Security Council

Security Council
Sebastian von Einsiedel and David M. Malone
The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations (2 ed.)
Edited by Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws

Print Publication Date: Jun 2018

Subject: Political Science, International Relations, Political Institutions
Online Publication Date: Aug 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803164.013.7

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter provides a history of the Security Council from 1945 until today. The authors
argue that the common division into a Cold War period, during which the Council was
largely paralyzed, and a post-Cold War one, during which it has emerged as a central ac­
tor in international conflict management, obscures important changes since the end of
the Cold War. Most occur in the twenty-first century and include a resurgence in peace­
keeping, a growing thematic agenda, a preoccupation with terrorism and other transna­
tional threats, and increasing attention to civilian protection. The Council has also seen a
return of great power tensions, manifest by P-5 differences over Libya, Syria, and
Ukraine. However, the biggest division does not run among the P-5 but the ten elected
members that struggle to leave a mark in Council decision-making. Reform is essential.

Keywords: Security Council, permanent members (P-5), elected members (E-10), veto, peacekeeping, sanctions,
use of force, civil war management, transnational threats, reform

THE United Nations was founded in 1945 with the central purpose of preventing another
world war.1 The primary UN organ concerned with the maintenance of international
peace and security is the Security Council. While formally equal to the other five princi­
pal organs, it has evolved into the UN’s most powerful forum.2 Unlike the General Assem­
bly, with which it has had a sometimes tense relationship, the Council’s decisions are not
only binding on all member states, but it also has the power to enforce them through
sanctions or military means.

The Council’s history is generally divided into two periods: the Cold War, during which it
was largely paralyzed by the superpower conflict; and the post-Cold War era, during
which it has emerged as a central actor in the international crisis management system
addressing the intrastate conflicts that now occupy the vast majority of its agenda.

However, that division into Cold War and post-Cold War period obscures important devel­
opments and changes that the Council has undergone since the end of the superpower
conflict. Indeed, the Council today is very different from that of the 1990s; and much of

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what drives, pre-occupies, and haunts the Council today can be traced back to a number
of events or developments that took place around the turn of the millennium.

First and foremost among them is the dramatic resurgence of peacekeeping, which start­
ed in 1999, following peacekeeping’s boom and bust cycle of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the
years 1999 and 2000 saw the adoption of seminal Council resolutions on civilian protec­
tion, HIV/AIDS and Women, Peace and Security, which were harbingers of an ever-grow­
ing body of thematic agenda items preoccupying it in the following years. In 2001, the
9/11 attacks led to the rise of the Council’s counter-terrorism agenda, in the wake of
which the body also turned its attention to a range of other transnational threats. Shortly
thereafter, the release of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) report3 ensured that civilian
protection would play a prominent role in its deliberations ever since. From 2002, the In­
ternational Criminal Court’s Statute gave the Council the power to refer and defer cases,
and made criminal accountability a recurrent factor in its dynamics. Finally, the 2003 Iraq
War was pursued without explicit Security Council authorization and caused deep scars
within the UN membership that continue to reverberate to this day.

(p. 141) This chapter, after briefly outlining the Council’s functions and powers, provides
an overview of the key developments and major events in the body’s life from 1945 until
the 2003 Iraq War. It then analyzes in detail the key trends that have shaped its decision-
making since the turn of the Millennium, identifying both areas of change and continuity.
Its final section assesses the prospects for Security Council reform, before some final
thoughts on the nature of the Security Council as primarily a political rather than princi­
pled body.

Functions and Powers

In its design, the Security Council was intended to address some of the deficiencies that
had rendered ineffective its predecessor, the Council of the League of Nations, which had
been established after World War I, but was unable to prevent a second one. The Charter
thus endowed the major powers of the day—that is, the victors of World War II (the Unit­
ed States, the Soviet Union, the Republic of China, France, and the United Kingdom)—
with special privileges and responsibilities, which were designed to ensure their lasting
engagement with the organization. These five members (P-5) were given permanent mem­
bership on the Council, and the power to ‘veto’ any of its decisions.4

In addition to the P-5, the Council has ten non-permanent members that are elected by
the General Assembly to serve two-year terms (and therefore also referred to as the
E-10).5 Originally, there were only six elected members, but four were added in 1965
through an amendment to the UN Charter, in the wake of decolonization to reflect the
world organization’s dramatically increased membership.6

The Charter grants the Security Council two sets of powers that differentiate it from any
other intergovernmental organ. The first is the power to take decisions that are legally
binding on member states. The second power unique to the Council is its authority, under
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Chapter VII, to enforce its decisions through sanctions (Article 41) or the use of military
force (Article 42), although only in situations that pose a ‘threat to international peace
and security.’

A (non-procedural) resolution requires nine affirmative votes and no veto in order to be

adopted by the Council. The necessity of both a super-majority as well as the consent of
the P-5 is important for the legitimacy of Council decisions. Conversely, any failure to act
in the face of a major international security crisis undermines the Council’s credibility as
the world’s pre-eminent crisis management organ.

Historical Background: From the Cold War to

the Twenty-First Century
As indicated, the over seven decades of Security Council history can be divided into two
periods.

(p. 142) The Cold War

For much of the first four decades of its existence, the Security Council’s ability to play
the role foreseen in the Charter was heavily constrained by the Cold War and the fre­
quent use of the veto by the Soviet Union and the United States. Before 1990, the Securi­
ty Council explicitly authorized military action under Chapter VII in only two instances.
The first occurred in 1950, to reverse a North Korean invasion into South Korea, and then
only because the Soviet Union—to its later regret—was boycotting the Security Council at
the time to protest the absence of the People’s Republic of China. The second instance
was the robust peacekeeping mission deployed to the Congo in the early 1960s (ONUC),
the only enforcement action in any of this period’s many intrastate conflicts. But the Con­
go intervention cost the life of the UN’s much admired second Secretary-General, Dag
Hammarskjöld, brought the organization close to financial ruin, and confirmed to many
that the Council should aim to avoid the use of force. Mandatory sanctions were imposed
by the Council in only two instances during this period: against Southern Rhodesia in
1966 and South Africa in 1977. But these were exceptions that were only made possible
by the universally condemned racial policies of the white-minority regimes there.

Despite these constraints, the Council maintained relevance by making creative use of
the Charter’s less intrusive Chapter VI provisions, which allow it to ‘investigate any dis­
pute’ and ‘recommend appropriate procedures or methods of adjustments.’ Building on
Chapter VI (but falling short of Chapter VII), the Council deployed two military observer
missions in the late 1940s, one to Palestine and one to Kashmir, providing an early tem­
plate of what later evolved into peacekeeping. Dubbed by Hammarskjöld a ‘Chapter VI ½’
instrument, ‘peacekeeping’ is not actually mentioned in the UN Charter. However, this ab­
sence did not prevent the Security Council from deploying fourteen peacekeeping or mili­
tary observer missions to defuse conflicts between 1958 and 1990. In doing so, it man­
aged to play an often overlooked ‘role in the mitigation and containment of conflicts

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which, it was feared, would otherwise bring the two superpowers into more direct con­
frontation.’7

Post-Cold War Euphoria

With the Cold War winding down in the late 1980s, the dynamics within the Security
Council changed dramatically as a result of increased cooperation among the P-5. This
manifested in the dramatic decline in the use of the veto: only four vetoes were cast from
January 1990 to December 1994, compared to thirty-six in the preceding five-year period,
and 193 during the first forty-five years of the UN’s history. Converging perspectives
among the P-5 enabled action aimed at the settlement of a number of violent conflicts. Be­
tween 1987 and 1989, it established five peacekeeping and observer forces to assist in
the settlements of the Iran–Iraq War, the crises in Afghanistan, Angola, and Namibia,
(p. 143) and interlinked conflicts within Central America—all previously major flashpoints

of superpower tensions.

However, what truly unlocked the Security Council’s potential was the Iraqi invasion and
annexation of Kuwait in August 1990. The Council immediately responded with a compre­
hensive UN trade embargo. When those sanctions failed to compel Saddam Hussein’s
regime to withdraw its forces from Kuwait, the Council, in November of that year adopted
resolution 678, authorizing a US-led coalition of member states to expel the Iraqi military
out of Kuwait in what became known as the Persian Gulf War. Subsequently, the UN kept
sanctions in place and imposed strong disarmament obligations on Baghdad, which be­
came a major source of contention among the P-5. By the mid-1990s, Russia, China, and
France increasingly questioned the legitimacy of the sanctions given their nefarious hu­
manitarian consequences and the inspection commission’s infiltration by the CIA.8

The UN’s success in the Persian Gulf War induced euphoria about a ‘new world order,’
with a reinvigorated Security Council capable of addressing conflicts worldwide at its
center. Having successfully tackled a conceptually straightforward challenge to interna­
tional peace and security in the form of Iraq’s attack on Kuwait, the Council then waded
into the murkier waters of civil wars and intercommunal strife. In the two and a half
years following the end of hostilities in the Gulf, the Council launched fifteen new peace­
keeping missions, with the number of troops in the field growing from 10,000 to approxi­
mately 55,000.9

There were reasons for optimism; Council-mandated peace operations deployed in 1992
to El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique proved successful in managing the unwinding
of conflicts that had been fueled by the Cold War. These missions were trendsetting in
two ways: first, unlike most of their Cold War predecessors, they were deployed to help
settle civil wars instead of serving as ‘plate-glass windows’ deployed along international
borders; second, presaging later complex, multidimensional peace operations, they had
significantly broader mandates than their Cold War predecessors, with large civil compo­
nents tending to the political, human rights, civil affairs, electoral, and humanitarian as­
sistance tasks of the missions.10

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The 1990s also saw a rapid increase in the use of UN sanctions.11 In the course of the
decade, the Security Council imposed twelve different sanctions regimes, although the
Council abandoned the use of broad trade embargoes after their humanitarian impact be­
came clear in Iraq, Haiti, and former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s. Indeed, all sanc­
tions regimes the Council has imposed since 1994 have been of a targeted nature, in
terms of individuals, entities, industries, or goods.12

In its new interventionism, the Council also significantly broadened its definition of
‘threats to international peace and security’ that would warrant enforcement action. By
authorizing coercive action in response to situations that would have previously been
thought of as falling outside Council purview (from cross-border flows of Kurdish
refugees from northern Iraq and humanitarian disaster in Somalia to an anti-democratic
coup in Haiti), the Council helped redefine the limits of sovereignty.13

(p. 144) Sobering Failures: From Rwanda to Kosovo

Mats Berdal notes that the large increase in the deployment of peacekeeping missions
meant that they soon ‘dominated the day-to-day business of the Council . . . and created
severe strains on the organization’s limited capacity for mounting, managing, and sus­
taining operations.’14 These strains, together with the application of insufficient or inap­
propriate resources and wishful thinking largely account for the UN’s triple peacekeep­
ing disasters in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda, unfolding during the years 1993–1995,
which cast lasting shame on the UN and a sudden end to the first boom period of peace­
keeping in the post-Cold War era.

In Rwanda, a cost-conscious Security Council deployed an understaffed and under­

equipped mission to implement a peace agreement; and moreover, it decided to cut and
run when genocide broke out, leaving hundreds of thousands of Rwandans to their fate.15
In Bosnia, the Council resorted to rhetorical posturing when its mission ran into difficul­
ties on the ground, promising to protect civilians in so-called ‘safe areas,’ without provid­
ing the necessary military hardware and political support to fulfill that promise. This led
to disaster in Srebrenica where thousands of civilians who had sought refuge in one of
the safe areas were slaughtered.16 In Somalia, a Council-authorized peacekeeping opera­
tion with a mandate to take military action against any faction threatening the ceasefire
soon found itself at war with a powerful militia, culminating in the ‘Black Hawk Down’
episode in which eighteen American soldiers were killed. The result was the ignominious
exit of the mission and a permanent withdrawal by the United States from UN peacekeep­
ing.17

These peacekeeping disasters had three key consequences. First, they led to a temporary
retrenchment of UN peacekeeping; between January 1995 and January 1999 only one
new operation with ‘boots on the ground’ was deployed. Second, in the wake of Somalia,
it became commonly accepted wisdom that the UN was ill-suited to wage war. Conse­
quently, from the mid-1990s onwards, the Security Council tended to leave the enforce­
ment of its decisions to multinational ‘coalitions of the willing,’ as in Haiti, Bosnia, the

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Central African Republic, East Timor, and Afghanistan.18 Lastly, the mass atrocities in
Rwanda and Bosnia led to one of the Council’s most consequential innovations in interna­
tional relations, namely the creation of the International Criminal Tribunals for the for­
mer Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Although the
slow proceedings of the tribunals were much criticized initially, the establishment of
these ad-hoc tribunals greatly intensified pressure for a more universal International
Criminal Court (ICC), a statute for which was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome
in 1998 and went into effect in 2002.

The failures in Bosnia and Rwanda also triggered a critical introspection at the UN and
beyond, with vows of ‘never again,’ nurturing a conviction that the international commu­
nity of states had an obligation to act in the face of mass atrocities, if necessary by force.
However, the notion of humanitarian intervention remained highly controversial in the
Security Council, and this issue resurfaced with the P-5’s conflicting objectives (p. 145)
and approaches to the situation in Kosovo in the late 1990s. Things came to a head in
1999 in Kosovo, where NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia without a Security
Council authorization proved highly contentious among UN member states.19 The dispute
highlighted the urgent need to establish consensus on the question of how to reconcile
the Charter principle of non-interference with an obligation to confront atrocity crimes.
This questioning ultimately led to the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), dis­
cussed below.

The September 11th Terrorist Attacks and the 2003 Iraq War

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 temporarily restored unity within the Council, which mus­
tered a robust response. This response included issuing a carte blanche for US military
action in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaida had plotted the attacks; the strengthening of a
sanctions regime against Al-Qaida and the Taliban that had originally been adopted in
2000; and the imposition of binding counter-terrorist obligations on all member states
through Security Council resolution 1373.20 These steps demonstrated the Council’s po­
tential when united in purpose.

Unfortunately, this unity of purpose evaporated upon the 2003 US–UK invasion of Iraq,
for which they tried but failed to get Council authorization, and which was pursued in the
face of adamant opposition from three permanent Council members (Russia, China, and
France) and a large part of the UN membership.21 This episode caused a deep crisis of
relevance at the UN, with supporters of the war criticizing the organization for its alleged
inability to hold to account a member state (i.e. Iraq) in breach of its obligations, and war
critics condemning the UN for failing to prevent the United States from waging a war
that they saw as illegal.

Key Trends in Security Council Decision-Mak­

ing since the Turn of the Millennium
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Several noticeable trends characterized the Security Council in the twenty-first century.

Civil War Management and Selective Security

While the 9/11 attacks centrally and lastingly placed counter-terrorism on the Security
Council’s agenda, its work continued to be dominated by civil war management. In the
decade from 2003 to 2012 roughly 79 percent of its resolutions fell into this category.22
But while early post–Cold War interventions were spread across multiple continents,
(p. 146) the Council’s activities have since converged on Africa and, to a lesser degree, the

Middle East. This is partly the result of demand (i.e., most of today’s civil wars take place
in these two regions combined with relatively permissive African attitudes toward UN in­
terventions) and partly of supply (i.e., the P-5 can most easily agree on collective action in
Africa, which does not fall into the exclusive zone of influence of any P-5 member or any
other major power).

These factors hint at an important observation by Adam Roberts that the Council-cen­
tered system of collective security is more aptly described as one of ‘selective security,’23
in which it is not objective criteria that determine whether, or how meaningfully, the
Council will get involved in a conflict, but rather the interplay of interest-based calcula­
tions of its members, their allies, countries potentially contributing troops to peacekeep­
ing operations, and often the states in armed conflict themselves. As Peter Wallensteen
and Patrik Johannsson have pointed out, the Security Council has failed to adopt any reso­
lution on ten of the twenty-five most deadly conflicts of the post–Cold War era, as ‘major
power interests in combination with sovereignty concerns have often trumped the im­
pulse for international action based on concerns over humanitarian plight or the threat of
regional diffusion of conflict.’24

The Resurgence of Peacekeeping

The Council’s enduring preoccupation with intrastate conflict is reflected in the dramatic
resurgence of UN peacekeeping that had started around the turn of the millennium. After
having gone through a boom-and-bust cycle during the 1990s, with the overall number of
peacekeepers dropping to below 13,000 by the end of the decade, in 1999 the Council
embarked on a prolonged surge period of deploying major new operations in Kosovo, East
Timor, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In the following
fourteen years, the Council mandated fourteen further peacekeeping operations, bringing
the overall number of deployed troops to around 100,000 by the fall of 2009, the level
around which peacekeeping forces have remained in mid-2017.

This resurgence in peacekeeping reflects the enduring utility of this tool to the P-5, which
have seen it as a cost-effective and politically expedient means of providing stability in
situations where few vital national interests are at stake, while spreading the costs and
risks of response. The three Western permanent members (P-3), in particular, have
proven adept at directing the Council’s attention and resources to the countries in whose
stability they are individually most interested. The Council’s motivations in mandating in­
terventions in civil wars vary from case to case, with humanitarian considerations mixing

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with the interests of one of the P-3 in the stability of a given conflict country, or concerns
about regional spillover and instability. Nevertheless as Richard Gowan has pointed out,
this resurgence was not driven by a grand strategy devised by the P-5, but rather repre­
sents a series of (p. 147) reactive responses to unforeseen crises, which in some cases
(e.g., Sierra Leone and the DRC) needed to be reinforced dramatically after the initial de­
ployment proved inadequate.25

The growth in peacekeeping has led to concerns of UN overstretch, not unlike those
faced by the organization in the early 1990s. As Council ambassadors and their staffs are
increasingly forced to split their time and attention among a growing array of issues, they
are less able to focus sufficiently on any one of them. Raising and maintaining necessary
blue helmets and getting them on the ground quickly have also become a constant
headache for the organization, often forcing the UN to make compromises in terms of
troop quality.

The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent economic slowdown
compounded the growing sense, particularly among the P-3, that the peacekeeping bud­
get, which by that point had ballooned to just above $7 billion annually, would need to be
contained.26 By the late 2000s, they started exerting increasing pressure on the UN Sec­
retariat to wind or close down missions.27 Meanwhile, by that time, special political mis­
sions (civilian field-based operations with no uniformed personnel) were increasingly seen
by Council members as more cost-effective alternatives to peacekeeping missions. Some
of these political missions proved effective in supporting peace processes (e.g., UN Mis­
sion in Nepal from 2007 to 2011), advancing longer-term peacebuilding (e.g., UN Inte­
grated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone from 2008 to 2014), or serving as platforms
for preventive diplomacy (e.g., the UN’s regional office in West Africa, since 2002).

However, a number of crises gave peacekeeping a new lease of life, calling for major new
deployments in South Sudan (2011), Mali (2013), and the Central African Republic
(2014), pushing the peacekeeping budget to above $8 billion by 2014. Meanwhile, erupt­
ing crises in Côte d’Ivoire (2011), the DRC (2013), and South Sudan (2013) called for the
adoption of more robust approaches and capacities to confront spoilers and protect civil­
ians. However, the move toward more robust peacekeeping elicits a great deal of unease,
not least among a number of troop-contributing countries that resent the prospect of see­
ing their soldiers placed in the line of fire in the pursuit of Council mandates that they
have little input in formulating.28

Deepening Ties with Regional Organizations

Among the most important shifts in the Council’s efforts to address civil wars are the
deepening ties with regional organizations, recognized by at least some of the P5 as ‘the
biggest strategic issue facing the Council today.’29 Reliance on regional organizations
grew from the mid-1990s onward as the UN scaled down its own involvement in peace­
keeping following the Rwanda and Somalia disasters. When UN peacekeeping revived in
the early 2000s, regional and sub-regional organizations, especially those in Africa, had

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gained confidence and were ‘aggressively advocating for regional solutions (p. 148) to re­
gional problems.’30 The African Union’s (AU) Peace and Security Council, created in
2002, increasingly demanded to be treated as the UN Security Council’s equal partner
with respect to that continent’s conflicts.

Despite their rhetoric to the contrary, the P-5 privately view the AU’s new-found as­
sertiveness with ambivalence and at times alarm—perhaps fearing it will prove conta­
gious for other regional organizations—and they continue to insist on the UN Security
Council’s primacy. Playing in its favor is the fact that most regional organizations lack the
financial and operational resources to realize their ambitions without assistance, even in
the case of the AU—the most operationally and institutionally mature regional organiza­
tion other than the European Union.

However, in light of the UN’s own overstretch, the Council, in situations where it was un­
willing or unable to take the lead in responding to a crisis, was all too happy to defer to
the AU, fueling the notion of African self-reliance. This development was underpinned by
the fact that African countries with powerful militaries were willing to deploy their troops
to places where there was no peace to keep, most notably in Somalia, where the AU field­
ed a Council-mandated peacekeeping operation that has suffered casualty figures that no
UN operation would be willing to sustain.31 As a result, the Council lost significant
ground to African regional and sub-regional organizations in the area of conflict manage­
ment.32

The Responsibility to Protect

The legacy of failure of atrocity prevention in Rwanda and Srebrenica, combined with the
controversies around NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, triggered renewed discussions
around the turn of the millennium about the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention.
These discussions eventually led to a reframing of the concept into the R2P doctrine, ac­
cording to which the international community of states has a responsibility to protect
populations from atrocity crimes if states, the primary holders of this responsibility, are
manifestly unwilling or unable to do so. At the 2005 World Summit, member states unani­
mously adopted the concept while adding that only the Security Council, acting on a
‘case-by-case basis,’ would have the authority to invoke it in practice.

Yet in much of the Global South, as well as in Beijing and Moscow, suspicion of the con­
cept as a smokescreen for Western interventionism has remained strong. And the World
Summit’s emphasis on ‘case-by-case’ consideration of each situation foreshadowed the
selective nature of its application.33 Indeed, this reality was illustrated early on with the
Council’s painful dithering in the face of mass killings in Darfur, where China’s efforts to
shield the regime in Khartoum from overly coercive measures was reinforced by the P-3’s
unwillingness to invest the resources required to mount an effective intervention. In
2009, when the Sri Lankan government’s final military campaign (p. 149) against the
Tamil Tigers resulted in an estimated 40,000 civilian deaths, the Council failed to hold a

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single formal meeting on the situation due to opposition from Russia, China, and its Asian
elected members.34

However, this does not mean that R2P was inconsequential. Civilian protection has be­
come a mainstay of peacekeeping mandates, and the Council and UN Secretariat have
shown an increasing willingness to muster robust yet risky responses to crises, as in the
DRC in 2012. In 2011, the R2P underpinned the Council’s mandating of the use of force
in Côte d’Ivoire to remove Laurent Gbagbo, who had refused to accept electoral defeat a
few months earlier.35 And after crisis broke out in South Sudan in late 2013, the UN mis­
sion there—its other shortcomings notwithstanding—saved countless lives by sheltering
tens of thousands of civilians under threat.

The biggest controversy around R2P has undoubtedly arisen from the 2011 NATO cam­
paign against the Gaddafi regime in Libya, the first time the Security Council had man­
dated the use of force against the de jure government of a UN member state for the pur­
pose of protecting civilians.36 NATO’s decision to interpret the resolution as authorizing
military attacks against the regime assets in Tripoli, rather than just the protection of
civilians in and around Benghazi, led to accusations—from Russia, China, and parts of the
Global South—of mandate overreach and of pursuing regime change under the guise of
R2P.

The Libya episode played into the hands of Moscow, which was opposed—for reasons
largely unrelated to Libya—to any robust Council measures in response to the escalating
civil war in Syria. This largely condemned the Council to inaction in the face of the worst
humanitarian crisis in the twenty-first century. Advocates of R2P tend to direct much of
the blame for the Security Council’s fecklessness on Syria at Russia, and to a lesser de­
gree China, which joined Russia in a series of vetoes on Syria-related draft resolutions.
However, even if Moscow and Beijing had been more accommodating, robust Council ac­
tion on Syria was always unlikely in light of the Obama administration’s reluctance to de­
ploy boots on the ground, chastened as it was by its experiences in Kosovo, Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Libya, which pointed to the difficulty of establishing and stabilizing a new order
after forceful regime change.

The Security Council’s paralysis on Syria invites a deeper reflection on the R2P concept.
In the United States, the poor outcomes of its military interventions over the past decade
and a half have fueled a retrenchment from world affairs, undermining the appetite for
using force for humanitarian purposes.37 In Moscow and Beijing, the interventions in
Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya are widely seen as assaults on world order, which have led to
hardened opposition not only to the notion of humanitarian intervention but also to any
moves in the Security Council that could be seen as paving the way to such an interven­
tion.38 Coupled with growing doubts in allied capitals on the utility of force more broadly,
this could leave the Security Council short of implementers of the military dimensions of
R2P in the future.39

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(p. 150) The Persisting Challenges of Prevention and Peacebuilding

The human cost of crises like the one in Syria, along with the growing financial burden of
peacekeeping, has renewed calls for greater focus on preventive action. However, despite
the UN Charter’s emphasis on the preventive role of the Security Council,40 the body’s
record on conflict prevention, like that of virtually all international organizations and gov­
ernments, remains poor. Indeed, absent a major crisis to mobilize collective action, the
Council tends to stand back. The enduring prevalence of P-5 interests (with Russia and
China viewing the concept of conflict prevention with particular suspicion), and the ten­
dency of countries in conflict or experiencing unrest to resist their inclusion on the Secu­
rity Council’s agenda, have hindered it from meeting the post-Cold War expectation that
it would progressively move from reaction to early action.41 This reality led newly elected
Secretary-General António Guterres to list it as his top priority upon beginning his man­
date in 2017.

Recommendations on how to address this problem invariably center on Article 99 of the

UN Charter, which gives the Secretary-General the authority to ‘bring to the attention of
the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of in­
ternational peace and security.’ Yet as Simon Chesterman has pointed out, the insistence
of the United States, Russia, and China to have exclusive control over the agenda goes a
long way in explaining why Article 99 has been explicitly invoked only twice in the
Council’s history, although there have been a handful of implicit references over the
years.42

Even modest attempts to improve the Council’s ability to anticipate crises face an uphill
battle. One striking example was the ‘horizon-scanning’ briefings introduced by the Unit­
ed Kingdom in 2011, in which the head of the UN Secretariat’s Department of Political Af­
fairs was invited to discuss with the Council, in closed session, emerging situations of
concern that were not formally on the agenda. The briefings, an effort at ‘Article 99-lite,’
proved a difficult exercise from the outset, not least because of Russian, Chinese, and US
discomfort, which led to their temporary suspension (although in late 2013 the practice
was reactivated in a modified and weakened format).

Meanwhile, efforts to improve the Council’s ability to advance longer-term peacebuilding

after the departure of peacekeepers have also had a mixed record at best. At the 2005
World Summit, the Security Council in resolution 1645 was joined by the General Assem­
bly in jointly establishing the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), a new intergovernmental
body tasked with devising long-term and integrated peacebuilding strategies for coun­
tries transitioning from war to peace, with a special focus on reconstruction and institu­
tion-building efforts. The PBC’s establishment was a response to the high rate of relapse
of countries into violence even after Security Council action. It also reflected a recogni­
tion of its inability to remain focused on specific situations over an extended period of
time while dealing with multiple crises. Still, the PBC has never been able to live up to ex­
pectations, suffering potentially irreversible damage to its reputation, at least partly be­

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cause the P-5 were uninterested in working through an oversized deliberative body that
was not established as the Council’s exclusive subsidiary organ.

(p. 151) Human Rights, Accountability, and the Role of Civil Society

The mass atrocities in Rwanda and Srebrenica not only spurned the development of the
R2P doctrine but also led to a more serious integration of human rights as a central ele­
ment of the Council’s conflict resolution efforts. This development, which accelerated in
the new millennium, manifested itself in various ways.

First, the Security Council developed more systematic interaction with the Office of the
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), with successive high commissioners
adopting more assertive approaches to their responsibilities, not least with respect to the
Council. While their direct participation in Council meetings remained controversial, from
2009 onwards high commissioners have received regular invitations to brief the Council,
including on country-specific situations.43

Second, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) deepened their influence over Council

decision-making, particularly in the field of human rights. In the 1990s, interaction be­
tween the Council and NGOs was largely limited to the so-called ‘Arria formula,’ under
which the Council intermittently met with civil society to receive briefings outside the
Council chamber, often addressing the human rights or humanitarian situations in con­
flict countries. Today, NGOs manage to influence Council deliberations in more diverse
ways, and its elected members in particular have come to rely heavily on NGOs such as
the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, CrisisAction, Enough, and Oxfam for
information and analysis from conflict zones, ensuring that NGO concerns are occasional­
ly reflected in Council mandates.

Third, thematic human rights issues have gained much prominence on the Council’s
agenda. These include prominently the protection of civilians, established in 1999 by res­
olution 1265; women, peace, and security in the 2000 resolution 1325; and children and
armed conflict through the 2004 resolution 1539. All three issues have generated coun­
try-specific improvement—the action plans against recruitment of child soldiers and mili­
tary use of schools are potent examples—and have been substantively reflected in coun­
try-specific resolutions.

Lastly, the issue of accountability for war crimes and mass atrocities has become increas­
ingly prominent on the agenda over the past two decades. The 1998 Rome Statute, which
established the International Criminal Court, accorded the Security Council the authority
to refer cases to the ICC and to suspend investigations or prosecutions for a period of up
to twelve months (known as deferral). So far, the Council has only used its right to refer
cases to the ICC in two instances: resolution 1593 for Darfur in 2005 and resolution 1970
for Libya in 2011. These episodes, along with the Council’s refusal in 2013 to meet the
AU’s request for it to exercise its deferral powers with respect to the indictments of Su­
danese president Omar al-Bashir as well as Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy
William Ruto, has led to growing hostility to the ICC among African member states, many
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of which accuse the ICC of neocolonial attitudes and anti-African bias.44 Partly because of
the controversies surrounding referrals, the Council has continued to establish special­
ized ad hoc tribunals to try international crimes, as evidenced by the Council’s involve­
ment in the creation of hybrid courts in Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and the Central African
Republic.

(p. 152) The Enduring Appeal of Sanctions

Among UN scholars, the 1990s are often referred to as the ‘sanctions decade.’45 Howev­
er, this obscures the fact that the Security Council has since continued to use an ever
greater variety of sanctions in pursuit of an ever greater variety of goals. A total of six­
teen sanctions regimes were in place as of December 2015, eleven of which were estab­
lished after 1 January 2000. Part of the attraction of sanctions is the fact that it is one of
the few coercive tools at the Council’s disposal and is viewed as more palatable than the
use of force. Another is that sanctions are initially cheap for those who impose them, with
costs assumed to be borne mostly by the governments of targeted states and their en­
ablers.

Over the years, the Security Council has displayed a remarkable degree of learning and
adaptation in its application of sanctions. Along with the move toward targeted sanctions,
it has also become more inventive in devising different types of sanctions, from travel and
flight bans to financial, arms, and commodity embargoes, as well as diplomatic sanctions.

The move toward targeted sanctions required greater sophistication in their design; a
higher degree of coordination among member states, UN entities; a wide array of other
international agencies; as well as the private sector, much of which remains a work in
progress. It also required improvements in monitoring mechanisms, leading to the estab­
lishment of independent panels of experts. The model template for others to follow was
established by the Security Council’s Angola sanctions committee in 1999–2000, which
set up a panel that broke new ground by engaging for the first time in ‘naming and sham­
ing’ third countries as ‘sanctions-busters.’ Such panels of experts are now generally es­
tablished along with a sanctions committee of the Council as part of any new sanctions
regime.46

Sanctions may have become more targeted over the years, but they certainly have not be­
come less controversial. Indeed, Russia and China, along with their fellow BRICS mem­
bers (Brazil, India, and South Africa), continue to view sanctions with much skepticism,
especially when they are imposed against sitting governments. By contrast, they tend to
support sanctions measures against non-state actors and rebel groups readily. Moscow’s
and China’s vetoes of proposed sanctions against Myanmar and Zimbabwe in 2007 and
2008 (arguing, with some justification, that neither situation had much bearing on inter­
national peace and security), and of a series of draft resolutions threatening sanctions
against Syria from 2011 onwards, indicate that this pushback may be becoming more as­
sertive.

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Growing Attention to Transnational Threats

One remarkable trend in the Security Council since the turn of the millennium is its in­
creasing attention to transnational threats—particularly terrorism, weapons of mass de­
struction (WMD), transnational organized crime, and pandemics. Overall, the P-5 display
a remarkable degree of unity on these issues, suggesting a convergence of (p. 153) inter­
ests and deepening global concern around the growing threat emanating from transna­
tional non-state actors. Nevertheless, the Council’s legislative approach to these issues
has persistently generated concern among much of the membership about overreach.
Each of these threats merits a brief treatment.

Terrorism

While the Council was much more active in addressing terrorism during the 1990s than is
commonly realized—in particular by imposing sanctions against Libya, Sudan, and the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan over their respective state sponsorship of terrorism—the
attacks of 11 September 2001, constituted a game-changer for Council-based counter-ter­
rorism action. The day after the attack, it unanimously adopted resolution 1368, estab­
lishing an important precedent by invoking—for the first time—the right of self-defense
under Article 51 against terrorist attacks, and providing an international seal of legal ap­
proval to the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan. The Council also extended a set of
sanctions (asset freezes, arms embargoes, and travel bans) solely focused on the Taliban
regime in Afghanistan, to all parts of the globe, vastly expanding the list of individuals
and entities associated with Al-Qaida or the Taliban against whom the sanctions would be
applied—the so-called 1267 sanctions regime named after the Council’s resolution with
that number. And less than two weeks after the attacks, it adopted resolution 1373, one of
the most ground-breaking resolutions in the body’s history, which imposed legally binding
obligations on all member states to, among other things, enhance legislation, strengthen
border controls, coordinate executive machinery, and increase international cooperation
in combating terrorism.

While the swiftness and assertiveness of the UN’s response to 9/11 was remarkable, it
soon attracted growing criticism from a number of quarters, which began to erode its le­
gitimacy and effectiveness. First, the legislative nature of resolution 1373, which created
far-reaching binding obligations on all member states without their prior agreement,
elicited much resentment. Second, the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq under
the banner of his global war on terror (GWOT) delegitimized Washington’s counter-terror­
ism endeavor in the eyes of many member states. Third, the resistance of the Council to
include human rights relevant to terrorism in its decisions led to some outrage among the
NGO community and beyond. In particular, the disregard of due process in the 1267 sanc­
tions listing procedures, which did not offer any recourse or review mechanisms for indi­
viduals who argued that they were wrongfully sanctioned, came under increasing criti­
cism and the regime was eventually deemed by the European Court of Justice to have vio­
lated fundamental human rights. In response the Council reluctantly established, in 2009,

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an ombudsperson to review requests for delisting of sanctioned individuals, which result­

ed in a large number of delisting decisions.47

Despite these concerns, the Council’s focus on counter-terrorism has proved enduring. If
anything, the rise of the Islamic State (ISIL, also ISIS and Da’esh) and the major attacks
carried out by the group in Europe and the United States, as well as international (p. 154)
concerns about tens of thousands of foreign nationals from over eighty countries having
joined extremist Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq, have led the Council to adopt a num­
ber of far-reaching resolutions aimed at strengthening its counter-terrorism regime—for
instance, the 2014 resolution 2178, which aimed at preventing travel of foreign terrorist
fighters. The election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 and his administration’s
early focus on the threat of ISIL reinforced this trend.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Bygone disagreements over Iraq notwithstanding, there has also been convergence of P-5
interests on the issue of WMD, reflecting their common desire to see no expansion of the
small club of nuclear weapon states and to achieve a diplomatic solution to the North Ko­
rean and Iranian nuclear crises. Indeed, in 2006 the Security Council imposed sanctions
against both North Korea and Iran, the former of which had carried out its first nuclear
test that year after leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) three years earlier, and the
latter of which is suspected of harboring nuclear weapon ambitions after failing to dis­
close the extent of its nuclear program.

During the following decade, US efforts to strengthen sanctions in response to continued

Iranian and North Korean defiance of Council demands ran up against the skeptical atti­
tudes of China and Russia, both of which tended to advocate for a less confrontational ap­
proach. Nevertheless, in particular from 2009 onward, the Security Council gained new
momentum on these issues, progressively adding new layers of sanctions against both
Iran and North Korea.

In the case of Iran, these sanctions are widely seen as having provided the P5 + 1 group
(adding Germany) with leverage in nuclear negotiations with Tehran, thus contributing to
the 2015 Nuclear Deal Framework which helped defuse the crisis (for the time being). By
contrast, on North Korea, where negotiations take place in a format that keeps the Coun­
cil at a certain distance and where China has greater control (i.e., Six-Party Talks of the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea along with China,
Japan, Russia, and the United States), sanctions have failed to rein in Pyongyang. Instead,
the situation has progressively escalated over the years, and presently constitutes one of
the most dangerous security threats globally and one of the biggest challenges to the Se­
curity Council.

Beyond these two cases, the Council adopted resolution 1540 in 2004 following the dis­
covery of the clandestine nuclear proliferation network operated by Pakistani nuclear sci­
entist A. Q. Khan. This decision required all member states to take legislative and regula­
tory steps to prevent terrorists and other non-state actors from procuring WMD and their

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means of delivery. Modeled after counter-terrorism resolution 1373, this resolution re­
vived concerns about the Council’s legislative approach to transnational threats, although
these concerns have since subsided.

Organized Crime, Drug Trafficking, and Piracy

Transnational organized crime is a more recent addition to the agenda of the Security
Council, and it musters a lower degree of P-5 consensus than the fields of terrorism or
(p. 155) WMD. Nevertheless, in the early 2000s the issue featured increasingly in the

Council’s country-specific discussions and peacekeeping mandates, in particular with re­

spect to Afghanistan and West Africa, reflecting the growing realization that organized
crime was a destabilizing factor in many of the post-conflict situations in which the UN
was engaged.

In 2009, the Security Council began to address transnational organized crime and drug
trafficking as a thematic issue delinked from any particular country situation. It adopted
a series of presidential statements calling on the Secretary-General to pay increasing at­
tention to the issue in his reports to the Council as well as in its conflict prevention and
peacebuilding strategies. The fact that these calls were never enshrined in a Council res­
olution reflected the suspicions of legislative overreach by some of the more sovereignty-
conscious member states inside and outside of the Council.48

Still, these concerns have not prevented the Security Council from developing innovative
approaches to dealing with organized crime and trafficking in specific countries, for in­
stance in the form of fact-finding (through panels of experts monitoring commodity sanc­
tions), use of force by blue helmets against criminal groups (for instance, the UN Stabi­
lization Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, in the slums of Port-au-Prince), or the imposition of
measures that would allow for punitive sanctions against government officials suspected
of drug trafficking (as in 2012 with respect to Guinea-Bissau).49

In no area of organized crime was Council action as robust as in its response to piracy off
the coast of Somalia in 2008, where it authorized states and regional organizations to use
all necessary means ‘within the territorial waters of Somalia’ to repress acts of piracy. As
James Cockayne notes, the Council’s unparalleled resolve on this issue is due to the
strong international consensus around the illegitimacy of piracy, the fact that acts on the
high seas are not protected by sovereignty barriers, and the economic cost that piracy in­
flicts not only on the P-5 but also on important members of the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM), such as India.

Infectious Diseases

On rare occasions the Security Council has also addressed infectious diseases as a poten­
tial threat to international peace and security. In 2000, HIV/AIDS was promoted in the
Council by the United States as a critical security threat in Africa. However, in light of
complaints from many delegations questioning the Council’s competence, resolution 1308
was anchored around concern over the impact of HIV/AIDS on the health of blue helmets.
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During subsequent Council debates, many member states remained apprehensive of any
effort to further broaden the Council’s purview in this area.50

In light of these sensitivities, it is all the more remarkable that the Security Council, in
September 2014 in response to the Ebola crisis, adopted resolution 2177 under Charter
Chapter VII declaring the epidemic a threat to international peace and security. The fact
that this resolution attracted the highest number of cosponsors in the Council’s history
(134) was both a reflection of the seriousness with which the world viewed this crisis and
(p. 156) a testament to the focused, high-intensity leadership of the United States, which

had championed the resolution. Unlike the 2000 AIDS resolution, the Ebola resolution
was accompanied by an outburst of international activism, including the Secretary-
General’s establishment of the UN’s first medical mission, the UN Mission for Ebola and
Emergency Response (UNMEER).51

The Return of Great Power Rivalry

A more recent, but possibly more consequential trend in Security Council dynamics is a
return of intense East–West rivalry. With the P-5 deadlocked over Syria and Ukraine,
there was a growing fear from 2014 onwards that the Security Council might soon find it­
self sidelined by a new Cold War. This is somewhat ironic given that, just five years prior,
the election of US president Barack Obama in 2008 had promised to restore a central
place for the Security Council in world diplomacy. Indeed, his commitment to multilateral­
ism, courting of China and pursuit of a ‘reset’ with Russia, promised a new era of P-5 con­
sensus. Initially, Obama’s approach seemed to pay off, leading to a set of remarkably ro­
bust Council actions including strengthened sanctions regimes against Iran and North
Korea, and the use of force, under the R2P banner, in both Côte d’Ivoire and Libya in
2011.

However, the honeymoon was not meant to last. The upheavals of the 2011 Arab Spring
ultimately proved divisive for the P-5 that started to fall out over NATO’s alleged over­
reach in Libya. The relations between the two camps deteriorated further over the ques­
tion of how to respond to the escalating civil war in Syria, which was seen by both
Moscow and the P-3 through the lens of their competing interests in the wider region.
Meanwhile, China seemed to have sided with Russia more out of tactical considerations
than Syria-specific interests. Subsequently, Russia’s stealth invasion and ensuing annexa­
tion of the Crimean Peninsula in the spring of 2014 led to a serious breakdown of East–
West relations inside and outside the Council.

Growing tensions in the Council are rooted in deeper dynamics that transcend the
specifics of recent cases. First, there is a longer-term backlash from Russia, China, and a
large part of the NAM against what they see as a US-driven assault on global order, mani­
fested in the repeated illegal use of force in the pursuit of regime change under the cover
of humanitarian or non-proliferation norms (as in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya). Second, upon
his return to the Russian presidency in 2012, Vladimir Putin has reoriented his country’s
foreign policy toward a more confrontational stance with the West, which he casts as de­

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liberately seeking to obstruct Russia’s rightful re-emergence as a great power. Third,

China’s remarkable economic rise has been accompanied by a more assertive foreign pol­
icy stemming from a need to defend its growing trade, investment, and energy interests
around the world—particularly in Africa and the Middle East. Lastly, the emergence of
conflicts in the aftermath of the Arab Spring has drawn the Security Council’s attention
to a region in which the P-5 have strong and divergent interests, increasing the chances
of gridlock within the body. (p. 157)

Reinforcing the P-5 divide is the fact that China and Russia have been increasingly work­
ing in tandem, which is illustrated by their eight joint vetoes between 1 January 2007 and
1 January 2018: one on Myanmar (2007), one on Zimbabwe (2008), and six on Syria
(2011–2017) (see Figure 7.1). This compares to just one joint veto in the preceding thirty-
six years since the People’s Republic of China replaced the Republic of China at the Unit­
ed Nations in 1971. Having improved their relations since solving their remaining territo­
rial disputes in the early 2000s, Russia and China share a similar outlook in the Security
Council, one that is marked by the strong attachment of both countries to the principles
of state sovereignty and non-intervention—notions that seem to apply considerably less
when it comes to Moscow’s relations with the former republics of the Soviet Union, such
as Georgia and Ukraine. Their shared and much invoked goal of ‘multipolarity’ suggests
that they partly see the Council as a convenient forum to constrain and ‘soft-balance’ US
power, as well as to underpin their own claims to great power status.

Figure 7.1: Number of Vetoes in the UN Security

Council, 1985–2017

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that China and Russia constitute a joint voting
block in the Council. While joining forces in the Council with Russia can be convenient for
Beijing, China did not join Russia’s vetoes on draft resolutions on the Georgian crisis in
2008, the Ukraine crisis in 2014 and 2015, and the Srebrenica genocide commemoration
in 2015. And even on Syria, Beijing provided company to Moscow on only two of the sev­
en vetoes cast by the latter in 2016 – 2017. This indicates that China assesses every draft
resolution on its own merits and entertains reservations over Russia’s own intervention­

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ism. Meanwhile, China has only occasionally used its veto in isolation, unlike the United
States, whose seventeen vetoes in the Council from 1990 (p. 158) to 2017 were all cast
alone, with fifteen of them pertaining to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

However, the Security Council is still a long way from descending into Cold War-level
paralysis. Deteriorating P-5 relations notwithstanding, it has continued to show encourag­
ing signs of vitality. In 2016, it adopted seventy-two resolutions, sixty-seven of which
unanimously, including forty-two under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.52 This confirms
two remarkable trends of the post-Cold War era: first, a trend toward consensus decision-
making in the Council, with at least 90 percent of resolutions since 2001 adopted by con­
sensus;53 and second, a trend toward an ever greater resort to Chapter VII of the UN
Charter, with the share of such resolutions rising from 25 percent in 2000 to above 60
percent since 2010.54 This reflects the P-5’s continued recognition that the Security Coun­
cil can serve their interests where they converge—as they often do on issue such as
counter-terrorism, conflict management in Africa, or nuclear non-proliferation. It also in­
dicates, as former UK permanent representative to the UN Jeremy Greenstock has noted,
that over the years, the Council has instilled in the great powers the habit and instinct to
debate international problems and seek constructive solutions, although that habit seems
to come under increasing strain.55

Growing P5 Dominance and the Role of the E10

The recent focus on the growing tensions among the P-5 overshadows the fact that the
biggest dividing line in the day-to-day work of the Security Council does not run among
the permanent members but between the P-5 and the E-10. Over the years, successive
waves of elected members have voiced frustration over how little influence they wield in
the Security Council in the face of the P-5’s at times overbearing dominance. Indeed, the
P-5 benefit not only from the power of the veto (with the threat of a veto often enough to
suppress any unwelcome initiatives by the E-10) but also from the advantage of institu­
tional memory and mastery of the Council’s procedures.

The power differential between the P-5 and the E-10 determines Council dynamics to a
large degree. Because of the need to reach a consensus among the P-5 ‘vetocracy’ for any
decision, the permanent members tend to negotiate draft resolutions among themselves
before submitting them to the full body for discussion. And before a draft is negotiated by
all of the P-5, it has generally been discussed by the P-3, which generate the vast majority
of initiatives. Indeed, among the more surprising aspects of Council dynamics tends to be
the near absence of any attempt by Russia or China to proactively shape the agenda.
Once the P-5 agree to submit a draft resolution for consultation to the wider Council, it
tends to represent delicate compromises, with little room for any further changes by any
of the E-10 when the text is circulated to them.

A noteworthy trend that has cemented the P-3’s grip on agenda-setting in recent years is
the so-called penholder system, which emerged in the late 2000s. Around that time, the
P-5 began to claim a monopoly when drafting resolutions detailing peacekeeping man­

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Security Council

dates, sanctions regimes, or other actions, with only rare attempts to wrestle this (p. 159)
power away from them. As of mid-2017, the P-5 held the pen for twenty-two of twenty-
nine country or region-specific files on the Council agenda.56

So what role does this leave for the E-10? In theory, any combination of seven nonperma­
nent members would constitute a blocking minority in the Security Council because of the
necessity to have eleven affirmative votes. However, there has been not a single instance
in which the E-10 has made use of their collective ‘sixth’ veto in response to draft resolu­
tions that had the support of all P-5.57 Potential openings occur for the E-10 to take initia­
tives when the P-5 find themselves divided on an issue. However, in those situations the
E-10 tend to either take sides to shore up the opposing camps of the P-5 divide, as was
the case with respect to the standoff over Syria from 2011 to 2013, or stay neutral, as
was the case in the Iraq debate of 2002 to 2003, when non-permanent members feared
getting chewed up in the quarrel between great powers.

On occasion, elected members have managed to shape the Security Council’s approach to
country-specific files, but these cases are exceptions. Active elected members have
brought more significant change to the Council by pushing thematic issues that have
come to occupy large parts of its work, such as children and armed conflict; women,
peace, and security; sexual and gender-based violence; civilian protection; climate
change; and the role of regional organizations. Elected members can also make signifi­
cant contributions to business in their role as chairs of committees overseeing individual
sanctions regimes (all of which are chaired by E-10 ambassadors), as the quality of a
committee’s chairmanship can make a huge difference in the vitality and effectiveness of
sanctions.

However, the most lasting change the E-10 have brought over the years to the Security
Council can be found in its working methods. Indeed, it was members of the E-10 that
spearheaded such innovations as the ‘Arria formula’ meetings, regular briefings by the
high commissioner for human rights, and the introduction of panels of experts to monitor
sanctions, to name just a few.

Reform
Security Council reform remains a live issue at the UN, and at regular intervals generates
much excitement as it moves to the forefront of the agenda—only to recede again to the
backburner after failure to achieve any progress. The fact that the Council’s structure no
longer adequately reflects the distribution of power in today’s world has sparked wide­
spread calls for reform, with discussions on how to accommodate claims by different re­
gions and countries for greater representation underway since the mid-1990s. These dis­
cussions have failed to generate sufficient consensus behind any of the major competing
reform models.

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Security Council

One model, proposed in 2005 by the ‘group of four’ aspirants for permanent seats (Ger­
many, Japan, Brazil, and India) suggests the addition of six new such seats without veto
power. The African group supports this proposal except that it insists on a veto (p. 160)
right for new permanent members. A third group, calling itself ‘Uniting for Consensus’
and dominated by a number of powers that are regionally influential, but that do not have
a strong claim themselves to occupy any newly created permanent seats (such as Italy,
Pakistan, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, and Algeria) opposes the expansion of perma­
nent membership. This group’s opposition resonates with a significant number of member
states who object in principle to the very idea of permanent membership and feel that the
granting of permanent privileges in 1945 was a historical mistake that should not be re­
peated. They thus tend to support reform models that would create a new category of
longer-term seats. Meanwhile, the P-5 are comfortable with the status quo and therefore
inherently skeptical of any reform proposal.

A significant majority of member states—those which are too small to aspire to either a
permanent or a longer-term seat and which are only rarely elected as nonpermanent
members—have little to gain from reform of the Council’s composition. Yet these states
are often affected by decisions (e.g., as contributors of troops or addressees of far-reach­
ing ‘legislative’ resolutions). As such, they tend to see an urgent need for reform of work­
ing methods—in particular, measures to constrain the veto and increase the Council’s
transparency. However, the P-5 tend to show remarkable unity of purpose when it comes
to blocking efforts that they see as infringing on the exclusive control of the P-5 over the
Council’s rules of procedure.58

Thus, while the hurdles for achieving reform are high, over time the failure to do so is
likely to erode the engagement of key member states in the UN’s work. At the same time,
member states need to ensure that reform does not come at the cost of its ability to act
decisively in the face of crises.

Conclusion
This chapter aimed at highlighting and explaining the dynamics that have influenced Se­
curity Council decision-making, in particular since the end of the Cold War. It showed that
these dynamics are often driven by competing interests among self-interested member
states. As a result, decisions are often inconsistent, interventions selective, and the limit­
ed ability to respond to crises evident.

While paralysis within the Security Council is often presented as evidence of the UN’s
dysfunction, it is generally merely a reflection of the inability of its key members to agree
on a common course of action. Indeed, in practice and by design, it is a political rather
than a principled forum in which decision-making is driven by the interests and power dy­
namics among its key members, and at times regional sentiments, for example in Africa
or Latin America. The existence of the veto represents a double-edged sword: it ensures
the P-5’s continued buy-in to the UN’s collective security mechanism, which can also pre­

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Security Council

vent robust Council action in response to crises in which any of the P-5 is involved or sees
important interests threatened.

At the same time, nothing has damaged the Security Council’s credibility and le­
(p. 161)

gitimacy more than its inability to take appropriate action when genocide or mass atroci­
ties were unfolding in Srebrenica, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, Sri Lanka, and Syria. While
there are admirable proposals for the P-5 to adopt a voluntary code of conduct to re­
nounce the veto in situations in which mass atrocities are or might be committed, and no
vital interests are at stake, they are highly unlikely to be supported by the United States,
China, or Russia in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile the P-5 arguably have the most to
lose should the erosion of the Security Council’s credibility lead to an irrevocable loss of
relevance. This reality should invite reflection on how they might want to engage with
each other constructively to address the major crises of the day.

Notes:

(1.) The authors thank Rebecca Brubaker, James Cockayne, Emma Hutchinson, Sarah Fu,
and Alexandra Ivanovic for their comments.

(2.) Ian Hurd, After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Coun­
cil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).

(3.) International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility

to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001).

(4.) David L. Bosco, Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of
the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

(5.) Vincent Pouliot, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilater­
al Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially 154–190 and
226–253.

(6.) Jochen Prantl, The UN Security Council and Informal Groups of States: Complement­
ing or Competing for Governance? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

(7.) Mats Berdal, ‘The Security Council and Peacekeeping,’ in The United Nations Securi­
ty Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice Since 1945, ed. Vaughan
Lowe, Adam Roberts, Jennifer Welsh, and Dominik Zaum (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 175–204, 179.

(8.) David Malone, ‘Goodbye UNSCOM: A Sorry Tale in US–UN Relations,’ Security Dia­
logue 30, no. 4 (1999): 400–401.

(9.) Simon Chesterman, ‘Blue Helmet Blues,’ Security Dialogue 34, no. 3 (2003): 369.

(10.) Michael C. Williams, Civil–Military Relations and Peacekeeping (London: Routledge,

1998).

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Security Council

(11.) David Cortright and George A. Lopez, The Sanctions Decade: Assessing UN Strate­
gies in the 1990s (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000).

(12.) Thomas J. Biersteker, Sue E. Eckert, and Marcos Tourinho, Targeted Sanctions: The
Impacts and Effectiveness of United Nations Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2016).

(13.) Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and Interna­
tional Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

(14.) Berdal, ‘The Security Council and Peacekeeping,’ 191.

(15.) Michael Barnett, ‘The UN Security Council: Indifference and Genocide in Rwanda,’
Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 4 (1997): 551; and Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the
Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004).

(16.) Report to the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35:

The Fall of Srebrenica, UN document A/54/549, 15 November 1999; Mats Berdal,
‘Bosnia,’ in The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century, ed. Malone,
451–466.

(17.) See John L. Hirsch and Robert Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflec­
tions on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington, D.C.: US Institute of Peace, 1995);
Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly,
1999); and Chesterman, ‘Blue Helmet Blues,’ 373–374.

(18.) See Oliver Ramsbotham and Tom Woodhouse, Encyclopedia of International Peace­
keeping Operations (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1999).

(19.) Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

(20.) Eric Rosand, ‘Security Council Resolution 1373, the Counter-Terrorism Committee,
and the Fight Against Terrorism,’ American Journal of International Law 97 (April 2003):
333–341.

(21.) Simon Chesterman and Sebastian von Einsiedel, ‘Dual Containment: The United
States, Iraq, and the U.N. Security Council,’ in September 11, 2001: A Turning Point in In­
ternational and Domestic Law, ed. Paul Eden and Thérèse O’Donnell (Ardsley, N.Y.:
Transnational, 2005), 725–756.

(22.) Peter Wallensteen and Patrik Johannsson, ‘The UN Security Council: Decisions and
Actions,’ in The UN Security Council in the 21st Century, ed. Sebastian von Einsiedel,
David M. Malone and Bruno Stagno Ugarte (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reiner, 2016), 27–54.

(23.) Adam Roberts, ‘The Use of Force: A System of Selective Security,’ in The UN Securi­
ty Council in the 21st Century, 349–372.

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(24.) Wallensteen and Johansson, ‘The UN Security Council: Decisions and Actions,’ 27–
54.

(25.) Richard Gowan, ‘The Security Council and Peacekeeping,’ in The UN Security Coun­
cil in the 21st Century, 749–770.

(26.) UN, Note by the Secretary-General: Approved Resources for Peacekeeping Opera­
tions for the Period from 1 July 2008 to 30 June 2009, UN document A /C.5/63/23, 1 May
2009.

(27.) The United Kingdom, for instance, started advocating around that time for the Coun­
cil to ask missions to develop benchmarks measuring peacebuilding progress in host
countries as a tool to argue for withdrawal.

(28.) Security Council, ‘Provisional Verbatim Record of the 7196th Meeting,’ UN docu­
ment S/PV.7196, 11 June 2014. .

(29.) ‘Address by UK ambassador Mark Lyall Grant at a workshop on the Security Council
organized by the International Peace Institute at the Greentree Estate in Manhasset, N.Y.,
14 June 2013.’

(30.) Bruno Stagno Ugarte, ‘Collaborating with Regional Organizations,’ in The UN Secu­
rity Council in the 21st Century, 475–490.

(31.) John Hirsch, ‘Somalia,’ in The UN Security Council in the 21st Century, 595–614.
See also Thomas G. Weiss and Martin Welz, ‘The UN and the African Union in Mali and
Beyond: A Shotgun Wedding?’ International Affairs 90, 4 (2014): 889–905.

(32.) Fabienne Hara, ‘Preventive Diplomacy in Africa: Adapting to New Realities,’ in Pre­
ventive Diplomacy: Regions in Focus, ed. Francesco Mancini (New York: International
Peace Institute, December 2011), 4–14.

(33.) Thomas G. Weiss, ‘Humanitarian Action and Intervention,’ in The UN Security Coun­
cil in the 21st Century, 217–234.

(34.) Report of the Secretary-General’s Internal Review Panel on United Nations Action in
Sri Lanka, November 2012; see also, ‘Update Report no. 5: Sri Lanka,’ Security Council
Report, 21 April 2009.

(35.) Arthur Boutellis and Alexandra Novosseloff, ‘Côte d’Ivoire,’ in The UN Security
Council in the 21st Century, 681–698.

(36.) Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, ‘Libya,’ in The UN Security Council in the 21st
Century, ed. Einsiedel et al., 699–716.

(37.) Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine,’ The Atlantic, April 2016.

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(38.) See Dmitri Trenin, ‘Russia in the Security Council;’ and Zhu Wenqi and Leng Xinyu,
‘China in the Security Council,’ in The UN Security Council in the 21st Century, 105–120,
83–104.

(39.) Ramesh Thakur, United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the
Responsibility to Protect, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and
Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).

(40.) Edward C. Luck, UN Security Council: Practice and Promise (London: Routledge,
2006), 21–23.

(41.) See Elizabeth Cousens, ‘Conflict Prevention,’ in The UN Security Council: From the
Cold War to the 21st Century, 101–116, 105.

(42.) Simon Chesterman, ‘Relations with the UN Secretary-General,’ in The UN Security

Council in the 21st Century, 443–456.

(43.) Joanna Weschler, ‘Acting on Human Rights,’ in The UN Security Council in the 21st
Century, 259–276.

(44.) Security Council, ‘Provisional Verbatim Record of the 7060th Meeting,’ UN docu­
ment S/PV.7060, 15 November 2013.

(45.) Cortright and Lopez, The Sanctions Decade.

(46.) However, as of November 2014, the following four sanctions regimes did not have a
dedicated committee: Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Guinea-Bissau.

(47.) Juliane Kokott and Christoph Sobotta, ‘The Kadi Case: Constitutional Core Values
and International Law—Finding the Balance?,’ European Journal of International Law 23,
no. 4 (2012): 1015–1024.

(48.) On 19 December 2014, the Council adopted resolution 2195 on the links between
terrorism and organized crime, but that resolution’s primary focus was very much on the
former.

(49.) James Cockayne, ‘Confronting Organized Crime and Piracy,’ in The UN Security
Council in the 21st Century, 299–322.

(50.) ‘In Hindsight: The Security Council and Health Crises,’ Security Council Report, 30
September 2014.

(51.) UN General Assembly and Security Council, ‘Identical Letters Dated 17 September
2014 from the Secretary-General Addressed to the President of the General Assembly and
the President of the Security Council Secretary General,’ UN documents A/69/380, S/
2014/679, 18 September 2014.

(52.) UN, Highlights of Security Council Practice 2016, http://www.un.org/en/sc/inc/pages/

pdf/highlights/2016.pdf.
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(53.) ‘Non-Consensus Decision-making in the Security Council: An Abridged History,’ Se­

curity Council Report, January 2014.

(54.) See Wallensteen and Johansson, ‘The UN Security Council: Decisions and Actions,’
27–54.

(55.) Jeremy Greenstock, ‘The Security Council in a Fragmenting World,’ in The UN Secu­
rity Council in the 21st Century, 815–826.

(56.) ‘2017 Chairs of Subsidiary Bodies and Penholders,’ Security Council Report, 2 Feb­
ruary 2017.

(57.) However, insufficient votes in support from non-permanent members have, on occa­
sion, caused resolutions supported by one or more permanent members to fail to be
adopted despite no veto being cast. And on 15 December 1973 a resolution on the Middle
East was adopted by a vote of ten in favor, with China not participating in the vote and
the other four permanent members abstaining. See Loraine Sievers and Sam Daws, The
Procedure of the UN Security Council (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 316–318
and 340.

(58.) Christian Wenaweser, ‘Working Methods: The Ugly Duckling of Security Council Re­
form,’ in The UN Security Council in the 21st Century, 175–194.

Sebastian von Einsiedel

Sebastian von Einsiedel has been the Director of UN University’s Centre for Policy
Research since its inception in 2014. He has worked in and around the United Na­
tions for fifteen years, including with the Executive Office of the Secretary-General,
the Department of Political Affairs, the UN Mission to Nepal, and the International
Peace Institute. He has written widely on the UN’s role in peace and security and is
the co-editor of two books, The UN Security Council in the 21st Century (2016); and
Nepal in Transition (2012).

David M. Malone

David M. Malone is rector of the United Nations University and under-secretary-gen­

eral of the United Nations. He has earlier served as Canada’s representative to the
UN Economic and Social Council and ambassador to the United Nations (1990–4); di­
rector general of the Policy, International Organizations and Global Issues Bureaus
within Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT,
1994–8); president of the International Peace Academy (now International Peace In­
stitute) (1998–2004); and president of Canada’s International Development Research
Centre (2008–13). He also oversaw Canada’s economic and multilateral diplomacy
within DFAIT (2004–6) and served as Canada’s High Commissioner to India and non-
resident ambassador to Bhutan and Nepal (2006–8). He has also held research posts
in the Economic Studies Program, Brookings Institution; Massey College, University
of Toronto, Canada; and Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton

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University, Canada. He holds a degree from l’École des Hautes Études Commerciales
(Montreal, Canada), an MPA from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Govern­
ment, and a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford, UK. His
recent books include Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy
(2011); Nepal in Transition: From People’s War to Fragile Peace (co-editor, 2012); In­
ternational Development: Ideas, Experience, and Prospects (co-editor, 2014); The UN
Security Council in the 21st Century (co-editor, 2015); and The Oxford Handbook of
Indian Foreign Policy (co-editor, 2015). The second edition of Law and Practice of the
United Nations (co-authored graduate textbook, 2008).

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