(Author’s note: Security Council Report is an independent think tank dedicated to supporting a more effective, transparent, and accountable U.N. Security Council. A version of this article will appear in Security Council Report’s October Monthly Forecast.)
The six years I’ve spent as Security Council Report’s (SCR’s) Executive Director have been eventful, and as my tenure draws to a close, I offer parting reflections on an overarching question animating our work: What impact can and does the Security Council have? Over the past six years, SCR has observed and documented the United Nations Security Council’s actions on dramatically changing situations including the COVID-19 pandemic, Ukraine, and Gaza, and on major policy shifts, such as the U.N. financing of African Union (AU) peace support operations. Day in and day out, SCR has interacted with Council members, other member States, regional bodies, the U.N. Secretariat, academia and civil society in order to produce impartial, nuanced and fact-checked reports on issues before the Security Council. I feel privileged to have held this position, in which I have learned a great deal.
The world has suffered gravely from the Security Council’s failure to have meaningful impact on the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine – and in Sudan, Myanmar, and Yemen. Also in Afghanistan, where women are written out of public life and denied their human rights, and Haiti, where gangs rule.
These Council failures contribute to international law unraveling, normalizing violations and impunity for them, and further weakening the universality of norms. The political cost of atrocity crimes is now shockingly low–even for plausible cases of genocide. The U.N. Charter presupposed that the Council’s core members would stand up for its core values. Often, they have not.
In negotiations on Security Council products, references to international human rights law, international humanitarian law, the rights of women, and climate security routinely draw objections and may need to be deleted in order to secure agreement. In some of today’s conflicts, States are turning to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the face of Security Council inaction.
Does the Security Council matter if it can’t change behaviors on the ground?
In the past, it was able to do more. When East Timor flared into violence, in 1999, Council members pressed for a lawful and rights-respecting solution. Their action, including a visiting mission by five Council members to Jakarta and Dili, was persuasive.
Between 2009 and 2015, when I headed three U.N. peace operations, the Council stood unanimously behind the 16 relevant resolutions setting out the functions of those operations. With the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), the United Nations Office in Burundi (BNUB), and the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), we could point confidently to a unified Security Council position, interpret the Council’s intentions to the government, and meet with a supportive group of Council members represented locally. Years after the peace operations closed, these countries have not gone back to war.
Today, there is far less Security Council agreement signposting the political trajectory out of conflicts. In fact, countries in crisis now quickly attract involvement by States who see ways of leveraging that chaos – and those States often include Council members.
But I see areas where change for the better is within reach.
The first concerns the role of the ten elected Security Council members, who have greatly strengthened their collective identity (as the “E10”). They often lead the way in calling for respect for international law, the protection of human rights, and humanitarian access. They have worked hard to find common positions among sub-groups – such as the three African members (“A3,” lately joined twice by a member from the Latin American and Caribbean group), and cross-regional alliances, such as Ireland and Niger joining forces on a draft climate change resolution in 2021.
Elected members have found that they can apply pressure for issues to be discussed, and drive political momentum. Notably, more elected members have stepped up to draft Council products: in March 2024, resolution 2728 calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was attributed to all ten elected members, a first. With the 2021 Presidency Initiative on Women, Peace and Security, elected members pioneered monthly commitments, coordinated across successive presidencies, and drew in some permanent members. Elected members have subsequently initiated other pledges: Malta, Mozambique, Switzerland and the UAE on climate, peace, and security in 2023 that now has the support of 11 members, and just last month, a joint action on conflict prevention in support of A New Agenda for Peace launched by Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and Switzerland.
The burgeoning leadership by elected members is recent, and responds to the permanent members’ disunity as well as their shortcomings as caretakers of the U.N. Charter. It represents real change. On Sept. 23, the ten elected and five incoming members met at ministerial level, underlining the space that this cohort now occupies—a meeting cohosted by the governments of Slovenia, Ecuador, and Kuwait and by Security Council Report.
Many elected members prepare extensively for their Council terms, years in advance, and staff up significantly, at times including personnel lent by other countries or regional bodies. SCR has supported the preparation of some fifty incoming elected members since 2012. But there are challenges. Being an active, effective Council member is hard work. Among the most frequently asked questions at the annual “Hitting the Ground Running” Workshop—which Finland has organized since 2003, in cooperation with SCR since 2020—is how to measure success as a Council member. Several member States have told SCR that their country’s Council terms could have had greater impact.
States could consider a careful review of how their region selects, and endorses, the country or countries that will compete for Council elected membership. (Every region does so differently, as explained in SCR’s annual research report on the Security Council elections.) They might also look at expanding and regularizing the ways partners, whether regional or bilateral, can provide practical support for countries joining the Council.
A second reflection concerns some Council members’ stiffened resistance to receiving independent, factual briefings and reports.
Nearly a quarter century ago, in the specific context of UN peace operations, Lakhdar Brahimi called for the U.N. Secretariat to tell the Council what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear. Doing so has become harder across the board. In 2023 and 2024, the Panels of Experts reporting on Mali and on the DPRK were shut down by Russian vetoes. Council members seeking to discuss particular conflict situations, even behind closed doors, have been intimidated and even seen their diplomatic personnel expelled by the country in question. Civil society representatives have also faced threats after briefing the Security Council. OHCHR, too, has encountered pressure and staff expulsions, such as in Mali. Robust reporting now requires fortitude. The truth is on the back foot.
The belief that good information can empower better decision-making is core to SCR’s work. And many issues on the Council’s agenda are complex and long-standing. Not all elected members know these situations well. Moreover, every year one-third of the Council’s members are new–and the group now makes far fewer visits to the field than it did before COVID-19.
SCR has described the Secretariat’s practice of candid situational briefings to Council members, which started in 2010. These largely ended in 2013, having become a Sisyphean task: as one senior Secretariat member reported in private, “Every time we do horizon-scanning, we get beaten up.” Elected members have periodically sought to revive a form of early warning briefings at a less formal level.
The Council should, at a minimum, seek and receive factual and impartial information on situations of concern to the Secretary-General, and on all situations already on its agenda. The weight is on the U.N. Secretariat to convey political and operational field realities, to produce sound, impartial analyses and recommendations for action, and to help protect Security Council briefers from harm.
A third reflection is on the possibilities offered by a great hinterland of underutilized elements in the U.N. Charter, in the Council’s working methods, and in the role of the Secretary-General. SCR has written extensively about this trove of options. They include the Charter’s Article 99 (invoked explicitly by the Secretary-General in December 2023 to warn the Council of an impending humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza); its Chapter VIII on regional arrangements (in the spirit of which the Council adopted resolution 2719, on U.N. financing of AU-led peace support operations); article 27(3) on abstention from voting, article 33 on first steps in the peaceful settlement of disputes, and article 34, on the Council’s right to investigate any situation or dispute that might lead to international friction or give rise to a dispute, in particular. In its entire history, the Council has only once used article 96(1), which enables it to request an advisory opinion from the ICJ on any legal question. There is also article 94(2), allowing the Council to “make recommendations or decide” how to give effect to an ICJ judgment, if so asked by one of the parties to the dispute.
The General Assembly opting to play a stronger role in matters of international peace and security—for example, through its 2022 “veto initiative”— falls within this basket of issues. Arguably, so does the process of appointing the U.N. Secretary General, which became significantly more transparent in 2016 after extensive civil society campaigning, and will be more important than ever the next time around, in 2026.
As well, the Council’s use of its strongest tools, peacekeeping and sanctions, is in decline; soon these too can fairly be termed underutilized. 2023 marked ten years since the Council last launched a U.N. peacekeeping operation, in the Central African Republic (CAR). Its continued pullback from sanctions is also visible. Between 1990 and 2015, the Council created on average one new sanctions regime a year. But since the 2017 Mali sanctions regime (abolished by a Russian veto in 2023), sanctions have been set up only for Haiti, in 2022. And it has been difficult to add new listings, or new criteria, to existing sanctions regimes.
Non-U.N.-led efforts to keep the peace, such as the Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti and the Southern African Development Community (SADC)-led mission in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), today face serious difficulties. U.N. peacekeeping is imperfect, and sometimes the wrong tool. But there are decades of evidence in its support. Security Council members and the Secretariat —including the Secretary-General—would be well advised to keep U.N. peacekeeping capabilities well-oiled and forward-looking. Potential peacekeeping missions are being discussed in some quarters for some of the world’s most desperate situations, including Haiti, Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine. Peacekeeping has been an adaptable and flexible tool, and a ministerial-level meeting in Berlin in May 2025 is expected to explore a wide range of models.
At this time of war, polarization, and desperation, one commentator after the next cites lines from W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming, of 1919:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Invoking this poem at every last crisis of the past century does not make it more true. Recently, I found a take I much prefer: that things fall apart if we let them.
Addressing the opening of the General Assembly last week, the Secretary General named impunity as the greatest driver of global unsustainability. Impunity, he said, is politically indefensible and morally intolerable. But it is not written in the cards that international law will fall apart, and that impunity will reign. Rather, peace and its parts, including respect for international law, are an ongoing project. Keeping the project alive depends on people the world over. Not letting things fall apart—valuable and hard-won things, such as accountability for violations of international law—is up to all of us.