The New United Nations: International Organization in the Twenty-First Century (3rd Edition)
By John Allphin Moore, Jr. and Jerry Pubantz
Routledge, 2023

Scholars and students of IR will welcome the publication of the third edition of this successful text. Substantially updated, the horizontal themes are the UN’s challenges in global governance, nation-building, and human development. Uppermost among these are unresolved conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe; and the scourges of disease, climate change, and the risks inherent in the retreat from multilateralism. Fully explaining the UN’s place amidst these challenges, the novel features of this new edition include the following:

To do justice to the breadth of this new edition, this review will offer a cook’s tour, chapter by chapter. The book is divided into a conceptual introduction, eight solid chapters and a thematic epilogue. It starts with the ‘good news’ story of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Against this it juxtaposes the pressure-points shown by COVID-19, human rights violations, intrastate conflicts, and threats to the UN’s own legitimacy in the liberal international order. Refreshingly, it concludes that despite threats to its viability, the UN enormously exceeded the envisioned breadth of the organization as conceived by its founders, most notably in its steps to protect ‘individual rights’.

Chapter 1 (Ways of Thinking about the United Nations and International Organizations) will excite the IR specialist, with its consideration of the organization in the context of the primary IR theories of realism and idealism. Against this, the authors consider the influences of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism, Marxism, feminism, constructivism, and post-modernism; populism, nativist and nationalist movements. This is a substantial improvement on previous editions as it places the UN right at the centre of theoretical debate about IR.

Chapter 2 (Origins and History of the United Nations) re-traces the steps taken to create collective security, and how the UN possesses greater prowess than its predecessor, the League. Implementing “Eleanor’s UN,” responding to the humanitarian aspirations of the President’s wife, the UN quickly encountered a Cold War. Twenty-first century fissures, including unilateral military intervention in Iraq by the United States and Russia’s muscular military action- inherently threatened the principle of collective security.

Chapter 3 (The........

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