This article distinguishes between the UN Security Council's "governance" and "concert" functions and argues that the latter is important in assessing the body's diplomatic value. It presents data suggesting that serving together on the Council deepens diplomatic linkages between permanent members. It also argues that Council membership may offer several benefits for managing relations between the permanent members. Specifically, the Council provides a mechanism through which permanent members have slowed the pace of crises that might threaten their relations, used ambiguity to produce exits from potentially dangerous situations, and mitigated diplomatic humiliation. The article contends that many proposals for Council reform pay little attention to this concert function and, if adopted, may unwittingly diminish a key benefit of the institution.

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One of the unique challenges that the International Criminal Court's (ICC's) Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) faces is deciding when and where to launch investigations. It is a task that other international prosecutors have not confronted. Their investigative "situations" were selected in advance, leaving those prosecutors free to focus on the myriad other challenges any international justice enterprise faces. The ICC prosecutor's ability to define her own investigative situations (within the limits of jurisdiction) is both a boon and a burden. On the one hand, it accords the OTP the freedom to select the situations it deems most serious and worthy of international attention. Yet this discretion can also generate intense strain for the prosecutor of a still novel and fragile institution.Identifying and choosing investigations is primarily achieved through the preliminary examination phase of the prosecutor's work. The Rome Statute provides very little guidance on this critical process; it merely gives the OTP the responsibility for "receiving referrals and any substantiated information on crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court, for examining them and for conducting investigations and prosecutions before the Court." 1 Article 53 of the Statute lays out the requirements for initiating an investigation, but the Statute contains no guidance on how long the preliminary examination process should last or the specific procedures the prosecutor should follow during that phase. Other key court documents, including the Rules of Procedure and Evidence, provide little additional instruction.The absence of statutory guidance should not obscure the importance of the preliminary examination phase. As Carsten Stahn has noted, " [T]his phase has become one of the most important centers of activity of the Court and a focal point of contemporary critiques." 2 Important elaborations of the preliminary examination process have taken place during the Court's fifteen years in operation. This essay briefly considers that emerging framework, with a focus on whether it adequately constrains the discretion of the prosecutor. In particular, this essay considers the merits of instituting a timetable for the completion of preliminary examinations and argues that, on balance, the reduced flexibility and other disadvantages associated with a timetable outweigh the advantages. Evolving PracticeIn the Court's first several years, the preliminary examination process was almost totally opaque. In several situations, including Afghanistan, it is not even clear when the OTP initiated a preliminary examination. The OTP