Back to the Assembly? Power Politics, Domestic Conflict, and Forum Shopping in the United Nations

Abstract

In the light of renewed great power competition and a surge in the use of veto power in the United Nations Security Council, this article analyses how the United Nations General Assembly can act as a substitute for the treatment of intrastate conflict. Noting the antecedent of Resolution 377 (1950), where the Assembly granted itself the authority to deal with those issues as a way to overcome the Council’s veto, we hypothesize that increases in the use of veto power in the Council lead to a correspondent increase in mentions to intrastate conflicts in the Assembly. We test this proposition by applying topic modeling to speeches from 1970 to 2018 and leveraging two exogenous shocks in which permanent members of the Council changed their veto policy, producing a discontinuity in time. The results of a Regression Discontinuity Design, among other tests, suggest that vetoes put significant pressure on the Assembly to pick up these topics.

Keywords: Security Council, General Assembly, Veto, Intrastate Conflict, Domestic Conflict