Expanding the Security Council: A Potential Bulwark Against the United Nations’ Legitimacy Crisis

The United Nations has long served as the primary vehicle for the administration and enforcement of the international legal and political order, and situated at its very core is its underlying security apparatus: The United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
The UNSC was designed with a structural rigidity, seeking to enshrine the superiority of its five permanent members—but now, seventy-five years later, the Council’s failure to keep pace with the changing composition of the United Nations writ large has led the entire compact to the precipice of a grave crisis of legitimacy.
Now more than ever, action must be taken to acknowledge the growing disillusionment of the United Nations’ smaller member states, BILAL ASKARI writes in the latest issue of the Virginia Journal of International Law.
An institution faces a crisis of legitimacy when social recognition of the validity of its identity, interests, practices, norms, or procedures comes under threat, at which point, it must either “adapt … or face disempowerment,” the author notes in his article ‘Expanding the U.N. Security Council: A Potential Bulwark against the U.N.’s Legitimacy Crisis’.
Perhaps the most fundamental threat to the UN’s legitimacy, ASKARI states, is its failure to establish representative governance; despite a quadrupling in the number of UN member states since 1945, the UNSC has remained untouched, granting only de minimis authority to the nations which rotate through the Council’s ten nonpermanent seats.
One potentially meaningful approach would be to amend the UN Charter to allow for the addition of one or more new permanent or nonpermanent members to the Security Council.
In particular, the possibility of permanent Indian accession to the Council may present a practical and promising means by which to salvage the legitimacy of the UNSC in the eyes of its constituent nations.
Perhaps the primary reason India ought to be considered as a potential addition to the permanent membership of the UNSC is simply that their bid would be the likeliest to succeed. This is for several reasons.
First, India certainly has the credentials to seek a seat at the UN’s highest table. Over the past two decades, India has enjoyed explosive economic growth and a rapidly expanding foreign policy outlook, and is now well poised to emerge as another potential superpower.
Second, India enjoys broad-based support from other members of the United Nations. India is currently serving its eighth term as an elected nonpermanent member of the Council, winning its seat with a resounding 184 votes out of a possible 192.
Finally, the current members of the P-5 are increasingly open to the possibility of allowing India on board. The US, the UK, France, and Russia have each signaled interest in at least moderate expansions of the Council, and even China, which has historically resisted India’s bid for a permanent seat, backed India for nonpermanent membership on the UNSC for its current term.
India’s permanent accession to the Council would be beneficial, in the first instance, to the United Nations’ legitimacy and operational integrity.
India has not only remained the largest contributor of UN peacekeeping troops for decades—providing nearly twice as many peacekeepers as every member of the P-5 combined—but its consistent record of timely payment to UN coffers will prove invaluable as the UN seeks to stabilize its budget. Validating these contributions with an offer to join the ranks of the Council’s permanent membership may also be important to prevent India from gradually sliding away from the UN and towards more fragmented multilateral organizations, which place greater value on India’s contributions, but sap the UN of relative legitimacy.
Of course, the value of elevating India to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council would not begin and end with India. To begin with, such a move would immediately bolster efforts by African nations which have long maintained that the absence of African representation on the Council constitutes a grave injustice. Indeed, most issues discussed by the UNSC have a direct nexus to African affairs, yet none of the continent’s fifty-four nations wield significant decision-making authority over these operations.
One potential approach, advanced by Sierra Leone’s UN representative, may be to reserve two permanent seats on the Council for African nations. India’s ascension to the Council would create a strong precedent that may enhance the viability of such measures in the future.
In addition to paving the way for future expansions of the Council, accession itself provides an opportunity for India to advocate for the views of historically marginalized nations. India has always styled itself as a “moralistic force” of the developing world, with Indian UN officials often highlighting that their nation’s own recent emergence puts them in a strong position to advocate for other states still on the rise.
This posture must be rewarded and developed if the UNSC is to successfully recapture the spirit of global community which undergirded the UN’s genesis. Only by restoring faith in the Council’s representative capacity can the UNSC safeguard its legitimacy and influence for years to come.

Developing Peace: The Evolution of Development Goals and Activities in United Nations Peacekeeping

Peacekeeping and development assistance are two of the United Nations’ defining activities. While there have been extensive studies of UN engagement in each of these areas, respectively, less attention has been given to the relationship between peacekeeping and development. 

JOHN GLEDHILL, RICHARD CAPLAN and MALINE MEISKE examine that relationship in an article titled ‘Developing peace: the evolution of development goals and activities in United Nations peacekeeping’, published in the journal Oxford Development Studies.  

The authors do so by first considering whether concepts and principles that underpin peacekeeping and development cohere. They then combine original quantitative data with qualitative analyses in order to document the degree to which development goals and activities have been incorporated into UN peacekeeping operations since their inception over 70 years ago. 

“While we observe a steady increase in the level of engagement of peacekeeping with development over time, we argue that short-term security goals have been prioritized over longer-term development objectives in a number of recent UN peacekeeping operations, as peacekeepers have been deployed to contexts of ongoing conflict.”

The authors propose that, just as the practice of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding has integrated diverse actors and goals, so too would the study of peacekeeping and peacebuilding benefit from integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives into a more ‘multidimensional’ approach. 

As it stands, those who study peacekeeping ordinarily have a background in political science and international relations, and they publish in related field journals. While there was arguably a logic to this disciplinary focus when UN peacekeeping activities were primarily aimed at maintaining negative peace between states, that logic has weakened as peacekeeping has expanded and diversified its activities. 

Indeed, given that peacekeeping now typically includes interventions that aim to foster human and economic development within conflict-affected states, it seems clear that academic fields that study development should also be integrated into efforts to analyse and assess peacekeeping – fields such as development studies, economics, anthropology, geography and beyond. 

Cross-disciplinary cooperation and collaboration will likely face some of the same institutional, organizational, and ontological barriers that the UN has encountered when trying to foster cooperation and coherence among the diverse agencies and organizations that are involved in multidimensional, integrated peacekeeping. 

However, if the UN has been able to make some headway on that front, then surely academics can also take further steps towards a more integrated approach to studying (development and) peacekeeping.

John Gledhill, Richard Caplan & Maline Meiske (2021) Developing peace: the evolution of development goals and activities in United Nations peacekeeping, Oxford Development Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2021.1924126

Perpetual Peacebuilding: A New Paradigm to Move Beyond the Linearity of Liberal Peacebuilding

Academics and policy-makers have accepted that the linearity of the liberal peace neither reflects, nor should it drive, the tumult of peacebuilding. Nevertheless, practitioners have made merely cosmetic changes to their approaches. 
Introducing ‘perpetual peacebuilding’, THANIA PAFFENHOLZ states that within the paradigm, peacebuilding is envisioned as an ever-developing process manifested in a series of (re-)negotiations of the social and political contract. Notions of success and failure and concepts such as ‘tracks’ and ‘peace agreements’ are abandoned, and peace is both utopian and subjective. Lastly, the peacebuilding community is called upon to display greater courage and creativity.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN, has called for an immediate ceasefire in all corners of the globe,” PAFFENHOLZ states in ‘Perpetual Peacebuilding: A New Paradigm to Move Beyond the Linearity of Liberal Peacebuilding’, published in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. Nevertheless, peacebuilding perseveres amidst persistent violence. We must therefore ask: how can we begin upon the pathway to perpetual peacebuilding? Critical rethinking must be the starting point. 
“I propose that peacebuilding, in response to violence, must be viewed as entailing continuous negotiations, and re-negotiations, of the social and political contract of a society and polity, with pathways to peace marked by opportunities, setbacks, catalysts, friction and resistance. Embracing this re-conceptualisation is an essential precondition for truly abandoning the linearity of the liberal peacebuilding model.” 
In addition to surveying relevant academic and policy literature, the author explores the peacebuilding which has taken place in Kenya post-2007 and Syria post-2011, processes which have been conducted amidst cycles of violence; this scholarly and empirical evidence informs the paradigm developed.
It remains crucial for those engaged in peacebuilding to participate in critical reflections of their own assumptions, biases, traditions and practices, the author states. The tenets outlined represent a lens through which peacebuilders and their supporters may be able to meaningfully rethink the ways in which they can contribute to sustaining peace, deploying creative, innovative, malleable and long-lasting approaches grounded in local, national, regional and international realities. 
The tenets will help to bridge the void between research and policy on the one hand and practice on the other, and to move towards generating a multitude of perpetual pathways to inclusive, peaceful and just societies. Crucially, these tenets shift the focus away from the international peacebuilding ‘industry’, foregrounding instead the communities facing conflict and the local and national actors that build their peace. Retreating into the background while reconceptualising the very notion of peacebuilding may represent the only means through which international peacebuilders can retain their relevance.
However, further effort will also be required to embark upon this new paradigm. That which is required are formal and informal processes which challenge and disrupt the prevailing system(s). Change-oriented governments, accompanied by think tanks, practitioners and activists, must ‘push’ until the policy frameworks surveyed within this article become an operational reality. This will demand courage and willingness to transform the dominant discourses at the global level, and will require in-country testing of this new paradigm to gather experiences and evidence to support this new practice of peacebuilding and mediation. Future research must contribute to this endeavour by investigating in-depth case studies, further confirming the non-linearity of peacebuilding, and documenting and assessing alternative approaches in order to continue to develop this new paradigm.

Thania Paffenholz (2021) Perpetual Peacebuilding: A New Paradigm to Move Beyond the Linearity of Liberal Peacebuilding, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2021.1925423

A Quantitative Approach to Studying Hierarchies of Primary Institutions in International Society: UN General Assembly Disarmament Resolutions 1989-1998

LAUST SCHOUENBORG and SIMON F. TAEUBER aim to contribute to two contemporary debates within the English School: The debate about how to observe primary institutions and the debate concerning hierarchy between primary institutions. 

Writing in the journal Cooperation and Conflict, they specifically analyze references to primary institutions in United Nations General Assembly disarmament resolutions in the decade 1989–1998 and their distribution using descriptive statistics. 

In this way, the article, ‘A quantitative approach to studying hierarchies of primary institutions in international society: The case of United Nations General Assembly disarmament resolutions, 1989–1998’, offers a novel approach to identifying primary institutions empirically, and provides some insight into the hierarchy-question in the sense of documenting the relative numerical presence of references to different primary institutions in a specific issue area and temporal context. 

With respect to the latter, the key finding is that great power management, diplomacy and international law are by far the most prominent primary institutions in the analysed material. 

This is an intriguing finding, not least given the importance attached to them by Hedley Bull in his classic work The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. 

The main contribution of the article is thus to spell out a new approach to how the aforementioned debates might proceed empirically.

Schouenborg L, Taeuber SF. A quantitative approach to studying hierarchies of primary institutions in international society: The case of United Nations General Assembly disarmament resolutions, 1989–1998. Cooperation and Conflict. 2021; 56(2): 224-241. doi:10.1177/0010836720965998

A Peacekeeping Mission in Afghanistan: Pipedream or Path to Stability?

RYAN C. VAN WIE analyzes how an international peacekeeping operation (PKO) can support an intra-Afghan peace settlement by mitigating information and commitment problems and fostering compliance during the settlement’s implementation phase. 

To frame the information and commitment problems currently hindering an intra-Afghan settlement, he briefly reviews noncooperative bargaining theory, its application to civil conflicts, and how PKOs can lessen mutual uncertainty and foster stability. 

Anchoring this research on Afghanistan, he analyze the first peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, the 1988–1990 United Nations Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan (UNGOMAP). UNGOMAP’s eventual failure to foster peace highlights Afghanistan’s complexities and the dangers of an insufficiently resourced PKO operating in a state without a viable, incentive-compatible settlement, VAN WIE writes in the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs.

The author applies these lessons to policy analysis, where he explores possible PKO options and their potential for incentivizing compliance with a future intra-Afghan deal. 

“Though a viable PKO currently seems improbable given Afghanistan’s ongoing violence and the Taliban’s insistence on the complete withdrawal of foreign forces,” VAN WIE writes in the article titled ‘A Peacekeeping Mission in Afghanistan: Pipedream or Path to Stability?’ “future conditions may change.”

He highlights necessary prerequisites where a PKO may become possible. If designed properly, an Afghanistan PKO can fill a critical monitoring and verification capacity and bolster Afghanistan’s prospects for long-term stability.

Meaningful Political Participation: Lessons Learned From UN Mediation in Afghanistan and Syria

In this Bonn International Center for Conversion policy brief, ESTHER MEININGHAUS and KATJA MIELKE present lessons learned and subsequent policy implications from an in-depth analysis of the United Nations peace processes on Afghanistan and Syria. 

The authors argue that in both processes, the ability of peace process participants who come from Afghanistan and Syria to politically participate in their respective process was and is severely limited, thus hindering the prospects of successful conflict transformation. 

By political participation, the authors mean that peace process participants not only attend negotiations (“are being included”) but are in a position to (co-) determine who is negotiating the agreement (incl. which representation mechanism is adequate), what is the format of peacemaking (incl. methods of consultation), and what are the issues negotiated in which order (agenda-setting). The authors call this ‘meaningful political participation’.

Emphasising “inclusivity” in peace processes over meaningful political participation is highly problematic for potential progress towards longer-term/sustainable peace. Potential organisers of peace negotiations and related pre- and post-peace agreement measures (whether outside actors or ‘indigenous’) should strengthen political participation and process legitimacy for representatives from the populations concerned. This would contribute to opening a new pathway towards more sustainable peace processes, also beyond the Syrian and Afghan cases.

Natural Resource Exports and African Countries’ Voting Behaviour in the United Nations: Evidence from the Economic Rise of China

How do African countries’ resource exports to China affect the countries’ voting alignment with Beijing in the United Nations?

YI CHE,  XIAOYU HE  and YAN ZHANG exploit time variation in the swift surge in China's demand for natural resources and cross‐sectional variation in countries’ propensity to export resources. 

Writing in the Canadian Journal of Economics, the authors find that an increase in resource exports to China increases the probability of voting in line with China in the United Nations. “Interestingly, we observe a stronger effect for resolutions on which China and the United States cast opposite votes. We provide suggestive evidence that public goods and state capacity are possible explanations for our main results.”

To establish causation, the authors, in an article titled ‘Natural resource exports and African countries’ voting behaviour in the United Nations: Evidence from the economic rise of China’, exploited the fact that China's surging demand for natural resources has been driven largely by its rapid economic growth, which was triggered by its own institutional reforms and African countries’ propensity to export resources, which is determined mostly by natural resource endowment. 

Using this arguably exogenous interaction term as an instrument for country–resource exports to China, the authors found a positive effect of resource exports to China on the share of the countries’ votes that are in line with China for important human rights resolutions in the UN. 

“We further documented that this baseline result is not influenced by the assumption of an exclusion restriction, alternative dependent variable, alternative methods for constructing the instrument, alternative resolutions or subsample analysis. Interestingly, we found that the effect of interest is particularly strong if we restrict the resolutions to those on which the United States and China take different positions, and more resource exports to China actually reduce the share of African votes that are in line with the United States.

To understand the reasons why countries with more resource exports to China tend to vote more in line with China, the authors explored several possible explanations. They found that government revenue, industry value added and capital investment in the society are all increased due to the profits from resource exports to China. In turn, these countries invest more in public goods, including electricity, roads and telecommunications infrastructure. “Because the increased government revenue and public goods provision elevate the opportunity cost of rebellion, in our sample, we found that countries with more resource exports to China have a lower probability of having an intra‐state conflict, providing a safer environment for citizens in the country. 

“In this sense, our paper contributes to the resource‐curse literature by showing that resources, when used appropriately, can be beneficial for the country's development.”

Che, Y., He, X. and Zhang, Y. (2021), Natural resource exports and African countries’ voting behaviour in the United Nations: Evidence from the economic rise of China. Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique. https://doi.org/10.1111/caje.12514