Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Bush, Sarah
Abstract
Conventional wisdom holds that the Cold War almost immediately held hostage the United Nations Security Council’s ability to pass resolutions and usher in a world of peace through law. Policymakers and scholars have long believed that the Council was largely unable to pass resolutions on important issues until after the Cold War ended in 1991. Using both existing data and my novel dataset of never-before-published statistics about Security Council voting, I show that the empirics of Security Council voting are inconsistent with this view; in fact, the passage of resolutions improved as the Cold War progressed, even during periods of intense acrimony between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Furthermore, I show that the Council was passing resolutions on issues of importance, and was not watering down resolutions to achieve the higher passage rate. The inaccuracy of the assumptions made by scholars and policymakers reflects both the perils of unexamined conventional wisdom and an undue focus on great power conflict as the benchmark for importance in international affairs. I theorize that changes in the balance of power within the United Nations provided new incentives for the U.S. and Soviet Union to change their voting behavior so as to maintain the Security Council’s role as the preeminent arbiter in matters of international security. Specifically, I posit that the U.S. and Soviet Union were unprepared for the rapid pace of decolonization and the resulting influx of dozens of new states, many of which expressly joined forces as part of the Non-Aligned Movement. As these newly sovereign states banded together to advance their interests in the United Nations General Assembly, the Security Council began losing its supremacy over issues of international security. As a result, the U.S. and Soviet Union faced a mutual incentive to counter-balance this loss of power and legal authority by cooperating with each other to address international crises with resolutions, so as to re-establish the Security Council’s prerogative over international security and preeminence within the system of international law.
Recommended Citation
Jerónimo, Viva Iemanjá, "Adapting to Change: The U.N. Security Council, Decolonization, and the Cold War" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 746.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/746
