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Institute
Despite high institutional hurdles for constitutional change, one observes surprisingly many EU treaty revisions. This article takes up the questions of what determines whether a treaty provision is successfully changed and why provisions are renegotiated at subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences. The article presents an institutionalist theory explaining success and renegotiation and tests the theory using all core institutional provisions by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The causal analysis shows that low conflict potential of an issue is sufficient for successfully changing the treaties. Furthermore, high conflict potential of an issue and its fundamental change are sufficient for it to be renegotiated.
We examine how and under what conditions informal institutional constraints, such as precedent and doctrine, are likely to affect collective choice within international organisations even in the absence of powerful bureaucratic agents. With a particular focus on the United Nations Security Council, we first develop a theoretical account of why such informal constraints might affect collective decisions even of powerful and strategically behaving actors. We show that precedents provide focal points that allow adopting collective decisions in coordination situations despite diverging preferences. Reliance on previous cases creates tacitly evolving doctrine that may develop incrementally. Council decision-making is also likely to be facilitated by an institutional logic of escalation driven by institutional constraints following from the typically staged response to crisis situations. We explore the usefulness of our theoretical argument with evidence from the Council doctrine on terrorism that has evolved since 1985. The key decisions studied include the 1992 sanctions resolution against Libya and the 2001 Council response to the 9/11 attacks. We conclude that, even within intergovernmentally structured international organisations, member states do not operate on a clean slate, but in a highly institutionalised environment that shapes their opportunities for action.
Based upon the current debate on international practices with its focus on taken-for-granted everyday practices, we examine how Security Council practices may affect member state action and collective decisions on intrastate conflicts. We outline a concept that integrates the structuring effect of practices and their emergence from interaction among reflective actors. It promises to overcome the unresolved tension between understanding practices as a social regularity and as a fluid entity. We analyse the constitutive mechanisms of two Council practices that affect collective decisions on intrastate conflicts and elucidate how even reflective Council members become enmeshed with the constraining implications of evolving practices and their normative implications. (1) Previous Council decisions create precedent pressure and give rise to a virtually uncontested permissive Council practice that defines the purview for intervention into such conflicts. (2) A ratcheting practice forces opponents to choose between accepting steadily reinforced Council action, as occurred regarding Sudan/Darfur, and outright blockade, as in the case of Syria. We conclude that practices constitute a source of influence that is not captured by the traditional perspectives on Council activities as the consequence of geopolitical interests or of externally evolving international norms like the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P).
Confronted with a new wave of criticism on the in effectiveness of its development programs, the World Bank embarked on a revitalization process, turning to private investors to finance International Development Association projects and widening its mandate. To explain these adaptation strategies of the World Bank to regain relevance, this piece draws on organizational ecology and orchestration scholarship. We contend that international organizations rely on two adaptation mechanisms, orchestration and scope expansion, when they lose their role as focal actors in an issue area. We find that the World Bank has indeed lost market share and has relied on these two mechanisms to revitalize itself. We show that the World Bank responded to changes in the environment by orchestrating a private sector-oriented capital increase, prioritizing private funding for development through a “cascade approach,” and expanding the scope of its mandate into adjacent domains of transnational governance, including climate change and global health.
The chapter explores how the Security Council has reacted to the changing global order in terms of institutional reform and its working methods. First, we look at how the Security Council’s setup looks increasingly anachronistic against the tremendous shifts in global power. Yet, established and rising powers are not disengaging. In contrast, they are turning to the Council to address growing challenges posed by the changing nature of armed conflict, the surge of terrorism and foreign fighters, nuclear proliferation and persistent intra-state conflicts. Then, we explore institutional and political hurdles for Council reform. While various reform models have been suggested, none of them gained the necessary global support. Instead, we demonstrate how the Council has increased the representation of emerging powers in informal ways. Potential candidates for permanent seats and their regional counterparts are committed as elected members, peacekeeping contributors or within the Peacebuilding Commission. Finally, we analyze how innovatively the Council has reacted to global security challenges. This includes working methods reform, expansion of sanctions regimes and involvement of non-state actors. We conclude that even though the Council’s membership has not yet been altered, it has reacted to the changing global order in ways previously unaccounted for.
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the most important multilateral institutions having the ambition to shape global governance and the only organ of the global community that can adopt legally binding resolutions for the maintenance of international peace and security and, if necessary, authorize the use of force. Created in the aftermath of World War II by its victors, the UNSC’s constellation looks increasingly anachronistic, however, in light of the changing global distribution of power. Adapting the institutional structure and decision-making procedures of the UNSC has proven to be one of the most difficult challenges of the last decades, while it is the institution that has probably been faced with the most vociferous calls for reform. Although there have been changes to the informal ways in which outside actors are drawn into the UNSC’s work and activities, many of the major players in the current international system seem to be deprived from equal treatment in its core patterns of decision-making. Countries such as Brazil, Germany, India and Japan, alongside emerging African nations such as Nigeria and South Africa, are among the states eager to secure permanent representation on the Council. By comparison, selected BRICS countries, China and Russia - in contrast to their role in other multilateral institutions - are permanent members of the UNSC and with this, have been “insiders” for a long time. This renders the situation of the UNSC different from global institutions, in which traditionally, Western powers have dominated the agenda.
Taking a new perspective
(2016)
Network analysis has attracted significant attention when researching the phenomenon of transnational terrorism, particularly Al Qaeda. While many scholars have made valuable contributions to mapping Al Qaeda, several problems remain due to a lack of data and the omission of data provided by international organizations such as the UN. Thus, this article applies a social network analysis and subsequent mappings of the data gleaned from the Security Council's consolidated sanctions list, and asks what they can demonstrate about the structure and organizational characteristics of Al Qaeda. The study maps the Al Qaeda network on a large scale using a newly compiled data set. The analysis reveals that the Al Qaeda network consists of several hundred individual and group nodes connecting almost all over the globe. Several major nodes are crucial for the network structure, while simultaneously many other nodes only weakly and foremost regionally connect to the network. The article concludes that the findings tie in well to the latest research pointing to local and simultaneously global elements of Al Qaeda, and that the new data is a valuable source for further analyses, potentially in combination with other data.