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

The Unintended Consequences of UN Sanctions: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis

United Nations sanctions are a potentially powerful instrument to tackle challenges to international peace and security, also because they constitute an alternative to the use of military force. While most existing work focuses on questions of whether and when restrictions are effective, KATHARINA L. MEISSNER and PATRICK A. MELLO’s article departs from these research aims by looking explicitly and systematically at the unintended consequences of UN sanctions and especially the conditions under which they arise. 
Picking up on recent contributions’ calls to investigate the negative externalities of sanctions, and drawing on scholarly advances in sanctions research, they develop an explanatory framework to account for the conditions under which unintended consequences occur.
Published in the journal Contemporary Security Policy, the authors’ results show that there are multiple pathways towards unintended consequences, documenting a complex interplay of conditions. Of these, the empirically most important pathways consist of (1) comprehensive sanctions with the involvement of a permanent member of the UN Security Council, (2) sanctions that have been in place for a long time (eight years and more), without P5 involvement, and not directed against autocratic regimes, and (3) sanctions regimes against autocratic targets that are not economically isolated, with P5 involvement. 
These results thus resonate with the expectations formulated in the authors’ theory. This applies foremost to the negative impact of comprehensive sanctions and those of long duration, as well as the involvement of P5 members, which are often instrumentalized by target states to shift blame and attention from the domestic regime. The latter applies chiefly to autocratic regimes that are not economically isolated. In this respect, the findings confirm earlier studies discussing the role of sanctions’ types, the involvement of international actors, and the target’s regime type as driving forces of unintended consequences. “Our study delivers a unique and new insight into how these conditions play together in producing adverse effects of sanctions,” MEISSNER and MELLO write.
The authors complemented their QCA analysis with a closer examination of unintended consequences as a result of the sanctions regimes against Haiti (1993–1994) and North Korea (2006–2014). These cases illustrate how comprehensive, namely sectoral and commodity sanctions combined with a broad involvement of international actors can impair the humanitarian and economic situation (Haiti) and how sanctions against stable autocratic targets, together with P5 involvement, can lead to an unintended strengthening of authoritarian regimes (North Korea).
“We see our study as a starting point for systematically investigating the drivers of sanctions’ unintended consequences and observe a twofold need for further research,” the authors state. “First, as evident from the variation on the outcome of unintended consequences and our case illustrations, a nuanced understanding of sanctions’ negative externalities is crucial to future empirical analyses. We provided a fine-grained measure of unintended consequences through an index that we constructed, and more research should be done to investigate the different nuances of sanctions’ negative side-effects, albeit in a systematic fashion. 
Second, as theoretically expected, multiple pathways exist in explaining the occurrence of sanctions’ unintended consequences. “Our empirics document three such pathways and a promising avenue for future research would be to assess the external validity of our findings by investigating the extent to which these paths hold in the context of other sanction senders, including the European Union and the United States.”

Katharina L. Meissner & Patrick A. Mello (2022) The unintended consequences of UN sanctions: A qualitative comparative analysis, Contemporary Security Policy, DOI: 10.1080/13523260.2022.2059226

Unpacking the Framing of Health in the United Nations Security Council

Traditionally falling under the remit of the World Health Organization (WHO), health issues such as health emergencies or access to healthcare have been addressed more frequently in debates and resolutions of the UN Security Council (UNSC) since 2000. 
As the UNSC is the UN’s principal body dealing with threats and endangerments to international peace and security, this points to a certain degree of the securitization of health. 
By means of a statistical analysis of UNSC speeches between 1995 and 2019 as well as by examining health-related UNSC resolutions, MAIKE VOSS, ISABELL KUMP and PAUL BOCHTLER explore by whom and how health is treated as a security issue in UNSC debates. Their article ‘Unpacking the framing of health in the United Nations Security Council’, published the Australian Journal of International Affairs, argues that health is increasingly paid attention to during health emergencies, displaying a narrow framing of health that follows a health security paradigm. 
However, health is also addressed with a focus on health systems, the wider determinants of health as well as with respect to the access to healthcare and hospitals and the protection of healthcare personnel. 
This points to the UNSC considering a broader understanding of public health issues to be relevant for its security agenda.

Maike Voss, Isabell Kump & Paul Bochtler (2022) Unpacking the framing of health in the United Nations Security Council, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 76:1, 4-10, DOI: 10.1080/10357718.2021.2017845

Do UN Peace Operations Lead To More Terrorism?

Recent research suggests that UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) reduce conventional violence. However, rebel groups have been increasingly using a combination of conventional and non-conventional violence, for example, terrorism. Little is known about whether and under which conditions PKOs shape rebels’ incentives to resort to more terrorism. At the same time, existing research on the use of terrorism in civil wars primarily focuses on domestic factors, thus overlooking the impact of external shocks such as the deployment of PKOs.
JESSICA DI SALVATORE, SARA M. T. POLO and ANDREA RUGGERI argue that PKOs can have critical unintended consequences inducing tactical adaptation in rebel violence as they alter the government-rebels balance of power. 
Particularly, rebel groups that are militarily strong prior to the UN arrival are incentivized to escalate terrorist violence to overcome the physical barrier imposed by PKO forces and improve their bargaining position vis-à-vis the government, they write in the article titled ‘Do UN peace operations lead to more terrorism? Repertoires of rebel violence and third-party interventions’, published in the European Journal of International Relations.  
Weaker groups, which in the absence of PKOs are more likely to use terrorism, have not only limited capacity but also fewer incentives to escalate terrorism when PKOs deploy. 
Leveraging new disaggregated data on rebel terrorist attacks during civil wars, the authors provide the first global actor-level analysis of the relationship between PKO deployments and changes in rebels’ tactical preferences for terrorist violence. 

They find that, conditional on initial government-rebels power relations, PKOs can make terrorism the weapon of the strong. Their study sheds light on the unintended effects of peacekeeping, the causes of terrorism, and offers important policy implications for several current PKOs deployed in the midst of violence.

Di Salvatore, J., Polo, S. M. T., & Ruggeri, A. (2022). Do UN peace operations lead to more terrorism? Repertoires of rebel violence and third-party interventions. European Journal of International Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211072714

China and Peacekeeping: Unfolding the Political and Legal Complexities of an Ambivalent Relationship

Intensifying its engagement with UN peacekeeping in the past decade, Beijing has, in particular, supported and participated in peace operations that were not fully compatible with the consensual, impartial, and non-coercive models of peacekeeping traditionally employed by the United Nations. 
China’s endorsement of offensive and intrusive missions is not inconsequential, given that it clashes with its professed adherence to rigid interpretations of the principles of sovereignty, non-intervention, and the non-use of force in international relations, MAURO BARELLI writes. 
“[T]o make sense of China’s involvement in unconventional peacekeeping operations one must examine the broader process of foreign policy recalibration that is redefining the interests and priorities of the country as a new great power,” BARELLI writes in the Asian Journal of International Law. 
Furthermore, by examining China’s ambivalent approach to the principles that have traditionally defined the legal framework of UN peacekeeping, his article, titled ‘China and Peacekeeping: Unfolding the Political and Legal Complexities of an Ambivalent Relationship’, highlights the opportunities and challenges that China will face as a provider of international security.
As a global economic power increasingly exposed to the risks and costs of conflicts around the world, the author states, China has naturally integrated into its foreign policy the question of instability in strategically important regions. In light of its non-confrontational nature, peacekeeping has been elected as an instrument capable of contributing to achieve the abovementioned objective without calling into question China’s continued adherence to a non-interventionist foreign policy. 
Direct engagement in peacekeeping operations further allows China to project the image of a country committed to human protection, while offering its military an opportunity to improve its combat readiness. However, the author states, these benefits come with a number of challenges revolving around China's interpretation and application of the classic principles of peacekeeping.
The first set of challenges derives from the aggressive nature of the peace operations recently supported by China. Missions such as those in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MINUSCO), Mali (MINUSMA), and South Sudan (UNMISS) are authorized to use offensive, as opposed to defensive, force. In addition, MINUSCO and MINUSMA are instructed to target specific “enemies” rather than remaining impartial. 
“Beijing can take comfort in the fact that peacekeepers are still deployed with the consent of the host state and are normally mandated to support the efforts of the latter in re-establishing peace and security,” BARELLI writes. Furthermore, the fact that offensive force has mainly been used to counter terrorist threats suits China’s ambition to become an important player in international efforts to combat terrorism, he adds. 
At the same time, an escalation in the use of force by non-impartial peacekeeping units, both in itself and in combination with the consequences attached to it, raises a number of issues for Beijing given its traditional foreign policy posture and professed commitment to a strict interpretation of the principle of non-use of force in international law. This is even more so, considering that several states and influential UN reports have warned against the type of offensive operations conducted by MONUSCO and MINUSMA. 
For these reasons, China has not formally endorsed the shift towards a more offensive form of peacekeeping, calling, instead, for the continued respect of the principles of impartiality and non-use of force except in self-defence. This has created a visible gap between its rhetoric and practice that will be difficult to bridge given the nature and dynamics of the competing forces at play, the author states.
A second challenge is represented by the practical difficulties that China is likely to encounter in defending a purely consensual model of peacekeeping. Peacekeeping forces can only be deployed with the consent of the host state, notably a requirement that, distinguishing peacekeeping from enforcement action, guarantees the alignment of the former with broader notions of sovereignty and non-intervention. 
In practice, however, China has not always applied the parameters of consent in a very rigid manner, having endorsed and even participated in missions established against the will of the host state and later deployed in the absence of genuine consent. 
“While engaging in not fully consensual operations may allow China to better defend its interests abroad in the face of host states’ reluctance to accept the offer of UN assistance, Beijing will have to constantly balance the benefits deriving from supporting intrusive operations with their potential effects on its commitment to rigid interpretations of the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention in international relations.”
Finally, the way in which China engages, as a permanent member of the Security Council, with modern peace operations will not only contribute to shape its identity as a great power increasingly engaged in conflict prevention and resolution, but can also have important implications for both the practice and doctrine of peacekeeping, BARELLI states.
In particular, China's continued support for offensive operations, especially when not qualified, could contribute to a process of legal validation of even more expansive interpretations of the principles of impartiality and non-use of force except in self-defence, while at a more practical level, and despite inevitable divergences of views and interests, its more active involvement in international peacekeeping efforts could provide the basis for a more fruitful collaboration with the other Permanent-Five in tackling contemporary global peace and security issues.

BARELLI, M. (2022). China and Peacekeeping: Unfolding the Political and Legal Complexities of an Ambivalent Relationship. Asian Journal of International Law, 1-20. doi:10.1017/S2044251321000606

From ‘Peacekept’ to Peacekeeper: Seeking International Status by Narrating New Identities

NINA WILÉN examines how post-conflict states attempt to increase international status by transforming their identities from “peacekept” to “peacekeepers.” Writing in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies, the author  focuses on the discursive side of identity construction and increases understanding of how post-conflict troop contributing countries (PCTCC) seek status on the international arena not only by “doing” peacekeeping but also by “narrating” their roles and identities as peacekeepers. 
A comparative case study of two PCTCC, Burundi and Rwanda, is used to illustrate the argument in the article titled ‘From “Peacekept” to Peacekeeper: Seeking International Status by Narrating New Identities’. By analyzing official discourses from the two cases through a theoretical framework, which combines social identity theory with narrative approaches, it is first argued that PCTCC seek status and a new identity through peacekeeping contribution in part, to underline their sovereignty and safeguard their domestic affairs from outside interference. Second, to successfully seek status, the narratives need to show coherence and be co-constituted by other international actors. 
The analysis underlines post-conflict states’ agency in identity construction and peacekeeping as an international practice to acquire status and legitimacy in international relations.