Our empirical study, beginning with the end of the World War II, and the colonial global system, is a useful entry point for making some theoretical generalizations around international relations – both in the field of diplomacy as well as its mainstream scholarship – in the context of our concern for security. For, this era, preceded by the long period of human misery and insecurity, leading to the war and the ethnic holocaust in Europe and the nuclear one in Asia, provided a sufficiently poignant historical backdrop to motivate humankind to the building of a comprehensive institutional framework of global peace and security. The breakdown of the colonial global order, and the emergence of the vibrantly democratic United States as the world's only economic and military super power, willing to play a global role, only helped to improve the potentials of the new institution. In fact, this historical conjuncture, along with the experience of the abortive earlier attempts, as we have argued, helped the creation of the UN system based on the principle of collective security. It aimed at laying the social, economic, political and humanitarian underpinnings of a global order that could irreversibly eliminate the use or threat of force from human consciousness to ensure universal security.

Yet, empirically, as we have also argued, the fledgling UN system of collective security remained operationally marginalised from its inception, as its predecessor, but this time by the over-arching Cold War global system, without ever eliminating the threat of war from human consciousness.