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The history of United Nations (UN) reform efforts is almost as long as the history of the organization itself (see Müller, 1997; Luck, 2003). However, since the mid-1990s, the UN reform drive has been particularly intense. Two rounds of reforms in 1997 and 2002 concerned issues of management and coordination within the UN system. However, the US invasion of Iraq and the oil-for-food scandal in 2003 prompted calls for a more ambitious overhaul of the organization. The High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (HLP) appointed by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued its report A More Secure World to this effect (United Nations, 2004). In his own report, 'In Larger Freedom', Annan anticipated 'the most far-reaching reforms in the history of the United Nations' (United Nations, 2005a: 3). Despite certain innovations, including the commitment to the 'responsibility to protect' and the creation of the Human Rights Council, the 2005 World Summit and its aftermath have fallen short of this ambitious goal. Nevertheless, the recent UN reform efforts can provide a revealing window for theorizing certain contours and mechanisms of contemporary global politics and governance.
Analyses of the recent UN reform endeavor have broadly followed two different trajectories. On the one hand, international lawyers and political theorists have focused on the implications of reform initiatives for sovereignty as a fundamental principle of international law and international relations.1 Neoliberal interventionists suggest (and welcome) that UN reform entails a shift in emphasis from state security to human security, and with this, a transition from Westphalian to conditional sovereignty (Slaughter, 2005, 2006a, b; see also Buchanan, 2003; Tesón, 2003). By contrast, Charter liberals maintain that, human security discourse notwithstanding, current UN reform efforts reaffirm (or ought to reaffirm) the principle of equal sovereignty (Cohen, 2004, 2006; see also Byers and Chesterman, 2003).2 Of course, this is not a merely academic debate, but a division running through the UN policy community since the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s (see Traub, 2006: 93-100). International Relations (IR) scholars and policy analysts, on the other hand, have largely focused on issues of state power and the UN's institutional authority, especially in connection with reform of the UN Security Council. Realist-oriented scholars see UN reform as a...