Leader Visits and UN Security Council Membership

Existing literature on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has largely painted a quiet China content with its veto power and uninterested in actively lobbying other members. While this might indeed be the case, this could also be attributed to the fact that these studies have focused exclusively on foreign aid as the favor. 
Writing in International Studies Quarterly, YU WANG first lays out reasons why a rising China might want to seek UNSC votes. His paper, titled “Leader Visits and UN Security Council Membership,” then approaches the problem from a new perspective and argues that leader visits are a better proxy for favor than foreign aid in studying China’s lobbying efforts. 
Using leader visits as the favor, he consistently finds that Chinese leaders are substantially more likely to visit a UNSC member than a nonmember when visiting Africa. The author obtains similar results when he extends his models to Dreher et al. (2018). YU further show that this positive effect of UNSC membership on leader visits does not hold in election years or exit years, nor does it hold for US leader visits. He concludes that China in the twenty-first century, just like the major Western powers, actively promotes its agenda among UNSC members, albeit this is not necessarily reflected in foreign aid.
“Our paper contributes to the literature on the political economy of the UNSC. It is arguably the first of its kind to provide solid evidence that China actively lobbies UNSC members and challenges our conventional view of a quiet China content with its veto power,” the author states.
“Our paper also adds to the debate of whether the rising China is a revisionist or a status quo state. Our findings suggest that China seeks influence over the Security Council, just like other major powers in the world. 
“Last, our paper highlights the importance of tailoring and updating our IR tools for studying China. China is different from other major powers. Yet, we have been studying China using exactly the same tools, such as foreign aid and UNGA voting, that were originally developed to study the United States. More tailored tools and measures could potentially yield new insights.”

Yu Wang, Leader Visits and UN Security Council Membership, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 4, December 2022, sqac064, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqac064

The R2P and Atrocity Prevention: Contesting Human Rights as a Threat to International Peace and Security

The significant link between human rights violations and the eventual outbreak of atrocity crimes has been widely promoted across the United Nations system. However, the question of how the connection between the responsibility to protect (R2P) norm and human rights plays out in the actual practices and debates of the UN Security Council has been relatively under explored.
SAMUEL JARVIS builds on constructivist research into norm robustness in order to trace how the R2P’s shift to an atrocity prevention focus has generated increased applicatory contestation over the push to expand the link between human rights and threats to international peace and security. 
Based on extensive analysis of UN Security Council meeting records and three case studies, the article – titled ‘The R2P and atrocity prevention: Contesting human rights as a threat to international peace and security’ and published in the European Journal of International Security – highlights two competing ideological frames that currently divide the Security Council’s approach to atrocity prevention.
This division has emphasized a key disconnect between the work of the Security Council and other UN institutions such as the Human Rights Council, therefore severely limiting the potential for effective atrocity prevention responses. 
Thus, without a stronger connection to human rights in the process of threat identification, the R2P norm will remain considerably limited as a prevention tool. 
Consequently, the article also contributes to a new understanding of the critical role evolving institutional rules and practices play in state attempts to both constrain and reshape human protection norms.

When May United Nations Peacekeepers Use Lethal Force to Protect Civilians?

Reconciling Threats to Civilians, Imminence, and the Right to Life

While the use of force in UN peacekeeping was traditionally limited to self-defense, the UN Security Council now regularly deploys peacekeeping missions with robust mandates to protect civilians and encourages their proactive implementation, including by using force. 
For many years, the Security Council authorized the use of ‘all necessary means’ to protect civilians from ‘imminent threats’ of physical violence, but its recent mandates have often dropped references to ‘imminence’. The UN has also interpreted such mandates as broader authorization for peacekeepers to use force in response to temporally ill-defined threats to civilians. 
This turn to robust civilian protection is often celebrated, yet the legal parameters of using force continue to evolve below the radar and are rarely scrutinized, with scholarly writing focused on peacekeeper self-defense, rules of engagement and UN policy to justify proactive mandate implementation. 
Drawing on an analysis of the relationship between peacekeeping mandates and international law in light of the shift from defensive to proactive peacekeeping, HANNA BOURGEOIS and  PATRYK I. LABUDA argue that the legality of using force for civilian protection purposes must be reconciled not only with Security Council resolutions and their language on imminence, but also with human rights law (HRL), which imposes strict temporal conditions for lawful deprivations of the right to life outside the conduct of hostilities. 
Using examples of how the UN’s current practice of using force to protect civilians in hostile environments may contravene international norms, their article – titled ‘When May UN Peacekeepers Use Lethal Force to Protect Civilians? Reconciling Threats to Civilians, Imminence, and the Right to Life’ and published in the Journal of Conflict & Security Law – attempts to reconcile proactive civilian-oriented peacekeeping with the concept of imminence as understood in HRL.

Hanna Bourgeois, Patryk I Labuda, When May UN Peacekeepers Use Lethal Force to Protect Civilians? Reconciling Threats to Civilians, Imminence, and the Right to Life, Journal of Conflict and Security Law, 2022; krac027, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcsl/krac027

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