Talking the Talk, Walking the Walk? Deliberations Within the UNSC, 1945-2018

• In Event: The United Nations and Global Norms

Abstract

Where are UN peace operations (POs) deployed? This once popular question seems to have lost its relevance as the peacekeeping literature has slowly but steadily shifted its main focus to evaluating whether peacekeeping works. Although early studies on effectiveness have addressed the non-random assignment of UN POs across civil wars head-on, more recent scholarship either does not discuss issues of selection at all or simply assumes that peacekeepers are send to ‘hard’ cases. Given recent large-N work on agenda-setting dynamics in the UN Security Council (UNSC), the finding that peacekeeping deployment is contingent on conflict characteristics seems puzzling: if the interests of UNSC members (both permanent and non-permanent) determine which civil conflicts make it to the Council’s agenda, why do they not determine where peacekeepers go? In order to make sense of this puzzle, I propose to shift our attention to a stage of the UNSC decision-making process that has hitherto not been examined: the deliberations of Council members in public formal meetings preceding authorizations of UN POs. Based on the content and speeches of these deliberations, I will use large-N text analysis methods to uncover patterns of argumentation among the members of the UNSC as well as those states that often request to be part of formal meeting due to special interests in a certain civil war. This approach will enable me to examine which narratives states use to convince others that a particular civil conflict is or is not a threat to international peace and security or which states are pushing for more or less intrusive Council action. Most importantly, I will be able to detect whether certain keywords push deliberations in a certain direction and provide a point of no return where authorizations of UN peace operations seem inevitable. This research is not only valuable to better understand how the UNSC works and whose voices are heard within this international body but also provides insights for non-state actors on whom to approach if lobbying for the deployment of peacekeepers.

Author

• Evgenija Kröker, University of Oxford