United Nations Security Council Approaches to Tackling Terror in the Pursuit of Peace

The past twenty years of global counter-terrorism efforts have profoundly influenced the work of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The proliferation of terrorist activity since 2001, including a high percentage of terrorist attacks occurring in conflict zones (97 percent), and emerging imperatives to protect civilians from conflict and terrorist violence, has seen the influence of counter-terrorism frameworks extend to the mandates and practices of UN peace operations from Mali to Yemen, despite their potentially conflicting operational logics. 
In particular, security-focused approaches to addressing the threats posed by terrorism have contributed to an erosion of the fundamental principles of peacekeeping, as liberal norms of peacebuilding have faded in the face of more pragmatic ideas of stability, emphasizing traditional ideas of security, CHARLES T. HUNT and SHANNON ZIMMERMAN write in a research brief published by the Resolve Network.
UN peace operations are generally considered a poor vehicle for counter-terrorism, the authors state. The 2000 Brahimi Report and 2008 capstone doctrine both emphasized that UN peacekeeping operations are not fit for peace enforcement and counter-terrorism operations.
More recently, the 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations stated that “UN troops should not undertake military counter-terrorism operations” and that “[e]xtreme caution should guide the mandating of enforcement tasks to degrade, neutralize or defeat a designated enemy”. 
Yet, UN peace operations are regularly deployed by the UNSC to settings affected by terrorism and violent extremism. The confluence of terrorism and conflict make this co-existence inevitable, but some missions have also engaged more directly in countering these elements. 
For example, the UNSC continues to support the mission in Somalia, which actively faces terrorist threats, and has also deployed a peacekeeping mission to Mali amid a jihadist insurgency. 
At the same time, in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), peace operations have engaged in offensive military operations that target groups labelled as “terrorists” by their host government partners.
Academics and peacekeeping experts have raised concerns and noted the initial impacts of counter-terrorism efforts on UN peace operations. Building on this work, the research brief, titled ‘Counter-Terrorism & Peace Operations: The Impacts of UN Security Council Approaches to Tackling Terror on the Pursuit of Peace’ draws on illustrative examples from the field to examine how the UNSC’s counter-terrorism framework has impacted the mandates and practice of the UN’s peace operations, particularly the large stabilization operations deployed in Africa. 
It shows that counter-terrorism efforts at the level of the UNSC have blurred the normative distinctions between peace operations and counter-terrorism to the detriment of the former. The brief, published under the Securing the Future Initiative, concludes by providing recommendations to ensure that UNSC responses to terrorism and violent extremism do not unintentionally undermine the effectiveness of UN peace operations.

Imagining a World without the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is thought to have shaped constitutions profoundly since its adoption in 1948. ZACHARY ELKINS and TOM GINSBURG identify two empirical implications that should follow from such influence. 
First, UDHR content should be reflected in subsequent national constitutions, the authors state in their article in the journal World Politics.
Second, such reflections should bear the particular marks of the UDHR itself, not those of the postwar zeitgeist more broadly, they write in the article titled ‘Imagining a World without the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. 
ELKINS and GINSBURG examine the historical evidence at various levels to identify and untangle the UDHR's impact. In a macro analysis, they leverage an original data set on the content of constitutions since 1789. They explore historical patterns in the creation and spread of rights, and test whether 1948 exhibits a noticeable disruption in rights provision. 
The authors build a multivariate model that predicts rights provision with constitution- and rights-level covariates. To gain further analytic leverage, they unearth the process that produced the UDHR and identify plausible alternative formulations evident in a set of discarded proposals. The authors further test the plausibility of UDHR influence by searching for direct references to the document in subsequent constitutional texts and constitutional proceedings. The evidence suggests that the UDHR significantly accelerated the adoption of a particular set of constitutional rights.

Elkins, Z., & Ginsburg, T. (2022). Imagining a World without the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. World Politics, 74(3), 327-366. doi:10.1017/S0043887122000065