Felix Haass

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the United Nations' most powerful institutional body, charged with the “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” The main instrument through which the Council asserts this power is its resolutions, specifically by using resolution text to attribute responsibility. The UNSC uses responsibility language to assign tasks, identify accountability under international law, or reflect the Council's normative interpretation of political principles. Yet we lack a comprehensive empirical description of responsibility attributions in UNSC resolutions. We address this gap by providing an original dataset of the full text of all UNSC resolutions between 1946 and 2020. We use this data to show that the Council has significantly increased responsibility attributions since the end of the Cold War, but only for a very specific subset of terms, targeting predominantly states and individuals. We further demonstrate how the data can inform debates about the timing and status of the “responsibility to protect” as an international norm. The data and findings provide a helpful starting point for many future research endeavors, including the role of member states in the UNSC, quantitative and qualitative research on UNSC decision-making processes, or topic development of the UNSC agenda in general.

Citizen engagement in and support for peace processes have been deemed important for sustainable peace after civil wars. Yet much of what we know about peace processes in civil wars centers on the interests of elite actors. This special feature aims to advance a research agenda focusing on citizens in peace processes to address this mismatch. In the introduction to the special feature, we first present empirical evidence situating citizens in relation to civil war peace processes. We then trace the current state of the literature on the roles of citizens in peace processes. Following that, we introduce a conceptual framework designed to improve scholarly analysis of the political behavior of citizens in peace processes. We also locate the individual contributions to the special feature within the framework in order to demonstrate its utility and as a means of helping to identify directions for future research.