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Abstract
From its capacity for deploying joint operations in conflict zones to its status as a standard-bearing forum for international behaviour, the United Nations has asserted its relevance in a diverse array of issues and conflicts around the world. Equally as diverse has been the scholarship surrounding the United Nations over the past several decades. This collection of essays provides a snapshot of these diverse lines of scholarship, highlighting existing scholarship on a range of topics, as well as identifying areas of opportunity for future scholarly work on these topics. Taken as a whole, this forum more broadly provides insight into core pillars of the United Nations' mission--including the maintenance of peace and security; fostering friendly relations between nations; promoting human rights and humanitarian goals; and encouraging cooperation and harmonization of interests between nations. Moving forward, it is our hope that this collection will serve as a sprigboard for inspiring future work to both build and expand upon the insights from the past several decades of scholarship on the United Nations.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on the editors
Zuhaib Mahmood (PhD, 2021, Michigan State Univ.) is a visiting scholar and post-doctoral fellow at Duke University. His dissertation examined patterns of speech at the United Nations General Assembly, and he has published on topics including forecasting in Political Science and the role of interest groups in United States foreign policy.
Kyle Beardsley (PhD, 2006, UCSD) is Professor of Political Science at Duke University. He is also a co-director of the International Crisis Behavior data project and the deputy director of the Triangle Institute of Security Studies (TISS). His authored books include Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping (with Sabrina Karim) and The Mediation Dilemma.
Notes
1 Just as the four purposes are not mutually exclusive—in many ways they are complementary—the binning of the essays is not meant to limit the application of the essays. Each essay has some application to our understanding of additional purposes of the UN.
2 For a detailed discussion on the evolution of peacekeeping research, see Fortna and Howard (2008).
3 Diehl and Druckman (Citation2010) review the many objectives (‘missions’) that peace operations can pursue.
4 While consent is not required under Chapter VII authorizations, and while consent is not always consistently maintained throughout deployments, it is a principal element of the UNSC's authorizations.
5 For a comprehensive discussion of the civilian protection norm, see Hultman (this forum).
6 Peacekeeping and peacemaking may not always complement one another, as when peacekeeping reduces the sense of a mutually hurting stalemate (Greig and Diehl 2005).
7 See, for example, Chapter 7 of Hultman, Kathman, & Shannon (Citation2019).
8 However, when PKOs engage in peacebuilding efforts that directly support the state, PKOs can inadvertently increase local instability (see Nomikos and Villa's contribution to this forum).
9 Missions such as those in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and the DRC (MONUSCO) have been mandated to re-establish, extend, or consolidate the authority of the state.
10 Burundi, CAR, Chad, Cote D’Ivoire, DRC, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Mali, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and South Sudan. These data come from Raleigh et al. Citation2010.
11 See Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo for a critique of UN operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo because they de-emphasized local-level security.
12 The study by Beardsley and Schmidt (Citation2012), however, finds no such relationship in the post-cold war era.
13 See Mahmood & Tucker (this forum) for recent advances in quantitative text analysis relevant to the study of the UN
14 The WHO has declared six public health emergencies of international concern (PHEICs) since 2009.
15 See Youde (2018) for an analysis of China's role in global health governance.
16 Types are differentiated by the value of parameters in their utility functions. For example, a resolved type is typically modeled as facing lower costs for action than an irresolute type. States of the world also influence utility functions. For instance, a country may be in severe crisis or moderate crisis, where the level of severity affects actors’ payoffs.
17 This example borrows from Wagner (2007) and many others.
18 For example, here we might include the way countries speak on certain issues (Baturo et al, Citation2017a; Pomeroy Citation2017), the selection of issues the UN Security Council takes on (Allen & Yuen Citation2020), and/or the particular category of action taken in a UN resolution (Beardsley Citation2013).
19 For example, here we might include the number of speeches or meetings over time (Schönfeld et al, 2019), patterns of alignment in UN General Assembly voting (Voeten 2013), and/or the political correlates of where UN resolutions are authorized (Beardsley & Schmidt Citation2012).
20 Kathman (2013)
21 Bailey et al (2015)
22 For example, his work was able to isolate condemnations as having little impact on a conflict's propensity for relapse, raising further questions about why they exist at all. His other work with this data included focused study on the effectiveness of diplomatic engagement on non-violent self-determination movements (Beardsley 2015) or on other civil wars occurring nearby (White, Cunningham, & Beardsley 2018).
23 Their data is limited to a sample African conflicts, though it provides a promising design example to merge content and behavior via the text of UN Security Council resolutions.
24 Their data is limited to the period 1989-2016, and further restricted to the 34 countries with peace agreements.
25 The data is available both as a web-browsing tool (http://ungd.smikhaylov.net/) and on Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0TJX8Y)
26 Data analysis done using R 4.0.3. (March 2021)
27 Baturo et al (2017b)
28 Gurciullo & Mikhaylov (Citation2017)
29 Kentikelenis & Voeten (Citation2020)
30 For example, the data show that speeches at the UN Security Council have increased over time, with a larger and larger share of those speeches belonging to non-P5 countries, especially in the past 5 years.
31 For example, Czaika (Citation2008) argue that diplomats can use the UN Security Council to attract development aid, showing that the number of speeches delivered at the UNSC by a given country is strongly related to the amount of aid dispersed to that country.
32 Chapman, this forum
33 Hultman, this forum
34 Benson & Tucker (Citation2022)
35 Data on broader UN General Assembly engagement is drawn from Mahmood (Citation2020)
36 Baturo (et al, 2017b; pg. 3)
37 Ibid. (pg. 10)
38 Mahmood (Citation2020)
39 Ibid.
40 This includes Resolutions, but also may include other associated content such as Secretary General reports associated with individual peacekeeping operations, or even statements by NGOs or other actors who are involved on the ground in particular conflicts.
41 This could include using the text itself (e.g. by way of various text analysis methods) or by linking the text to observed behavior, and developing theory on the conditions under which this occurs.