Military enforcement action

As a tool of the UN Charter system, military enforcement action arguably represents collective security in its most conventional form: envisaging a collective military response to situations threatening or breaching international peace and security. However, in practice it has been utilised relatively little in comparison to the mechanisms of non-military sanctions and peacekeeping considered in the preceding chapters. Although the UN Charter&s;s provisions envisaged a system whereby the Security Council would be able to take military enforcement action using readily available standby forces placed at its disposal, the failure to implement these arrangements has required the military enforcement option to evolve along different lines in which the Council effectively subcontracts operations to be conducted by actors in accordance with mandates which it authorises. As will be shown, this has given rise to some practical concerns about the exercise of sufficient oversight over UN-sanctioned military enforcement, although the Security Council&s;s practice in this regard has broadly improved over time. Although there are routes through which the Council might be provided with a more reliable military enforcement capability, these are unrealistic in practice due to a range of obstacles, while it might also be noted that the greatest barrier to the utilisation of the military enforcement option lies not in the absence of physical resources to be used but in the lack of political support among the Council&s;s permanent membership.