‘India’s UNSC claim is strong — big powers are failing their UN role’

Richard Caplan is Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. As the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly is held, he tells Srijana Mitra Das in ET Evoke if the UN is still relevant amidst unmediated clashes with global impacts, Trumpian caprice — and new geopolitical alliances:

Q. What is the core of your research?

A. My research sits at the intersection of international organisations, international security and the management of armed conflict. I am particularly interested in how international organisations — especially the United Nations (UN) — respond to armed conflict and instability, the roles they assume in efforts to build peace that is sustainable and the effects of their engagement on the societies in which they operate.


A central focus of my work is international peacekeeping and peacebuilding. I look at how these operations are designed and implemented, the conditions under which they contribute to more peaceful political orders and the challenges that arise as international actors reduce or end their involvement. I’m especially interested in what happens after major peace operations withdraw from regions, including their effects on security, governance and economic development there.

My research also addresses broader questions concerning nationalism, self-determination, state-building, international territorial administration and the recognition of states. Across these areas, I explore both the possibilities and limitations of international action in managing conflict and supporting peace. My work combines theoretical concerns in international relations with policy-relevant questions on the practices and consequences of international engagement in conflict-affected societies.

Q. Two major conflicts, each with global impacts — Ukraine-Russia and US-Iran — are being waged now with little or no United Nations role. Is the UN relevant amidst such wars?

A. There is no question that the UN has been largely on the sidelines from the standpoint of collective security in these two conflicts. That is principally because Russia and the United States — both permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) with veto power — have prevented the Council from performing its Charter prescribed role as the organ with primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Hence, the Council has been unable to authorise coercive measures against aggressors or establish peace operations where permanent members are in agreement.

That is not to say the UN has played no meaningful role — in the Russia–Ukraine war, the UN has supported diplomatic efforts by helping to broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative which enabled the export of Ukrainian grain and other foodstuffs, provided extensive humanitarian assistance and protection, documented violations of international human rights and humanitarian law and contributed to safeguarding Ukraine’s nuclear facilities. These are not insignificant achievements — but they should not obscure the limited role the UN has played in managing the conflict itself. The deeper problem is not that the UN has failed to live up to expectations. Its most powerful members are determined to use their veto to prevent collective action — it is the major powers that have failed to live up to the responsibilities entrusted to them under the Charter.

Q. In a Trumpian world, the United States can apparently dominate resource-rich nations like Denmark and Venezuela at will — what is the UN’s role here?

A. The UN functions as the custodian of the normative framework against which such actions can be judged. The Charter establishes a clear standard — states must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of other states.

You can ask, what does it matter that these actions are largely seen as violations of the Charter, and therefore, international law, if no significant measures are taken against them? Well, there was a time when conquest and other uses of armed force by states were regarded not as illegal acts but acceptable ways of settling differences. That is no longer the case. Hence, there has been scope for some action by the UN — on Venezuela, the UN Secretary-General has challenged the legality of the US invasion, the President of the General Assembly has drawn attention to violations of the Charter and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has rejected the proposition that Venezuela’s human rights record could provide a legal justification for unilateral military intervention.

At the UN, the conduct of the United States can be scrutinised against standards of the Charter and UN officials have questioned or rejected the legality of the intervention.

But the organisation’s principle collective security body, the UNSC, has been unable to translate those standards into enforcement action against a permanent member.

Q. Starting with George Bush and the Iraq tragedy, America has markedly whittled down the UN’s powers. How should we see Donald Trump in the UN system today?

A. Violations of fundamental principles of international law inevitably erode their salience. Of course, from the UN’s inception, norms of international law have often been honoured in the breach by political and military leaders across the globe. But there is an important difference between acknowledging that rules are sometimes violated and concluding that the rules themselves no longer matter — fortunately, we have not reached that point. Most states continue to recognise the value of a rules-based international order and, notwithstanding their occasional departures from it, have an interest in sustaining it.

In some respects, Donald Trump has ceased to surprise — as a consequence, there is a tendency to treat many of his actions as idiosyncratic and of limited precedential significance. That said, I don’t want to understate their cumulative effect. The Trump administration has clearly weakened the UN institutionally by withholding funding and ceasing support or withdrawing from numerous UN bodies, politically, by disparaging many principles and purposes the organisation embodies and normatively, by treating established constraints on the exercise of state power as impediments to be disregarded when they conflict with perceived US interests.

Q. Gaza continues to be a site of genocide with little attention paid to what the UN says. How should observers interpret this?

A. It’s a question of who controls the agenda at the UN — and elsewhere. At the outset, the Gaza crisis commanded major international attention, understandably so. There was even some hope that out of the ashes of this conflagration, there might emerge a determination in the international community to address the underlying problems more seriously than at any time since Israel’s occupation of Gaza in the wake of the 1967 war.

That hope steadily diminished. Throug the war, Israel ignored pressures to work towards a political solution. Indeed, only with Trump’s ‘peace plan’, which he announced two years after hostilities erupted, has a political horizon for the Palestinians (‘self-determination and statehood’) even featured in diplomatic discussions, though how seriously is unclear.

Meanwhile, Gaza remains a humanitarian catastrophe — that points to a broader problem. It is not that what the UN says is irrelevant. The organisation remains important in providing humanitarian assistance, documenting conditions on the ground, articulating the requirements of international law and keeping the Palestinian question before the international community — the difficulty is converting those norms and demands into effective political action when the Security Council is divided and Israel enjoys the protection of the United States.

We’ve begun to see some meaningful movement recently, notably with the decision of Britain and other countries to sanction networks financing and enabling settler violence in the West Bank, but these actions are being taken outside the UN.

Q. How do you view India’s demand to join the UN Security Council?

A. It is a reasonable demand if the question is what it would take to make the UN Security Council more representative of the international community and more reflective of contemporary geopolitical realities. There is broad agreement that any reform of the Council should give greater weight in decision making to states that make significant financial, military and diplomatic contributions to the United Nations and to the maintenance of international peace and security — India clearly qualifies on that score. Indeed, at one time or another, India has enjoyed expressions of support from all five permanent members of the Security Council (including China, with caveats). India therefore has a strong claim to a larger role.

But while there is widespread recognition that the Council is insufficiently representative and should be enlarged, there is no consensus among member states about what that should entail. Should additional seats be permanent? Should new permanent members enjoy the veto? Should elected membership be expanded? And, crucially, which states should occupy new permanent seats? Every plausible candidate brings competing regional claims and, in some cases, opposition from neighbouring states.

These disagreements have frustrated Security Council reform for decades. The procedural hurdle is formidable. Reform of the Council requires amendment of the UN Charter — any amendment must be approved by two-thirds of the General Assembly and subsequently ratified by two-thirds of the UN membership, including all five permanent members of the Security Council. These obstacles are built into the constitutional structure of the organisation itself, which is inherently conservative. Reform requires states that enjoy privileged status agree to changes that may dilute that privilege, while securing agreement among the wider membership on who should gain from the redistribution of power — that combination has proved extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

Views expressed are personal