Action or inaction: United Nations Security Council activity, 1994–2013

Abstract

This article presents new data on the behavior of the United Nations Security Council from 1994 to 2013. Which international issues does the United Nations Security Council act upon? Which issues are ignored, languishing for years on the Council’s agenda? What are the characteristics of the issues that are considered by the Council and what are the characteristics of those that are overlooked? Beginning with the annual Summary Statements on matters of which the Security Council is seized, information was gathered for every agenda item that appears on the Security Council’s agenda during this period. Daily data are recorded for the number of public meetings and private informal consultations held, as well as the number of resolutions (which are voted on), presidential statements (which are a product of consensus), and vetoes that occur. These data offer scholars new opportunities for testing theories of legislative behavior in international institutions, particularly on issues of peace and security, that have not been available heretofore. In this article, we introduce the data and coding processes, present trends, illustrate prospects for research that could benefit from these data and provide an empirical application.

‘Acting under Chapter 7’: rhetorical entrapment, rhetorical hollowing, and the authorization of force in the UN Security Council, 1995–2017

“…Since many cofounders are collected on a country-level, it is not immediately clear how one could combine these two kinds of data in a meaningful way. 85 One possibility to overcome this problem may lie in a different level of observation. Future research could try to identify specific conflicts in each debate, using, for example, a series of topic-modeling-techniques.…”

Selective Attention: The United Nations Security Council and Armed Conflict

“…Also favouring the governance perspective, a study of civil wars between 1990 and 2009 by Benson and Gizelis (2020) finds that the UNSC agenda is responsive to sexual violence. In contrast, Allen and Yuen (2020, 2022) identify P5 interests as a key determinant of the UNSC's meeting agenda, while Binder and Golub (2020) find that the UNSC primarily reacts to conflict severity but that P5 interests have some predictive power.…”

“…There are many explanations for this inability to firmly establish a set of correlations, including disparities in sampling, divergent definitions of what constitutes a conflict, panel data with short time frames and different modelling techniques. A primary reason for the divergent findings, however, is the tendency in quantitative studies to model and measure the P5 as a collective (see, for example, Allen and Yuen 2020; Benson and Gizelis 2020; Binder and Golub 2020; Frederking and Patane 2017). 1 In light of historical evidence that emphasizes P5 tensions as a defining characteristic of the UNSC (see, for example, Malone and Malone 2004; von Einsiedel, Malone and Ugarte 2015) and new data sources allowing for fine-grained disaggregation, modelling P5 preferences as collective averages appears unwarranted and unnecessary.…”

“…The conventional view is that greater preference diversity increases transaction costs, leading to a lower likelihood of agreement (Axelrod and Keohane 1985; Tsebelis 2002). This argument has been presented in the context of individual organizations, including the European Union (EU) (Golub 2007) and the UN (Allen and Yuen 2020; Allen and Yuen 2022; Beardsley and Schmidt 2012). With regard to agenda setting, this logic can be extended to support a conjecture of anticipation effects: when facing a situation where UNSC members hold divergent preferences, an individual member will rationally expect that agreement is less likely and will refrain from expending political resources to place it on the agenda.…”

“…These four interest variables are measured both as P5 averages and as individual measures varying across the P5. The former is the conventional approach in the literature (Allen and Yuen 2020; Allen and Yuen 2022; Beardsley and Schmidt 2012; Binder and Golub 2020), whereas the latter represents our ambition to break with this approach and investigate interests in a disaggregated manner.…”