The United Nations Secretary-General and the United Nations Security Council spend significant amounts of time on their relationship with each other. They rely on each other for such important activities as peacekeeping, international mediation, and the formulation and application of normative standards in defense of international peace and security - in other words the executive aspects of the UN's work.

The UN Secretary-General and the Security Council fills an important lacuna in the scholarship on the UN system. Although there exists today an impressive body of literature on...