Project Design

Projekt Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Thomas Gehring - E-mail

Researcher: Dr. Christian Dorsch - E-mail

current and former Research Assistants (Project and Chair): Helge Flug, Benjamin Hoh, Johanna Gehring, Melanie Rüth, Felix Schirner, Mareike Schamel, Marcel Stübner, and Antje Treichel.

Research gap and new research approach

The UN Security Council is seen as the most powerful international institution and its activities are regularly commented on, though there are hardly any analyses that systematically investigate this World Security Council as an international institution. The project aims not only at producing insights on how the Council operates, it also wants to contribute to development of a useful theory of international organizations, which should systematically account for the autonomous effects of these entitities beyond merely treating them as bureaucracies or resultants of the preferences and power potentials of states and possibly other actors.

The project's approach draws from dominant perspectives, which primarily treat the Security Council as a forum for or instrument of powerful states, but moves beyond them by adding new aspects. Following existing theories of international institutions and important strands of organizational theory, we conceptualize the Security Council as an international organization that defines decision situations and thereby shapes the available options of involved actors. This conceptial move allows us to systematically investigate whether and to what extent the World Security Council as an organization-like institution gains autonomy in relation to its member states and thereby systematically influences the behavior of states and the content of their collective Council decisions.

Research on theoretical mechanisms

From among many theoretically possible ways that organizations influence the decisions of involved actors, the project begins by investigating the presumably most important ones for the developments concerning the Council's decision-making since 1990. It has been observed that the Council has increasingly expanded its decisions concerning its competencies according to chapter VII of the UN Charter to include conflicts that are not international in the classical sense. Additionally, the decisions of the Council are taken in increasingly complex decision systems (committee governance) and interact with other international institutions. Drawing from exisiting knowledge on international institutions, we examine important ways of organizational influence to theoretically outline underlying mechanisms and to empirically trace their relevance within the Security Council.

As a first step the project will investigate the forming of "decision doctrines", which connect actually unrelated crisis cases with each other and thereby bind involved actors to previously chosen paths. Dies should be suited to explain the gradual expansion of Security Council competencies. Other important ways of organizational influence could be examined in subsequent or complementary research stages, like functional differentiation within the more complex decision systems of the Security Council or the interaction with other international institutions. For example, the Security Council increasingly employs committees and other suborgans or its decisions affect the issue areas of other international Organizations.

Selected cases for research

The selected cases, which serve as a basis to empirically verify whether decision-making within the Security Council leads to the formation of decision doctrines that shape the content of subsequent decisions, should meet the following criteria:

First, across time several decision situations must occur which pose similar decision problems, because this is the precondition for the formation of decision doctrines. Second, the problems must concern the collective decision within the Council itself, as subsequent decisions concerning the provision of necessary resources are located within the level of individual states. Third, to secure relevant empirical findings for our understanding of the functioning of the Council, the studies shall focus on major issue areas of the Security Council's activity related to coercive measures under chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Therefore we have chosen these early cases:

1) Interventions into intrastate conflicts

Since the end of the Cold War the Security Council has intervened in civil wars on numerous occasions with peace enforcement measures in accordance to chapter VII of the UN Charter, even without the consent of the target state or all relevant conflict parties. By now it has established about 20 such UN-missions and authorized about 20 such missions without UN commando structure. Thus coercive measures in peace operations in intrastate conflicts are nothing unusual anymore und represent an expansion of the Council's activities that should involve the logic of decision doctrines.

2) Measures against international terrorism

After 1990 the Security Council has also used its competencies to decide on coercive measures in accordance to chapter VII of the UN Charter in order to combat international terrorism. Previously its decisions were limited to mere condemnations and appeals. Since then it has imposed sanctions against Libya, established coercive measures directly aimed at non-state actors, and has recognized the right of self-defense for states against terror attacks after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Now the Council regularly addresses terror attacks around the whole world and issues global anti-terror measures. These measures raise the problem how activities of individual persons or private groups can be dealt with in a primarily intergovernmental entity and represent an expansion of the Council's activities that should involve the logic of decision doctrines.