Update - August 13, 2009

Understanding Compliance with UN Security Council Resolutions Addressing Civil Wars

IPI is undertaking a multiyear research project to improve understanding of the role of the UN Security Council in the area of work where it has been most active since the end of the Cold War: the resolution of civil wars.

The project will produce three major outputs by early 2010
    •    a public, searchable database of all demands made in Security Council Resolutions addressing civil wars between 1989 and 2003, providing detailed justifications and source references for all codes based on the coders’ assessment;
    •    in-depth case studies evaluating and analyzing compliance and noncompliance in detail; and
    •    policy reports and an edited volume analyzing levels and correlates of compliance.

In order to determine correlates of compliance, values for more than fifty variables have already been gathered in a database with more than 1,000,000 data points, including variables relating to:
    •    characteristics of the civil war addressed by the demand;
    •    contextual activities of the United Nations related to the conflict;
    •    circumstances of the drafting and adoption of the Resolution containing the demand;
    •    substance of the Resolution and of the demand;
    •    characteristics of the demand addressees; and
    •    follow-up, monitoring, and enforcement mechanisms.

For each demand issued in a Security Council Resolution, recognized experts will assess the level of compliance and the depth of the demand on two scales on the basis of a rigorous methodology, and will document and justify their coding decision.

This project builds on academic literature on war termination, compliance with international regimes, and the United Nations. The findings of this project will improve our understanding of the factors that influence the Security Council’s work, its interaction with conflict parties, and their calculations on settling or continuing conflicts. The methodology of this project has so far been presented at an expert roundtable at the International Peace Institute and at the International Law and International Relations Seminar at the Weatherhead Center, Harvard University.