Assessing the UN Security Council: A Concert Perspective

Bosco, David

doi:10.1163/19426720-02004005

Cited by 19 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…As long as this configuration contains persistent elements of heterogeneity, it gives a strong caution against another strand of views on the council, namely, seeing too much unity, autonomy, or even agency in the working of this body [3,8,9]. On the other hand, it neither implies that the council has been losing a foundation for serving some of its crucial functions, whether the collective legitimization of the use of force, great-power concert, or other governance functions, such as deploying peacekeepers [58][59][60]. Despite frequent suggestions to the contrary, the durable nature of a certain degree of accord among powerful members of the council still allows cautious optimism for its continued relevance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-national analysis of global security discourse using word embeddings

Sakamoto

2020

Preprint

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Recent methodological advances in quantitative text analysis enable a not only more rigorous, but also more systematic, investigation of the discursive dynamics that are unfolding among various international actors, in comparison with preceding approaches. This study conducts such an investigation in the context of policy deliberations on international peace and security, by performing cutting-edge text analysis on the entire body of meeting records of the Security Council of the United Nations for the past quarter of a century (1994-2019). Focusing on one of the most consequential notions for the council's policy-making, "threat to the peace," this study employs an unsupervised machine learning model, broadly termed "word embedding," to analyze how this notion has been discussed by relevant members of the council, especially its five permanent members, during the period under investigation. Word embedding estimates the semantic relationships among all words found in a given set of documents, by assigning a high-dimensional vector representation to each of these words. In combination with other natural language processing techniques and simple statistical operations, it reveals persistent patterns of cross-national convergence and divergence in security discourse. While these findings are mostly consistent with existing empirical observations on council politics, some are not, including, most notably, a considerable degree of correlation in how to conceive international threats found between the close-knit Western allies in the council and their Russian counterpart. The study also tracks changing conceptions of threats over time, unveiling distinctive aspects of international relations in each period that have strongly affected the evolution of these conceptions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-national analysis of global security discourse using word embeddings

Sakamoto

2020

Preprint

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“…Indeed, there has never been experienced a war among the P5 for more than seventy years (Bosco, 2014). With respect to this relatively peaceful relationship, Hobbes explanation in the De Cive is meaningful:…”

Section: Contemporary World Order and Realist Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

UN SECURITY COUNCIL: The ‘Frozen’ Victory of the Great Powers

Yilmaz¹

2019

CSQ

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There exists a broad agreement that the Security Council (SC) is anachronistic, and it is in urgent need of reform. Despite various attempts which have been made to amend the current structure of the SC for the last half a century, none of these has yielded any considerable result yet. This paper will look at the SC from both change management and international relations (IR) theories perspective and argue that the structure of the SC actually re lects not just 40s' but also today's "balance of power", which will be corresponded with the "state of balance" or "equilibrium" concepts of change management, where both driving forces and the restraining forces seem to stand still in balance. This structure is so irmly 'frozen' that, no one has been able to "unfreeze" it in Lewin's words, in order to launch a successful change, up until today. It will be concluded that the failure of change initiatives of the SC and at large, the global order is only likely to be explained by taking into consideration both the assumptions of those realist theories and change management approaches together.

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“…This has been a key factor in maintaining a concert of interest among the most powerful nations. 7 Conflicts of interest between the P5 often paralyzed the Council during the Cold War and have also been the cause of various deadlocks in this century. However, the Council's workload has transformed during the last quarter century.…”

Section: Restructuring Permanent Membership: a Task For Sisyphusmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Elected but Neglected Security Council Members

Langmore¹,

Thakur²

2016

The Washington Quarterly

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Many of the pressing policy challenges confronting the world's countries and peoplesclimate change, pandemics, food and water scarcity, terrorism, financial meltdown-are international in origin and nature, global in scope and effects, and require concerted multilateral action led by the major powers. However, the responsibility for making policy and the authority to mobilize the requisite coercive resources to tackle the threats remain vested in sovereign states. Absent a world government, the order, stability, and predictability in international transactions comes from global governance operating as a patchwork of authority structures which produce generally adhered-to norms to regulate behavior, and layers of mechanisms to punish noncompliance. 1 The architecture of global governance consists of international and regional intergovernmental organizations; a 'soft' layer of informal general-purpose groupings of states-such as the old G7, new G20, and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) groupings; as well as transnational civil society and market actors that have exploded in numbers, role, and influence. In this global governance architecture, the United Nations (UN) forms the inner core of the mandated multilateral machinery. It was established to provide a degree of predictability and order in a world in constant flux. The organization is at once the symbol of humanity's collective aspirations for a better life in a safer world for all, a forum for negotiating the terms of converting these collective aspirations into a common program of action, and the principal international instrument for realizing aspirations and implementing plans to achieve their ends. The UN's primary function is to maintain international peace and

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Assessing the UN Security Council: A Concert Perspective

Cited by 19 publications

References 16 publications

Cross-national analysis of global security discourse using word embeddings

Cross-national analysis of global security discourse using word embeddings

UN SECURITY COUNCIL: The ‘Frozen’ Victory of the Great Powers

The Elected but Neglected Security Council Members

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