Bibi van Ginkel, The Practice of the United Nations in Combating Terrorism from 1946 to 2008

There is no shortage of publications on the international legal framework relating to terrorism, despite the prolonged failure to properly define the term. There has been extensive scholarly production over the past decade, not less so because of the general hysteria which followed the events of 11 September 2001, and which shows little sign of abating. Accordingly, there have been books on the definition of terrorism in international law (e.g. by Saul in 2006), others focusing on State responsibility for terrorist acts (e.g. by Becker in 2006 and Trapp in 2011), others yet on the criminal law and international humanitarian law aspects (e.g. by Bianchi and Naqvi in 2011), not to mention edited collections covering all of the above (and more), and a whole host of articles on these and other international legal aspects of terrorism. Yet the present study can be seen as covering an area that had received little focused and exclusive attention in the past: that of the practice of the United Nations (UN) in combating terrorism. Not just the Security Council, that is, and its practice after the events of 11 September 2001, but rather the practice of the organisation as a whole, from its inception until 2008. A monograph could well be published to illustrate ‘the operational techniques which the UN has at its disposal—with its strengths and weakenesses’ and to tell the ‘story of committees and their reports, of resolutions, of drafting treaties, and of calls for State action’.1

Action (physics) · International law · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · Principle of legality · Sociology · State (computer science) · Terrorism · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law