Thinking Different about the UN Security Council

Abstract

media-genic: countries debate, votes are taken, drama abounds as when Colin Powell made his case for intervention in Iraq. The Council's composition is sup posed to reflect coercive power in the world, and it is the only institution whose decisions are expected to be binding on all member states of the UN. Sometimes it does not seem to work well and reformers want to change its composition bet ter to reflect current power. The UN Security Council and the Politics of International Authority seeks to encour age us to think differently about the institution, reflecting radically alternative way to conceptualize power in supranational institutions. It is different from the usual take on the Security Council, which can focus on process and issues dealt with, like Edward Luck's (2006) UN Security Council: Practice and Promise, or David Malone's (1998) analysis of the specific case of Haiti in his Decision-making in the UN Security Council, or Chinmaya Gharekhan's (2006) personal memoire in The Horseshoe Table: An Inside View of the UN Security Council. Bruce Cronin and Ian Hurd start the process in their introductory chapter, which sets out their focus on authority and legitimacy as key factors in the Council's effectiveness. Authority here means a relation among actors within hierarchy in which one group is recognized as having both the rights and the competence to make binding decisions for the rest of the community... (p. 6). As such it is related to legitimacy, form of very soft power. Hurd's next chapter elaborates on this and sets up tests of authority as way of assessing the Council. This is based on Hurd's earlier work on legitimacy in After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council (Hurd 2007). Eric Voeten's chapter on the nature of Security Council authority combines an institutionalist and realist perspective on how decision making can be seen as bargaining between public goods perspective (peace and security are good for everyone) and private goods perspective (a given State's national interest). He shows that the decision-making process is evolving in such way that agree ment in the Security Council is becoming increasingly important. Bruce Cronin's chapter on how international consensus has expanded the Security Council's legal authority is central argument in the volume. It demon strates that consensus, which is the prevailing means of decision making at the international level, allows international law to develop. As he notes, ...it reflects the growth of legal norms that are derived not from individual state consent,