ABSTRACT
Over the last nearly two decades, Member States mandated the United Nations system to respond to the threat posed by global terrorism. This sparked a wide range of structural and conceptional developments, driven both by the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council. The global threat posed by al-Qaida and more recently by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) enabled a global coalition of Member States to be built, which on other issues hold diverging, in some cases opposing, positions. By focusing mainly on this specific terror threat the new structure could avoid the political difficulties of the negotiations concerning a general definition of the term terrorism, which have been deadlocked for several decades, with little hope of progress.
