that have improved[...]

What is the current state of thinking about global governance? Can the United Nations be reformed and modernized? Is it legal, ethical or desirable for states to invade other states in the name of humanitarian intervention? Thomas G. Weiss has been contemplating these significant issues throughout t[...]

Arguing forcefully that changing times are a clarion call for new thinking, this book convincingly shows that if humanitarian organizations continue to operate as they have in the past, they will fail to help the very victims whom they try to save. Focusing especially on the emergence of 'new wars,'[...]

Six decades after its establishment, the United Nations and its system of related agencies and programs are perpetually in crisis. While the twentieth-century's world wars gave rise to ground-breaking efforts at international organization in 1919 and 1945, today's UN is ill-equipped to deal with con[...]

Friends and foes of international cooperation puzzle about how to explain order, stability, and predictability in a world without a central authority.[...]

With some 50 billion people living under duress and threatened by wars and disasters in 2012, the demand for relief worldwide has reached unprecedented levels. Humanitarianism is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and aid agencies are obliged to respond to a range of economic forces in order [...]

One of the most important dynamics of the postDCold War period consists of simultaneously downsizing the armed forces and assigning them new roles. As a result, military-civilian humanitarianism_the coming together of military forces and civilian agencies to deal with the human suffering from comple[...]