The Legitimacy of the UN Security Council

Existing research on the UN Security Council typically assesses the Council’s legitimacy according to objective criteria, and this paints a rather grim picture. Some scholars point to the Council’s undemocratic decision-making procedures. Others highlight its various performance failures. Still others argue that the Council oversteps its legal mandate. A valuable contribution of existing research has been the development of heuristic dimensions – procedures, performance, and legality – for the assessment of Security Council legitimacy. Yet, by measuring legitimacy according to objective criteria, existing research can say little about what UN member states actually think of the Council. To address this shortcoming, our project examines states’ perceptions of the legitimacy of the Security Council. Do states perceive the Security Council to be in a serious legitimacy crisis? If so, are concerns regarding the Council’s undemocratic procedures, its performance shortcomings, or its transgression of its legal mandate at the heart of this crisis? Finally, are legitimacy perceptions evenly distributed among different types of states, or is there variance in terms of the overall level of legitimacy attributed to the Council and in the emphasis different states put on different dimensions of legitimacy? We seek to find answers to these questions using, as the basis of our research, political claims analysis of debates over the Security Council in the UN General Assembly.