The UN Security Council (UNSC)

Author: Newsteam Staff
Updated: September 2, 2015

Shannon Stapleto/Reuters

The Security Council is the United Nations' principal crisis-management body, empowered to impose binding obligations on the UN's 193 member states to maintain peace. The council's five permanent and ten elected members meet regularly to assess threats to international security, addressing issues that include civil wars, natural disasters, arms control, and terrorism. Structurally, the body remains largely unchanged since its founding in 1946, stirring debate among many members about its efficacy and legitimacy as an arbiter on matters of international security. Syria's civil war poses particular challenges to the Security Council amid concerns about regional instability, proliferation, and a mounting humanitarian crisis. Similarly, Russia’s frictions with the United States and European Union following its actions in Ukraine in early 2014 have introduced new tensions into the council.

What is the Security Council’s structure?

The Security Council comprises five permanent members (P5)—China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States—any one of whom can veto a resolution. The council’s ten elected members, who serve two-year nonconsecutive terms, are not afforded veto power. The P5's privileged status has its roots in the UN's founding in the aftermath of World War II. The United States and Russia (then the Soviet Union) were the outright victors of the war, and, along with the United Kingdom, they shaped the postwar political order. As their plans for what would become the United Nations took shape, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted on Nationalist China's inclusion at the helm, envisioning international security presided over by "four global policemen." British Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw in France a European buffer against potential German or Soviet aggression and so sponsored its bid for restored great-power status.

The members of the P5 have chosen to exercise their ability to veto Council resolutions to varying degrees. Counting the years when the Soviet Union held the seat, Russia has been the most frequent user of its veto power in the Security Council, having exercised the right to block more than one hundred resolutions since the council’s founding. The United States is the second most frequent user of the veto. The United Kingdom, France, and China use their vetoes sparingly. China’s use of the veto has risen notably in recent years. In 2014, China joined Russia in vetoing a council resolution that would have referred actors in the Syrian Civil War, including the Bashar al-Assad regime, to the International Criminal Court.

The council's presidency rotates on a monthly basis, ensuring some agenda-setting influence for its ten nonpermanent members, who are elected by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly. The main criterion for eligibility is contribution "to the maintenance of international peace and security," often defined by financial or troop contributions to peacekeeping operations or leadership on matters of regional security likely to appear before the council.

A secondary consideration, "equitable geographical distribution," gave rise to the regional groups used since 1965 in elections: the African Group has three seats; the Asia-Pacific Group, two; the Eastern European Group, one; GRULAC (Latin America and the Caribbean), two; and WEOG (Western Europe and Other Groups), two. Each has its own electoral norms. An Arab seat alternates between the African and Asian blocs by informal agreement. Turkey and Israel, which has never served on the council, caucus with WEOG.

Subsidiary organs that support the council's mission include ad hoc committees on sanctions, counterterrorism, and the nonproliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Within the UN Secretariat, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Department of Field Support manage field operations. The Peacebuilding Commission, established in 2005 as a repository of institutional memory and best practices in peacebuilding, serves an advisory role.

What are the Security Council’s tools for conflict management?

The Security Council aims to reach peaceful resolution of international disputes under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, which authorizes the council to call on parties to seek a solution via negotiation, arbitration, or other peaceful means. Failing that, Chapter VII empowers the Security Council to take more assertive action, such as imposing sanctions or authorizing the use of force "to maintain or restore international peace and security." Peacekeeping missions are the most visible face of the UN's conflict-management work; in mid-2015 the council was overseeing sixteen operations and nearly 105,000 uniformed personnel.

Constrained by U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the Security Council acted infrequently in the four-and-a-half decades between its founding and the close of the Cold War in 1989. During that time it authorized seventeen peacekeeping operations. Since 2014, heightened tensions between the United States and Russia have manifested anew in the council, leading to concerns that it may be less able to act when faced with crises. For example, in July 2015, Russia vetoed a resolution that would have created an international tribune to prosecute the pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine who are thought to have shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 using a Russian-made missile.

The Security Council has authorized fifty-one operations in the years since the Cold War, many responding to failing states, civil wars, or complex humanitarian emergencies, and deploying to conflict zones in the absence of cease-fires or parties' consent. Under more muscular mandates, they have combined military operations—including less restrictive rules of engagement that allow for civilian and refugee protection—with civilian tasks, including policing, electoral assistance, and legal administration. Developing nations provide the lion's share of personnel.

Top contributors to UN peacekeeping missions.

Regional organizations have played an increasingly important role in peacekeeping and conflict resolution, in some cases prodding the council to action and in others acting as subcontractors on its behalf. For instance, the council authorized the use of force in Libya in 2011 after the Arab League called for a no-fly zone, which NATO then executed. Experts point to the increased will and capacity of the African Union (AU), which has partnered with the UN in carrying out hybrid missions in Somalia and the Darfur region of Sudan. However, in late 2014, the UN took over peacekeeping responsibilities in the Central African Republic from the AU-led International Support Mission (MISCA).

What coercive measures can the Security Council take?

The sanctions provisions in Article 41 of the UN Charter, dormant during much of the Cold War, have become one of the Security Council's most frequently employed tools. Sanctions were imposed just twice prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall: In 1966, a trade embargo was enacted against the white-minority government in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), and in 1977, an arms embargo was enacted against apartheid-era South Africa. In the early 1990s, the council began to make regular use of sanctions, starting with Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Haiti. As of 2014, 13 Security Council sanctions regimes, listing 618 individuals and 421 entities and other groups, are in place.

These comprehensive embargoes have faced criticism. After Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War, the United Nations coupled a successful disarmament regime with severe sanctions. The UN subsequently established the Oil-for-Food Program, which was marred by exploitation and corruption. An independent inquiry found that some two thousand firms—many of them based in P5 countries—paid kickbacks to the Iraqi government totaling nearly $2 billion. The inquiry found that much of the food provided under the program was of poor quality and that delivery schedules were delayed.

So-called "smart sanctions" emerged in the mid-1990s as an alternative to the "blunt instrument" on display in Iraq, targeting discrete economic and political matters and specific individuals deemed threats international security. Certificate-of-origin regimes have curtailed the trade in so-called "blood diamonds" that finance several civil wars, for example. Arms embargoes, travel bans, asset freezes, and import/export bans on individual goods are now the norm, rather than comprehensive embargoes, with roughly a dozen regimes in effect at any given time.

CFR Senior Fellow Stewart Patrick says the Security Council has played an important role in setting a floor for sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program and harmonizing international policy on terrorist financing.

But targeted sanctions have raised human rights concerns of their own. In order to be delisted, blacklisted individuals, entities, and items—often those with dual uses, such as agricultural or medicinal applications—require an affirmative vote of sanctions committees in which all Security Council members are represented.

The council also has the power to refer cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity to the prosecutor of the independent International Criminal Court. It did so for the first time in 2005, resulting in an outstanding warrant for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir on charges of genocide in Darfur.

Is force unsanctioned by the Security Council legitimate?


NATO's seventy-eight–day-long air war in Kosovo is the most oft-cited case in arguing for the legitimacy of humanitarian interventions outside Security Council authorization. The bombing campaign was undertaken to protect Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing by Serbs, then leading rump Yugoslavia, after Russia had indicated it would block authorization in the council. An independent commission of scholars later deemed the intervention "illegal but legitimate."

The emergence of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in the early 2000s appeared to justify the use of force outside Council authorization by qualifying the principle of noninterference in sovereign affairs. The doctrine, as adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005, stipulates that states have a responsibility to protect their populations from crimes against humanity; the international community has a responsibility to use peaceful means to protect threatened populations; and when a state "manifestly fails" to uphold its responsibilities, coercive Chapter VII measures should be collectively taken.

Successive U.S. administrations have argued that humanitarian intervention can be undertaken with regional organizations or "minilateral" coalitions of the willing, conferring legitimacy. But UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has rejected this position, saying, "The responsibility to protect does not alter, indeed it reinforces, the legal obligations of Member States to refrain from the use of force except in conformity with the Charter." This debate was revived in the run-up to the 2011 NATO-led Libya intervention and continues with the ongoing Syrian civil war.

"Legitimacy is very much in the eye of the beholder." — Jeffrey Laurenti, The Century Foundation

"Legitimacy is very much in the eye of the beholder," veteran UN analyst Jeffrey Laurenti says. Some experts caution that by lowering the threshold the United States claimed for legitimacy as it sought to intervene unilaterally in mass atrocities—most recently, following allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria in August 2013—Washington may achieve its short-term objectives while setting precedents counter to its long-term interests.

What criticisms has the Security Council faced?

A number of critics, including member states from the developing world, charge that the council's structure does not reflect current geopolitical realities. The council was expanded from six elected members to ten in 1965, and, in 1971, the People's Republic of China took the permanent seat previously occupied by the Republic of China (Taiwan). Since then, the body's composition has remained unchanged.

Developed and emerging powers, such as Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Nigeria, have sought Council enlargement and permanent seats. Others have called for a common European seat to replace the British and French permanent seats as the EU moves toward a common security policy. The debate about expansion is often framed as a trade-off between legitimacy and efficacy.

Saudi Arabia took the unprecedented step of declining a Security Council seat in October 2013, announcing a day after it was elected to a 2014–2015 term that it would not serve in the absence of institutional reform. Riyadh cited the council's failure to broker peace in Syria’s civil war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jordan ran unopposed to fill the vacated "Arab swing seat" and was elected by the General Assembly in December 2013.

Other critics include advocates of R2P, who say the veto gives undue deference to the political interests of the P5, leading to inaction in the face of mass atrocities. It is not just P5 members who have demonstrated reluctance to use force. Beyond Russia and China, aspirants to permanent-member status, including Brazil, India, and Germany, have views on intervention and sovereignty at odds with those espoused by the United States.

While R2P advocates criticize the Security Council and its members for a lack of political will, others question the UN's conflict-management capacity, often citing 1990s peacekeeping crises in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda.

In the shadow of its 1993 experience in Somalia, in which eighteen Army rangers were killed in an attempt to capture a warlord, the United States was among the powers that prevented a robust UN response in Rwanda, where in 1994 an estimated eight hundred thousand people were killed in a genocide committed against ethnic Tutsis.


Peacekeeping mandates continue to be the focus of scrutiny for their scope, cost, and cases in which peacekeepers themselves have committed abuses. A 2000 self-evaluation, commissioned by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan and led by veteran envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, said the UN had "repeatedly failed," and would continue to do so absent "significant institutional change and increased financial support." A 2015 Council Special Report by Paul D. Williams identifies ongoing challenges for UN peacekeeping missions, particularly in Africa.

But a number of experts say the UN's overall track record is relatively strong: Recent empirical studies of UN peacekeeping have found that, in general, peacekeeping is effective at preventing the resumption of violence in post-conflict scenarios.

What are the Security Council’s prospects for reform?

Prospects for substantial reform are seen as remote because amending the UN Charter requires an affirmative vote and domestic ratification by two-thirds of UN member states. This includes all of the Security Council's permanent members, who are unlikely to take measures that curb their own influence. While there is broad agreement among UN members that the Security Council's makeup is outdated, each of the various proposals for reform inevitably leaves some aspirants alienated. Some proposals call for additional permanent members, and others for a new class of elected seats with the possibility of renewal.

CFR's Patrick and former International Affairs Fellow Kara McDonald wrote in a 2010 Council Special Report that a state's contribution to collective action should be the primary criterion for permanent membership.


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