Strategic challenges posed by non-state actors to collective security arrangement

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Ever since its foundation, the predicament of the United Nations Organization has been that the enforcement of the general principles of international law as set out in the Charter has only been possible when and to the extent by which the interests of the Security Council’s permanent members allowed such measures to be undertaken. Obviously, this was the main reason for the de facto paralysis of the Security Council during the Cold War, a period which was characterized by the bipolar power structure resulting from the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the wake of the 21st Century, the world has witnessed a huge rise in the activities of transnational terrorists and violent non-state actors. These threats erupted immediately after the Arab spring. Series of terrorist groups claimed to be fighting for justice under the pretext of religious ideology or secessionist claims, thereby posing lots of strategic challenges to global peace and the UN collective security mechanism. The UN has made several efforts at addressing these challenges but to no avail. The obstacles to consistent and efficient mechanisms of collective security are becoming even more serious in the present era of unipolarity – when the international community is faced with the rise of global terrorism in the course of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001. At the dawn of the 21st century, the issue of terrorism constitutes the most serious challenge to the world organization’s supremacy in matters of enforcing common legal principles, i.e. as guarantor of the international rule of law vis-à-vis all nations, small or big, weak or powerful. The way the United Nations deals with this challenge politically – and the legal and eventually military methods the organization uses, or authorizes, in its collective action against terrorism on the basis of Chapter VII of the Charter – will define its future role in the global system. Indeed, the world organization will have to walk a tightrope trying to balance the power politics of sovereign nation-states – particularly those that enjoy the status of permanent members in the Security Council – against the requirements of collective action as set out in the Charter. This challenge, however, cannot be met if one has to rely solely on instruments and legal procedures created on the basis of the power balance of 1945, i.e. by means of a Charter reflecting the necessities of an earlier era. Despite the fact that Article 43 of the Charter determines Member States to make their armed forces available to the UN if required by the Security Council, it has rarely occurred and seems to be even more difficult in the case of the fight against non-state actors employing terrorism. The United Nations Organization can only accomplish its mission if it adapts itself to the newly emerging global situation through a genuine democratic reform[1] – along the lines neither of bipolarity nor of unipolarity, but of multipolarity – and by establishing a comprehensive and consistent system of international humanitarian law in which norms regulating the definition and punishment of the crime of terrorism will form an integral part. This is the essence of the international rule of law. In such a system, there can be no domaine réservé of international action with impunity, neither for a state nor for a movement acting against a state, whether it does so with the support of a third state or not. One state’s terrorist cannot be the other state’s freedom fighter and vice-versa – no international actor, not even a permanent member of the Security Council, can be above the law. In this regard, the Organization needs to streamline its work with the International Committee of the Red Cross and Member States to ensure that Humanitarian Law instruments are more widely accepted and enforced. That includes better defining of terrorism and connected crimes in armed conflict. Even if it may sound highly idealistic or utopian in the present state of international affairs, in the eyes of the citizens of the world, the very legitimacy of the world organization will depend on a consistent and persistent commitment to the rule of law. Such a commitment is the essence of the policy of collective security as laid out in Chapter VII of the UN Charter.