Smallscale Study "Rule-based Decision-making in the UN Security Council: The Al-Qaida/Taliban Sanctions Committees"

As the most important global organization for the maintenance of international peace and security, the UN Security Council has wide-ranging powers. Within its sanctions regimes, the Council establishes complex governance structures that exist for an extended period of time. Sanctuions regimes require continuously deciding on issues of administrative character, which the Council itself as a political body cannot deal with adequately. As a result, the Council increasingly delegates important decision-making functions to its sanctions committees.

Despite the extensive literature on the UN Security Council, little attention has been paid to systematic analyses of the creation and consequences of sanctions committees. It is largely overlooked that by establishing a multi-level sanctions regime, a functionally differentiated decision-making process is created that transfers the Security Council from a forum for superpower bargaining into a more complex governance structure.

To close this research gap, it will be investigated, whether and how the delegation of competences to the sanction committees affects the Council’s dominant logic of decision-making, which is expected to be determined by the current distribution of power among Council members. In addition, it will be studied, how this development influences the content of the decisions taken. As such, the decisions of these bodies gain considerable relevance for peace research, as they possibly affect the humanitarian situation in target states or restrict the freedom of movement of targeted individuals.

Against this background, the pilot project will examine, whether and how the Council seeks to control its Al-Qaida/Taliban-sanction committee by setting procedural and substantive guidelines for committee decision-making and whether this attempt impacts on the decisions taken within the committee. The study intends to understand the multiple changes in the sanctions regime that can be observed over time. It will shed light on the question whether these changes were predominantly caused by exogenous factors or are mainly the result of problems that originate from the internal workings of the committee in relation to the Council. The pilot study shall also assess the empirical feasibility of the overall project.

Selected publications:

Thomas Gehring und Thomas Dörfler 2013: Division of Labor and Rule-based Decisionmaking Within the UN Security Council: The Al-Qaeda/Taliban Sanctions Regime. Global Governance; 19:4, 567-587.