Adoption, Adaptation or Chance? Inter-organizational Diffusion of the Protection of Civilians Norm from the United Nations to the African Union

Norms can be adopted without modifications or adapted to regional contexts for strategic or principled reasons. Norm adoption and adaptation can also happen by chance. 
When adoption takes place without consideration of the norm’s effectiveness or appropriateness, we speak about imitation. When adaptation takes place in such a manner, we lack conceptual tools to analyze it. 
“We propose a novel concept of incidental adaptation – divergence between promoted and adopted norms due to fortuitous events,” KSENIYA OKSAMYTNA and NINA WILÉN write in Third World Quarterly. “This completes the typology of scenarios leading to norm adoption and adaptation,” they write in their article titled ‘Adoption, adaptation or chance? Inter-organizational diffusion of the protection of civilians norm from the UN to the African Union.’
OKSAMYTNA and WILÉN apply the typology to the transmission of the protection of civilians norm in peace operations from the United Nations (UN) to the African Union (AU). The AU adopted the UN’s approaches in pursuit of interoperability and resources, and out of recognition of the UN’s normative authority. 
It also happened incidentally when the AU temporarily followed the UN’s approaches. The AU engaged in adaptation to reflect the nature of its operations and normative orientations of AU member states. 
Incidental adaptation accounted for the presence of the rights-based tier in the AU’s protection of civilians concept. 

“These findings nuance our understanding of norm diffusion, inter-organizational relations and the role of chance in international affairs.”

Kseniya Oksamytna & Nina Wilén (2022) Adoption, adaptation or chance? Inter-organisational diffusion of the protection of civilians norm from the UN to the African Union, Third World Quarterly, 43:10, 2357-2374, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2022.2102474

International Law and the Securitization of Peacemaking: On Chapter VII, the United Nations Security Council and the Mediation Mandate in Yemen

Peace mediation as a form of peaceful settlement of disputes has evolved significantly in the past 20 years, moving away from an informal process between parties towards a more structured undertaking rooted in norms and values of international law. 
Sitting between Chapter VI and Chapter VII of the UN Charter, mediation is an underexplored aspect of the collective security regime in international law, Catherine Turner writes in the Journal of Conflict and Security Law.
“Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the role of the UN Security Council (UNSC) and the exercise of legal authority under Chapter VII in shaping mediation mandates,” the author states in her article titled ‘International Law and the Securitization of Peacemaking: On Chapter VII, the Security Council and the Mediation Mandate in Yemen’. 
The article addresses this gap by developing a theoretical framework for understanding the role of UNSC in the construction of security in the context of peacemaking. 
Using the mandate of the Office of the Special Envoy for Yemen as a case study, the article traces the progression of the mediation mandate as set out in the UNSC resolutions, interrogating the shift in discourse from UN support for an inclusive political transition into a narrower focus on hard security and the international response to the threat of terrorism. 
Through this analysis the article demonstrates how the place of UNSC within the Charter system allows for a gradual securitization of the peace mediation process at the expense of inclusive approaches. At a time when consensus on collective security appears to be weakening, the role of the UNSC in constructing and responding to global threats is of significant interest to the future of Charter-based international peace and security.

Catherine Turner, International Law and the Securitisation of Peacemaking: On Chapter VII, the Security Council and the Mediation Mandate in Yemen, Journal of Conflict and Security Law, 2022;, krac031, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcsl/krac031

On the Right to Diplomacy: Historicizing and Theorizing Delegation and Exclusion at the United Nations

COSTAS M. CONSTANTINOU and FIONA MCCONNELL analyse the disregarded notion of the ius legationis (right of legation), revisiting historical debates in diplomatic theory and law over who possesses or ought to have this right. 
“By examining how the ius legationis manifested into a volitional or subjectional or natural right, we argue that this renders it not merely a legal issue, but a highly political and ethical question that is of direct relevance to contemporary international relations,” the authors write in ‘On the right to diplomacy: historicizing and theorizing delegation and exclusion at the United Nations’, published in the journal International Theory.
In an era where inclusivity is rhetorically promoted at the United Nations, the authors suggest that a rekindled right to diplomacy (R2D) – conceiving diplomacy as a right that is claimed but also contested – can shed light onto inequalities of representation and the role international law can play in remedying asymmetries and ethicizing the practice of diplomacy. 
Beyond its primary normative contribution, CONSTANTINOU and MCCONNELL argue that the R2D can also provide an analytical framework to understand UN’s efforts at institutionalizing diplomatic pluralism, its logics of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the struggles of diverse groups to obtain accreditation, consultative status, and negotiation ability within multilateral diplomacy.

Constantinou, C., & McConnell, F. (2022). On the right to diplomacy: Historicizing and theorizing delegation and exclusion at the United Nations. International Theory, 1-26. doi:10.1017/S1752971922000045

Offering the Carrot and Hiding the Stick? Conceptualizing Credibility in United Nations Peacekeeping

Credibility has been used to explain theories of deterrence and cooperation in international relations. In the peacekeeping environment, for what purposes should credibility be built and how can it be signaled? 
Despite being listed by the United Nations as a success factor in peace operations, our understanding of credibility in peacekeeping remains limited and focused on deterrence. 
‘Offering the Carrot and Hiding the Stick? Conceptualizing Credibility in UN Peacekeeping’ argues that credibility in peace operations must be built for both deterrence and cooperation purposes. Drawing on the international relations, civil war, and peacekeeping literatures, the article by VANESSA F. NEWBY, published in the journal Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, conceptualizes credibility in peacekeeping by identifying the purposes for which credibility must be built and signaled: deterrence and cooperativeness. 
The author contends that while a peace operation’s ability to deter is limited, signaling cooperativeness – credibility in cooperation – enables a force to cultivate cooperation with national and subnational audiences. 
This helps to create a more predictable security environment by enabling the force to function on a daily basis.

Newby, V. F. (2022). Offering the Carrot and Hiding the Stick?, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 28(3), 303-329. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/19426720-02803003

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