‘Broadening’ and ‘deepening’ collective security in times of health crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, the UN’s collective security model has been questioned as to whether it has been well equipped to respond to the changing landscape of global security. By using the UN Security Council’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, this paper traces the discursive contestations of the traditional understanding of the UN Charter-based collective security model. It examines what meanings the member states collectively attach to public health crises, how they frame the COVID-19 pandemic, and, finally how they consider the role of the Security Council in responding to non-military emergencies. An analysis of the debates by the Council members suggest that there is a slow normative change in the recognition of health security as an indivisible aspect of peace. We argue that the pandemic has created a normative environment for the Council’s members to rethink ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ collective security beyond military conflicts to emphasize the Council’s role in addressing health issues, structural inequalities, and other human security threats.

Introduction

The idea of collective security is underpinned by the indivisibility of peace and security. It is based on the principle that a breakdown of peace anywhere poses a threat to everyone and everywhere, and thereby necessitates a collective action to respond to the threat and restore the stability of the system. ¹ The United Nations (UN) was created in 1945 to institutionalize this idea, after the League of Nations’ unsuccessful collective security experiment. Since its inception, the UN’s collective security model has been mainly dealt with traditional forms of military security, such as armed conflicts and inter-state violence. However, over the last three decades, this narrow model has been questioned by arguments on the necessity of ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ its established boundaries. This paper traces the discursive contestations of the traditional understanding of the UN Charter-based collective security and examines how the member states attach different meanings to its purpose and operation.

The United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) response to the COVID-19 pandemic offers an ideal case study to examine the ways in which the member states contest the established boundaries of the UNSC’s mandate in maintaining peace and security. It is a case study aimed at understanding how the discussions around the ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ of collective security are reflected at UNSC meetings. By broadening, we refer to the recognition of threats beyond armed conflicts and conflict-related humanitarian emergencies as collective security issues. By deepening, we mean expanding the list of referent objects – the main recipients – of the UN collective security system to include not only states, but the most vulnerable people, marginalized communities, and even fragile ecosystems. Our central argument is that while the UN collective security system is an international arrangement established by the UN Charter, it is, at the same time, a normative process discursively constructed by the key actors, mainly the member states. It is a dynamic process. Major global events and crises, and the intersubjective meanings attached to these events, may operate as ruptures contributing to contestations over the concept of collective security and the ways in which it is implemented within the Charter’s framework.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a global event that has revived questions about what constitutes a threat to peace and security and the role of the UNSC in maintaining the system. The key question is whether such an acute public health crisis could undermine security of all states, and whether it should be recognized not simply as a global or human security issue, but as a collective security issue calling for collective action. The most observable impact of the pandemic was that it exacerbated concerns about the effectiveness of the traditional boundaries of the Council’s mandate to respond to emerging non-traditional security threats in times of international emergencies that required a rapid collective decision and action. From the outset, the UN framed the COVID-19 pandemic not simply as a health crisis, but also as ‘a socio-economic crisis, a humanitarian crisis, a security crisis, and a human rights crisis’. ² Within a fortnight of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring a pandemic on 23 March 2020, the United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) issued a call for a global ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to reach populations that were most vulnerable to the pandemic. A few days later, on 26 March, the UNSG called for an immediate ‘war-time plan’ not only to suppress the transmission of COVID-19, but also to minimize its social and economic impacts. ³ He called for the international community to adopt multidimensional and cross-sectoral responses, and recommended collaboration among international humanitarian, development, and security actors. In his statement on 28 May 2020, the UNSG called the pandemic an ‘existential threat’, that was causing ‘turmoil’ in societies and sending economies into ‘freefall’. ⁴

Similarly, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in its Resolutions 74/270 and 74/272 in April 2020 and 74/306 in September 2020, called for global solidarity and renewed multilateral cooperation to fight the pandemic. In July 2020, the UNSG called upon the UNSC, as the primary organ responsible for the maintenance of collective security, to carry out its essential role suggesting that ‘collective security . . . [is] under assault on many fronts’. ⁵ Despite the repeated calls, the UNSC was slow to respond to the growing emergency. Its first thematic meeting took place only in April 2020. The first COVID-19-related resolution, Resolution 2532 (2020), drafted by Tunisia and France, took several months to be adopted in July 2020. In 2021, the UNSC adopted a second resolution, Resolution 2565, which demanded humanitarian pauses to deliver vaccines. In both resolutions the Council considered the COVID-19 pandemic ‘likely to endanger maintenance of international peace and security’. ⁶

The limited response of the Council has raised questions over its effectiveness in responding to international emergencies that may cause social, political, and economic instabilities between and within states. These questions have revived debates over the limits of the Council’s mandate beyond armed conflicts or so-called ‘non-traditional threats’, such as health crises and climate change. ⁷ Former Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, for example, stated that the Council’s delayed decision damaged its role in multilateral cooperation and global solidarity against COVID-19. ⁸ Harman similarly argues that a ‘delayed UNSC resolution on a major world crisis . . . and shifting away from multilateral cooperation’ could have serious consequences for global health security and multilateralism within the UN system. ⁹ Harman and Wenham suggest that Resolutions 2532 and 2565 present opportunities to incorporate mainstream human security concerns into the Council’s mandate. ¹⁰ The key question is whether the UNSC should have played a more active role in ongoing health emergencies, and whether this unprecedent crisis had to be seen as a wake-up call to rethink its mandate to enable ‘a stronger, more networked and inclusive multilateral system, anchored within the United Nations’ as stated by the Secretary-General in 2021 Our Common Agenda. ¹¹

Certainly, questions over the traditional boundaries of the UNSC’s mandate and ‘updating’ the UN collective security system are not new. There is now a solid literature that examines practical, legal, and normative consequences of ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ collective security to include threats such as pandemics, climate change, human rights, and poverty, and to expand the list of referent objects such as people, communities, and ecosystems. ¹² We suggest that most of these debates are framed by legal and normative concerns over broadening the UNSC mandate. Nasu, for example, focuses on the ‘practicality’ of broadening the operation of the UN collective security system. ¹³ He argues that expanding the UNSC mandate to respond to human security threats beyond violent conflicts has serious institutional, normative, and legal limitations. Wolf similarly emphasizes that, unlike concepts of global security and human security, the concept of collective security under the UN Charter has a legal framework and thereby any attempt to broaden it could potentially destroy the legal basis of the system itself, and may ‘radically change the balance of power between different branches of the UN’. ¹⁴ Some commentators have suggested that ‘humanizing security threats’ would be a ‘normative overstretch’ of the Charter. ¹⁵ The central argument is that if the concept of collective security becomes all-encompassing, including all threats affecting system-wide security, then it may lose its unique meaning and purpose.

The key limitation of these debates is that they are reflective of certain normative viewpoints on how threats to international peace and security need to be framed. Within this framework, traditional threats such as armed conflicts and nuclear instability are given a hierarchically superior position to others, and called ‘high politics’, while issues like climate change, health insecurity, and poverty are considered ‘low politics’, despite their system-wide impacts. Such normative dimension of the debate reflects the familiar tension between problem-solving approaches and critical approaches in security studies, and therefore different ontological perceptions of security in general. As Newman argues, scholarly debates on what constitutes security cannot be easily resolved due to the normative dimension of the debate itself, and the ‘fundamental ontological and ideological differences’ between traditional and critical approaches in security studies. ¹⁶ The debates on the concept of collective security are thus not very different from these debates that reflect such normative concerns and theoretical differences within security studies.

In this article, we go beyond problem-solving approaches. Rather than asking what the concept of collective security ‘really’ is, we are inspired by critical constructivist approaches to examine how it is framed by actors. ¹⁷ Shifting to the ‘how questions’ allows us to conceptualize collective security as a process, rather than a fixed system or having a set meaning. We suggest that the concept of collective security, as institutionalized by the UN, is a legal, political, and normative process. Despite its legal framework outlined in the Charter, it is also a discursive process, the meaning of which is created and contested by intersubjective processes among member states. Such a process is dynamic that it is affected by social, political, and cultural issues, emerging norms, and international emergencies. It changes according to how member states define their identities and their relations to one another. The meaning of collective security is not only affected by normative and social changes in the world, including acute security crises, but also affects those changes and the ways in which we perceive security emergencies. Critical constructivist approaches to security help us examine ‘how actors frame events in order to make persuasive claims concerning the need for change’. ¹⁸ The emergence of new situations, crises, or events can encourage actors to contest the status quo and to offer alternative interpretations or to resist any changes. This framework helps us to focus more on movements and constant fluctuations in actors’ perceptions of events, their framing of what constitutes the concept of collective security and the overall function of the UNSC in the maintenance of peace and security.

Based on the theoretical underpinnings of critical constructivist approaches to security, we ask how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected member states’ perceptions of collective security. We examine what meanings member states collectively attach to public health crises, how they frame the COVID-19 pandemic, how they link their perceptions of the event with their understanding of collective security, and, finally how they re-interpret the role of the UNSC in responding to non-military emergencies. To answer these key questions, we closely examine UNSC debates on the COVID-19 pandemic that took place in 2020 and 2021. We conduct a discursive analysis of UNSC meetings with the agenda item ‘Maintenance of International Peace and Security’ and on the COVID-19 pandemic, held between April 2020 and December 2021. ¹⁹ We map whether, during these discussions, the member states raised their concerns about the UNSC’s role in the crisis, whether they called for an inclusion of health security within the mandate of the UNSC and/or framed it as a collective security issue, and finally, whether they called for the recognition of non-military threats to human security as collective security issues, by placing more emphasis on the link between individual well-being, development and human rights, and the idea of the ‘indivisibility of peace and security’.

The article proceeds in four steps. First, we examine the concept of collective security, as institutionalized under the UN system. We discuss its key principles and show why it can be seen as a legal, institutional, and normative process. We then explore the discursive contestations of the traditional understanding of collective security. We look closely at how, in the post-Cold War era, the changing normative context has enabled the international community to assign new meanings and purposes to collective security and the UNSC’s role in maintaining peace and security. In the third and fourth sections, we turn our attention to health emergencies and the UNSC debates on the COVID-19 pandemic. The discursive analysis of these debates suggests that there is a growing emphasis by member states on broadening traditional boundaries of the UN collective security system beyond military conflicts and conflict-related issues. A close look at the UNSC debates suggests that while it was not the first time that the international community had questioned the narrow boundaries of the system, the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a strong catalyst to rethink collective security to effectively respond to non-military public emergencies. These debates by the Council members signal a slow normative change in the recognition of health security as an indivisible aspect of peace calling for a broader understanding of collective security beyond violent conflicts and a broader role for the UNSC in responding to public health emergencies.

The UN collective security system as a legal and normative process

At a conceptual level, collective security treats a breach of peace and security anywhere as a threat to the entire system, necessitating a collective response. As Butfoy puts it, the key norm that underpins collective security is the notion of the indivisibility of peace: ‘a breakdown of the peace anywhere threatens the peace everywhere’. ²⁰ That is to say, any collective security arrangement calls for each member of the system to treat security of every other member as its own security and to join collective action to restore the security of the system. Claude sums it up as an arrangement where, ‘security represents the end; collective defines the means; system denotes the institutional component of the effort to make the means serve the ends’. ²¹ In the current context, the UN constitutes the institutional component that is responsible for the maintenance of existing collective security order.

It is not our intention to present a detailed historical account of the collective security system; that can be found elsewhere. ²² However, two elements of the system deserve particular attention to elaborate the ongoing debates over broadening and deepening collective security: what/who is to be secured from what? The first element is the legal and institutional dimension of the structure. The UN collective security system is a legal and political arrangement that operates within the existing (international) legal system, which is collectively designed and shaped by common institutions, rules, and norms. ²³ The UN Charter provides the constitutional and legal basis of this system. The purpose of the UN collective security system, Orakhelashvili argues, is not simply to ‘advance ideas, nor to fit itself to particular patterns of governance, but to perform [particular] tasks that have been consensually delegated to it’. ²⁴ In broad terms, the main task is to maintain international peace and security. The essence of this arrangement begins with the key article of the Charter – Article 1(1) which states that the primary purpose of the UN is:

to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace [emphasis added].

Chapters VI and VII outline the means to achieve that end, which go beyond the use of coercive action. Under Article 39 (Chapter VII) of the Charter, the UNSC has the primary responsibility to ‘determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’. In the light of Article 1(1), the first question is therefore what constitutes peace and security that the UN collective security system aims to maintain. As can be read in Article 1(1), threats are not limited to ‘acts of aggression’, and collective measures are not restricted only to prevention of violent conflicts, such as wars, but ‘the prevention and removal of threats to the peace’. Importantly, Article 1(3) calls for cooperation to address ‘international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character’ which are all listed as the purposes of the UN. Due to the broad nature of Article 1, what constitutes peace has been the main area of discussion on the implementation of collective security within the Charter’s framework.

Attempts to broaden the UN Charter’s collective security framework, therefore, begin with the question of what constitutes threats to peace and security. The Charter does not define these threats. The definition of threat, Dinstein argues, is ‘elastic enough to stretch away from a contemplated use of force and beyond inter-state relations’. ²⁵ López-Jacoiste similarly suggests that the drafters of the Charter declined to define what constitutes a threat to peace and security explicitly. ²⁶ Rather, they left that responsibility to the UNSC to decide on a case-by-case basis. Dinstein further notes:

A ‘threat to the peace’ (Article 39) . . . is not to be confused with a ‘threat . . . of force’, mentioned in Article 2(4). . . . A determination of a threat to the peace is no longer contingent on any (past, present or future) use of force. Nor is it linked even to any breach of international law. . . . It has been asserted incorrectly that the Council ‘is obliged to act on real and imminent threats’. But, in fact, the Council is free to deal with ‘remote threats’: it can go as far ‘upstream’ as it desires in identifying a threat to the peace. Indeed, a threat to the peace is not necessarily a state of facts: it can be merely a state of mind; and the mind that counts is that of the Council. . . . In other words, ‘a threat to the peace in the sense of Article 39 seems to be whatever the Security Council says is a threat to the peace’. ²⁷

Furthermore, Article 24, which confers upon the UNSC the responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, sets out a very broad framework of its responsibility to ‘ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations’. As Dinstein observes, the UNSC’s decisions (which are ultimately decisions of the member states) are ideological, social, and normative decisions with legal consequences. That is to say, the definition of peace and security can be broadened to include all forms of threats, if the UNSC decides to do so. Wilson, for example, rightly argues that through an expansive reading of Article 41, the UNSC can pass legally binding resolutions to create ‘new norms of international law’. ²⁸ Indeed, on a few occasions, the UNSC has passed such resolutions. For example, UNSC Resolution 1373 (2001) called upon states to undertake range of measures to disrupt, prevent, and criminalize terrorist financing, and UNSC Resolution 1540 (2004) called on preventing the access of non-state actors from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. While these resolutions are still conflict related, they demonstrate how the UNSC can use its unique position to frame emerging circumstances and re-interpret legal frameworks by passing binding resolutions to expand the scope of collective security. To put this bluntly, there is nothing in the UN Charter that prevents the UNSC from calling a wide range of non-traditional issues, beyond international and civil conflicts, threats to peace and security.

The second element is the referent object of the system: what/who needs to be secured collectively? There is no doubt that ‘all entities that form the international society are . . . stakeholders and beneficiaries’ of the UN collective security system, as suggested by Tsagourias and White. ²⁹ But the crucial question is what/who ‘all those entities’ are. Traditionally, it is argued that the UN collective security system is constituted by and for states. Individual humans, non-human animals, and ecosystems in general are not considered as referent objects of that system. Orakhelashvili, for example, argues that collective security is ‘operational’ only if it reflects the ‘fundamental security needs of states’. ³⁰ Indeed, states are acknowledged as the most fundamental units of the international system that the UN seeks to protect. The protection of territorial integrity and political independence of each member state under Article 2(4) is the plain reflection of this norm. However, while such a reading of the Charter may suggest that states are the key referent objects, the use of ‘We the people’ in the Preamble hints at an acknowledgment of people as the ultimate beneficiaries, as Newman puts it. ³¹ The increased role of the UNSC in the protection of civilians, specifically women and children during violent conflicts in the post-Cold War era, reflects the growing recognition of human-centered readings of the Charter. Finally, with growing concerns on climate change, some scholars have suggested a recognition of climate change as a threat to peace and security, and further called for a non-anthropocentric understanding of collective security, which could include non-human lives and the planet as referent objects of collective security. ³²

It is crucial to emphasize that these debates on the UN collective security system should not be thought of as independent from the normative context in which they operate. As Tsagourias and White suggest, the UN collective security system has not only a legal and political dimension, but also a normative character, which is reflected in international principles, rules, and norms. ³³ Emerging contexts (and social and political meanings attached to them) may give rise to alternative interpretations of collective security by encouraging actors to re-evaluate their established views and offer different framings. More importantly, these emerging contexts, as Krook and True propose, may promote the creation of new norms, which in turn may transform the existing framings of rules and principles. ³⁴ As we elaborate more in the next section, emerging crises, uncertainties and anxieties, and the changing norms and rules of the international community in the post-Cold War era regarding what constitutes insecurity and how it should be responded to, is an example of how changing social, political, and cultural contexts and emerging crises can contest the existing framing of the system itself. If we rethink collective security within this framework, as a normative process, we can capture the dynamic, constantly evolving picture of the system and can identify how member states attach new meanings to its boundaries, how they challenge them, or how they resist the change and defend the normative status quo based on a narrow reading of the Charter.

This, however, does not mean that any issue concerning international peace and security can be named as a threat. Due to their normative dimensions, not all security issues are perceived as security threats, but they need to be framed as a threat to be recognized as such. In this sense, framing has a performative power in so far as it constructs a reality upon which we act. As a performative act, framing plays a powerful role in determining the normative content of what constitutes a breach to peace and security. We need to acknowledge that any attempt to broaden the list of threats to peace and security needs to be widely accepted by the international community for it to become part of the UN system. In their discussion of extending the mandate of the UNSC to include climate change, Scott and Ku make a similar argument: ‘legitimacy is not an esoteric question when it comes to the functioning of the Council but relates closely to that of effectiveness. For, in order for a Council decision to be effective, it needs to be broadly acceptable to the international community’. ³⁵ They observe that the international community is likely to resist actions if those actions appear to represent not ‘the greater good’, but the selective interests of the P5. ³⁶ As we will discuss below, an action in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is largely perceived as a ‘greater good’, showing us how an unprecedented global health emergency affects actors’ perceptions of the traditional boundaries of the UNSC mandate and what constitutes a threat to international peace and security.

Understanding collective security as a normative process helps us to see it as an ongoing work. Its traditional boundaries are subject to ongoing discursive contestations. These contestations, however, do not promise a successful (or a lasting) change or concrete paradigm shift. The emerging alternative meanings can be co-opted, and traditional ones reinstated by member states for their strategic interests. Broadening the meaning of collective security without deepening it may also contribute to securitization and militarization of non-traditional security issues in the Council. Therefore, we need to focus on the oscillation of meanings attached to collective security, rather than seeking concrete paradigm shifts. And this is the task of the next section, which examines how emerging environmental and health crises have created a normative context for member states to rethink what constitutes a ‘breach of peace’ and its indivisibility.

Contestations over the meaning of collective security in the post-Cold War era

The end of the Cold War provided a context and permissive environment to rethink what constitutes threat to international peace and security and to question the traditional reading of the collective security. The debate by the early 1990s was on how to include hitherto neglected issues under the UN collective security system. Concerns over non-traditional security issues highlighted the UN’s institutional limitations in responding to humanitarian crises. In 1992, An Agenda for Peace set the foundation of this discourse by calling the international community to recognize non-military threats beyond violent conflicts and nuclear deterrence. According to Peou, An Agenda for Peace challenged ‘the internationalist legalistic concept of state sovereignty-based collective security (rooted in the Wilsonian logic of balancing aggression against member states)’. ³⁷ While the report was criticized for its interventionalist framework, it nevertheless set the foundation of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) that would dominate debates about the ‘freedom from fear’ aspect of human security a decade later. In 2000 the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, the Brahimi Report, declared the protection of civilians as the fundamental responsibility of peacekeepers.

The turning point, however, was the UN Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change 2004, which attempted to redefine the boundaries of the UN collective security system. After outlining the institutional weaknesses of the UN in responding to the so-called ‘new security threats’, the report offered a comprehensive collective security framework that could address six clusters of threats to international peace and security: economic and social threats, inter-state conflict, internal conflicts, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, terrorism, and transnational organized crime. ³⁸ A year later, in the report In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all, the UN Secretary General made a similar attempt to broaden the traditional boundaries of collective security to encompass a wide range of threats and called for a ‘comprehensive vision of collective security’. He not only sought to create a new consensus on why non-traditional issues needed to be acknowledged as threats to international peace and security, but also aimed to dismantle the hierarchical ordering of threats in our perception of collective security, suggesting that ‘soft threats’ were not less important than ‘hard’ ones. ³⁹

Certainly, these calls to broaden and deepen the collective security can be seen as a by-product of the growing recognition of the discourse on human security, which was seen as idealistic when it was first articulated in the UNDP Human Development Report 1994. The Report merged positive and negative peace under the concept of human security. The adoption of 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, the 2010 UN Secretary-General Report on Human Security and the 2012 General Assembly Resolution on the definition of human security are all reflective of the general endorsement and the official commitment to implementing the concept within the UN system. UNSC Resolution 1261 on children and armed conflict, UNSC Resolutions 1265 and 1296 on protection of civilians in armed conflicts, and UNSC Resolution 1325 on women and peace are usually regarded as revolutionary moves in incorporating the conflict-related ‘freedom from fear’ aspect of human security within the UN collective security system. UNSC Resolution 1296 categorically redefined threats to international peace and security to include ‘violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in situations of armed conflict’. These legally binding resolutions can be considered turning points that deepen our understanding of the referent objects of collective security under the UN system.

While protection of civilians and the promotion of humanitarian law during violent conflicts have found a wider recognition within the international community, broadening collective security to include threats beyond armed conflicts has faced more resistance. Climate change is a case in point. Since the first formal Council discussions began in 2007, much progress has been made in identifying climate change as a threat multiplier. ⁴⁰ However, there has been significant resistance against its recognition as a threat to peace and security. Such resistance could be observed during the discussions of UNSC draft resolution in 2021. ⁴¹ The resolution acknowledged the adverse effects of climate change on peace and security. Its key objective was to include security risks induced by climate change within the UNSC mandate and to grant it the tools to address those risks. Nevertheless, the resolution failed to be adopted due to Russia’s veto power. Russia opposed the inclusion of climate change within the UNSC agenda and suggested that such a move could overly politicize the issue. ⁴² Similarly, China and India insisted that climate change needed to be seen not as a security but as a development issue, therefore it should not fall under the UNSC mandate. ⁴³ Despite such resistance, there have been growing calls to recognize climate change as a collective security issue with 12 member states supporting the resolution.

Growing calls on including climate change within the UNSC mandate is an important example of an intersubjective discursive process in which some member states attach new meanings and purposes to the UN collective security system to respond to changing international and global contexts, while others resist the change. As discussed earlier, the emergence of new situations, crises, or events can encourage actors to contest the status quo and offer alternative interpretations of collective security. Novel situations and emergencies can raise ongoing contestations over its meaning and operation under the UN system. Such contestations reveal the flexible nature of collective security, which operates as a discursive process constantly oscillating between UNSC’s traditional roles in armed conflicts and broadening them to include so-called non-traditional threats.

The growing discursive contestations over the narrow understanding of the concept of collective security and the boundaries the UNSC’s mandate is evident at some of the UNSC meetings on the theme ‘Maintenance of International Peace and Security’ in 2021. Arguably, the wide-spread social, political, and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have encouraged member states not only to focus on health-related issues, but also to propose a multi-dimensional understanding of collective security to encompass issues beyond military conflicts such as development and human rights. A close look at 2021 meetings suggests that there has been increasing emphasis on broadening the UNSC agenda beyond armed conflicts and deepening it beyond states to include individuals, mainly marginalized and under-privileged communities. In particular, during the thematic meeting on 7 September 2021, the majority of states repeatedly raised questions about the narrow boundaries of the UNSC mandate and discussed how the Council could be equipped to address evolving nature of security threats. ⁴⁴ Despite the explicit resistance of Russia and India to broadening the Council’s agenda, most states acknowledged the significance of non-traditional threats in ‘rethinking’ international peace and security and highlighted the link between peace, human rights, and development. In fact, many member states noted the responsibility of the UNSC to evolve to respond to emerging non-traditional threats. In the words of the UK representative, for example:

First, in the 76 years since the Security Council was entrusted with the responsibility to maintain international peace and security, the nature of the threats that we face has evolved. . .As the threats to international peace and security evolve, so too must the Security Council. We should not self-censor. Where there are clear emerging threats to international peace and security, we should consider them in a timely fashion. ⁴⁵

Perhaps, most importantly, much attention was paid on discussions about the impact of inequalities on peace and security during the UNSC 2021 meetings on ‘Maintenance of International Peace and Security’. The emphasis on the ‘authentic’ aim of the UN that is presented in Article 1 during these meanings reveals how actors read it broadly to reflect the normative dimension of the Charter as a whole and how actors in fact perceive the UN collective security system as an evolving process. As discussed in the following sections, we can observe similar contestations in the context of health emergencies.

Health security as a collective security issue?

Since the High-Level Panel’s calls to include infectious diseases within the ‘new vision of collective security’ in 2004, there has been a recognition of the impact of health emergencies within the UN system. Certainly, growing concerns over infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, biosecurity attacks, pandemic outbreaks such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and the re-emergence of other diseases such as tuberculous and measles in the developed world, raised questions about the Council’s role within the larger UN system when significant health crises impact peace and security. Reflecting the growing concerns over the effects of health crises on economic, political, and demographic stability, in 2007, the WHO recommended ‘new tools for collective defense’ in the light of the revised 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR). ⁴⁶ Its articulation of ‘global public health security’ as a concept distinct from public and international health has contributed to collective efforts in responding to growing health concerns. The WHO defined global public health security measures as ‘the activities required, both proactive and reactive, to minimize vulnerability to acute public health events that endanger the collective health of populations living across geographical regions and international boundaries’. ⁴⁷ In doing so, it has promoted a broad definition of global health security and underlined the health-related impacts of wars and conflicts, climate change, poverty, and natural catastrophes. All these efforts, in particular the shift toward state obligations to collectively respond to international public health threats, have created what Davies, Kamradt-Scott, and Rushton call a new ‘disease diplomacy’: a new surveillance system that sets new expectations and norms for states and international community to work collectively to respond to health emergencies. ⁴⁸ By the mid-2000s, growing international health anxieties were successful in mobilizing not only a new international security discourse within the UN, but also a new set of norms that emphasized collective obligations and the responsibilities of each state in developing transparent monitoring, reporting, and controlling mechanisms for specific diseases within their own borders. ⁴⁹

The UNSC responded to these growing global health anxieties. In January 2000, for the first time, it devoted a session on health with a discussion of the impact of HIV/AIDS on the maintenance of international peace and security. Between 2000 and July 2020, the UNSC adopted four key resolutions on major health crises on HIV/AIDS and the Ebola outbreaks in Western Africa. ⁵⁰ The UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) in 2014 after the passing of UNSC Resolution 2177 was the first-ever health emergency mission to scale up the ground response to Ebola outbreak in African states. The UNSC response to the Ebola outbreak was a turning point in the recognition of a health issue as a threat to international peace and security. While earlier resolutions on HIV/AIDS recognized the impact of health emergencies on violence and instability, they did not consider it as a threat to international peace and security under Article 39 of the UN Charter. UNSC Resolution 1308, for example, was formulated as ‘the HIV/AIDS pandemic, if unchecked, may pose a risk to stability and security’. UNSC Resolutions 2177 (2014) and 2439 (2018) on Ebola, however, explicitly, recognized the outbreak as constituting a ‘threat to international peace and security’. Commenting on the uniqueness of the international response to the Ebola outbreak, Wilson argues that the UNSC resolutions on Ebola and the establishment of UNMEER as a ‘hybrid peacekeeping and public health operation’ shows not only the importance of non-military responses to threats to international peace and security, but also the evolution of ‘the tools of the UN collective security system’. ⁵¹

The resolutions can be read as contestations over the traditional interpretations of what constitutes ‘threat to international peace and security’. However, as argued before, such contestations do not necessary lead to paradigm shifts in the system. Recent research shows that since 2000 while the UNSC has sought to address health security more frequently, statistically it discussed health emergencies less frequently than expected. ⁵² Furthermore, despite the growing recognition of the impact of health emergencies on international peace and security, all these initiatives and debates over health insecurity continue to privilege a very narrow understanding of threat to peace and security, the meaning of which is confined to violent conflicts. That is maybe because over the past two decades, many member states have resisted calls to consider health crises as ‘high politics’. ⁵³ As Youde observes, over the last two decades only a very limited number of UNSC resolutions were adopted on health issues. ⁵⁴ Many member states still contest that idea that health issues need to be included within the UNSC mandate. This is closely related to legitimate concerns over the securitization of health within the UN system.

These resolutions do not offer a shift toward deepening the concept of collective security: the referent object remains the state. For example, UNSC Resolution 2177 emphasizes the impact of the Ebola outbreak on ‘civil unrest, social tensions and a deterioration of the political and security climate’. As Rushton and McInnes and Rushton suggest, within the UNSC health threats continue to be framed as ‘existential threats’ to political, economic, and demographic stability and security of states. ⁵⁵ Elbe rightly argues that framing health threats within ‘threat-defense’ logic and privileging military and intelligence organizations of powerful states in discussions on health emergencies does not change the subject of collective security. ⁵⁶ As we will discuss below, while we see similar concerns raised by some member states during the COVID-19 pandemic discussions at the UNSC, the current health emergencies and their wider impact on global economic and political systems have acted as a catalyst for more frequent calls to not only broaden but also deepen collective security.

Framing the COVID-19 pandemic: a ‘threat to peace and security’?

As of January 2023, the UNSC adopted two key resolutions regarding the COVID-19 Pandemic. Due to the tensions between the US and China and disagreements over the WHO’s role in responding to the pandemic, it took 3 months to negotiate the final text of Resolution 2532 (2020). The delay is the reflection of power politics within the Council itself. Fidler argues that, in many ways, the pandemic showed the inadequacies of international law in responding to global health emergencies and represents ‘the return of realpolitik’ in the Council. ⁵⁷ With the change in the US administration, however, the Council’s discussions on the pandemic became less divisive in 2021. It adopted Resolution 2565 (2021) more promptly, compared to the previous one. Resolution 2565 does not call for collective action but emphasizes ‘the need for intensified international collaboration in the face of the common threat of pandemics’.

Both resolutions can be seen as important steps toward greater recognition of health emergencies as security issues. The UNSC, for the first time, called for a global ceasefire. Although the focus of both resolutions is the impact of the pandemic in armed conflicts, post-conflict situations, and humanitarian crises, Resolution 2532 acknowledges its wide-ranging impact and recognized ‘the launch of the Global Humanitarian Response Plan for COVID-19 by the United Nations, which puts the people at the center of the response’. The wording of Resolution 2565 goes beyond armed conflicts, it recognizes the impact of COVID in exacerbating inequalities. It presents some elements of human security concerns and a broader understanding of the role of the UNSC in maintaining peace and security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Resolution 2565 demands humanitarian pauses to conflicts to maintain vaccine distribution and reiterates the Council’s demand for a general and immediate cessation of hostilities in all situations. Most importantly, it highlights the WHO’s role in fighting the pandemic, recalls states’ obligations under the IHR 2005 regulations, stresses equitable access to safe and affordable vaccines, and frames immunization campaigns against COVID-19 as a ‘global public good’. In this sense, one may argue that the wording of the second resolution is more comprehensive compared to the first one. However, none of the resolutions frame the COVID-19 pandemic as ‘constituting’ a threat to international peace and security. Rather, they state ‘the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security’ and acknowledge its potential to worsen existing conflict situations.

Despite such wording of UNSC Resolutions, a discursive analysis of UNSC meetings on the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, suggests that the pandemic acted as a catalyst for both permanent and non-permanent member states to assign new purposes and meanings to the UNSC role in ongoing health emergencies and to offer an alternative interpretation of how peace and security should be understood in an age of growing health crises. There are now calls by the non-permanent members of the Council to include non-traditional threats within the mandate of the UNSC. A few examples are worth mentioning. In its concept note for the debate on ‘Pandemics and Security’ held on 2 July 2020, Germany, as the Council President asked the member states to re-assess ‘“triggers” which transform a health crisis into a security crisis’. ⁵⁸ In its statement at the debate, it called the UNSC to ‘embrace a broader understanding of peace and security’:

The founders of the United Nations may well have had artillery, bombers, and soldiers in mind when they drafted the Charter. Today, we know that a virus can be deadlier than a gun, a cyberattack can cause more harm than a soldier and climate change threatens more people than most conventional weapons. Closing our eyes to that reality means refusing to learn. . . . That is what “maintaining peace and security” means in the twenty-first century. ⁵⁹

Joining Germany’s call to rethink peace and security beyond its conventional boundaries, small states, such as Malta, Liechtenstein, and Tunisia invited the Council to broaden its ‘overly narrow security paradigm’. ⁶⁰ Malta, for example, in its statement at the July 2020 debate, called upon member states to reassess what constitutes a threat to peace and security:

At a time when we have to rethink what constitutes major threats, the world has had to contend with a threat that went beyond the conservative awareness of what we understand by threats to security. We have been rudely awakened by the fact that pandemics can give rise to grave security and economic concerns that are equally widespread and devastating as any other commonly perceived major threat. ⁶¹

Similarly, in its statement on 14 August 2020, Liechtenstein advocated both broadening and deepening security and noted:

Where the Security Council takes a broader and deeper look at security, it can have positive impact. . . The Council should . . . ensure that it contributes to systemwide discussions on the negative security impacts of the pandemic, including but not limited to the areas of climate and biodiversity, poverty and hunger, health, education, gender, freedom of expression and information and privacy. ⁶²

In 2021, the Council’s discussions on COVID focused on how socioeconomic impacts could act as a threat multiplier and aggravate conflicts by worsening unemployment, poverty, and political tensions. Two key meetings in 2021 held on 25 January and 17 February for the implementation of Resolution 2532 and the discussion on Resolution 2565 invited more calls to rethink the narrow boundaries of the UNSC’s role in maintaining peace and security. During the January meeting, India, for example, called for a more human-centered approach to pandemic and stated that ‘the Council’s initiatives on combating COVID-19 should transcend conflict lines and contribute to social cohesion’. ⁶³ Mexico similarly called pandemic a de facto international security issue. ⁶⁴ Kenya, during the 17 February meeting, framed pandemic as an existential threat ‘to global human and economic development and an acute threat to global peace and security’. ⁶⁵ All other non-permanent members consistently emphasized vaccine equality, in terms of fair and equitable vaccine distribution.

For some member states, non-traditional security threats have become ‘existential’, such that the UNSC can no longer detach itself from their impact on international peace and security. From this perspective, while violent conflicts still constitute the UNSC’s key area of concern, the UNSC should endorse a broader mandate to include emergencies and crises due to pandemics, climate change, and food security. Recognizing the COVID-19 pandemic as a direct threat to peace and security, Cyprus, for example, in its statement during debate on Maintenance of Peace and Security in 2020, expressed:

Notwithstanding the clear primacy that should be afforded to hard security issues by the Council, we cannot overlook that factors beyond hard security have become existential. This fact compels us to adapt to the nature of threats and embrace a more comprehensive concept of security, given that just as root causes of conflict cannot be divorced or compartmentalized, nor can our response. ⁶⁶

Reassessing the contemporary multilateralism and the mandate of the UNSC to respond to new security challenges was one of the key messages in Niger’s concept note in September 2020. ⁶⁷ Adopting a human centric tone, Niger made calls to broaden the UNSC’s mandate to include not only new types of threats but also to address inequalities among and within nations and the systemic causes of global insecurities:

. . .the Council, despite its divisions, has moved beyond expressing concern to consolidate a clear political framework for addressing new types of threat to international peace and security. The Security Council has a responsibility to use the tools at its disposal to prevent phenomena that could lead to fully fledged security crises and to strengthen the basis for decision-making at this time of systemic disruption, which could be a turning point in correcting inequities in the effective participation of nations in global governance, for the collective good and the further strengthening of international peace and security. ⁶⁸

Despite growing contestations of traditional boundaries of the UNSC mandate and calls to broaden the meaning of security, it would be premature to conclude that there is a consensus on the recognition of health emergencies as collective security issues. An analysis of UNSC debates on COVID-19 suggests three key areas of disagreement: broadening the list of threats to peace and security without securitizing non-traditional issues, the limits of the UNSC mandate, and finally, concerns over the violation of state sovereignty due to the domestic nature of health emergencies. For example, in 2020, Russia and South Africa indicated that the Council’s discussion of the pandemic needed to focus on topics that were ‘in its agenda and not to involve itself in, for example, economic aspects, which are the responsibility of other UN organs and entities’. ⁶⁹ Russia held its position that there was a division of labor between the UN organs, and the Council should not be involved in socio-economic issues. ⁷⁰ For some states, the Council was not the right platform to debate non-traditional issues even if they were directly related to armed conflicts. ⁷¹ South Africa, for example, in its response to Resolution 2532, expressed reservation on broadening the mandate of the Council saying that ‘the role of the UNSC with regard to global public health emergencies should be clearly understood and linked to issues that fall directly in the ambit of the Council’s mandate’. ⁷² Similarly, Brazil stated that while pandemic impacted global peace, this issue was not within the competence of UNSC and ‘implication of pandemics should be limited to its relationship to threats to peace and security, not extend the Council’s purview to every aspect of international life’. ⁷³

Disagreements over the UNSC mandate also raised questions about whether the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a direct threat to peace and security. As mentioned before, the wording of the both resolutions suggests that the ‘COVID-19 pandemic is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security’. This reflects the division in debates on whether a pandemic is a threat itself or simply a ‘threat multiplier’ – a similar debate to that on the role of the UNSC in responding to climate change. For Niger, for example, the pandemic had ‘the potential to trigger crises and instability, particularly in countries in conflict or post-conflict situations, and to exacerbate security-related, social and economic crises, which in turn may heighten socio-political unrest’. ⁷⁴ Ukraine, however, argued that COVID-19 was not a direct threat to peace and security, but could trigger conflicts:

Nevertheless, there is still no consensus as to how much pandemics constitute an immediate threat to international peace and security. Be that as it may, there is hardly anyone who would sincerely question the existence of a correlation between severe health crises and a deterioration of the security environment. Even though a health crisis per se may not necessarily trigger a security crisis, in any security crisis it would definitely be an exacerbating factor, complicating conflict-resolution efforts. ⁷⁵

Analysis of UNSC debates on pandemic suggests two broad conclusions. First, the COVID-19 pandemic helped to develop greater recognition of non-traditional security issues as threats to international peace and security. Second, despite growing calls to broaden the list of threats to international peace and security and to expand the UNSC mandate, it is hard to see any significant attempts to deepen the meaning of collective security. The state remains the key referent object. During meetings held both in 2020 and 2021, only a handful of states, such as Japan, Cyrus, Sweden, Switzerland, Dominican Republic, and Lichtenstein explicitly framed the COVID-19 pandemic as a human security threat and made references to individual security.

However, this is not to say that concerns over marginalized individuals and groups, poverty, structural inequalities, and the link between insecurity and underdevelopment were missing at UNSC debates. China, for example in its response to Resolution 2532 ‘welcome[d] the inclusion of the concept of putting the people at the center’. ⁷⁶ Many states clearly articulated the link between development and security and recalled the three pillars of the UN: human rights, peace, and development. States underlined socioeconomic impacts of pandemics including its impact on violence against women and children, democracy, and further marginalization of vulnerable people. In his less state-centric tone, the Chair of the African Union Commission, for example, stressed the importance of ‘the health of the human person’ for international peace and security and noted that ‘protecting it will require the Council to shoulder its responsibilities under the Charter of the United Nations’. ⁷⁷ Similarly, Tunisia told members that ‘collective peace and safety depend on the peace and safety of every individual without exception’. ⁷⁸ These remarks show that there is growing recognition of the inadequacies of the traditional boundaries of the UN collective security model.

Conclusion

Mendonça et al. argue that the ways in which events are (re)narrated shape how the past is understood, and the future is re-imagined. They write:

events do foster collective meaning-making process around thorny questions, which are usually pushed aside by the inertia of the existing order. Events act as cracks that make the world contingent again, calling for human action. ⁷⁹

Consequently, the ways in which actors frame certain events may change how they interpret existing systems, ideas, and norms. This article was an attempt to show how emerging contexts and events might act as driving forces for the discursive contestations over the traditional, state-centric boundaries of the UN collective security system. We sought to contribute to the ongoing debates on broadening and deepening the UN collective security. We argued that these debates need to go beyond focusing on the practicality of reconceptualizing collective security and need to consider actors’ perceptions and framings of global security events and crises, and the UNSC’s role in responding to these crises. Our key focus was that the UN collective security system is not simply a legal institutional arrangement, but also a normative process, in which actors attach different meanings to its purpose and function. Inspired by critical constructivist approaches in security studies, we argue that meanings are not stable, but open to various forms of contestations. Events and crises play an important role in fostering such contestations. Those contestations show us the fluidity of the UN collective security system, which is open to transformations with collective and individual meaning-making processes in the light of major events and crises.

Our analysis suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic as a significant global event, acted as a crack that could foster an alternative collective meaning-making process around difficult questions on what constitutes threat to international security and for whom. A closer look at the Council debates suggests that the debates on the pandemic signal a growing recognition of the need to broaden the traditional boundaries of the UN collective security model and of the interconnectedness between public health crises, structural inequalities, and other human security threats. Despite such contestations, it would be wrong to conclude that there has been a shift in our understanding of the concept of collective security. Fears of coercive intervention, securitization of health issues, and loss of sovereign rights remain key barriers to revisiting the limitations of the current system.

As a final note, it is important to note that concerns about the over-expansion of the collective security and securitization of non-traditional threats should not be discarded. However, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic showed the limits of state-centric and conflict-related understandings of collective security, it is equally important to recognize that broadening and deepening collective security can make the UN more relevant and dynamic to ever evolving threats to our security. The discussions at the Council at the height of the crisis demonstrate that in a rapidly changing world, it is no longer realistic and practical to label ‘non-traditional security issues’, in particular pandemics, as ‘non-traditional’. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, we can no longer afford to place these issues in the realm of ‘low politics’. At an age, when peace can no longer be understood simply as ending conflicts, as Tunisia’s delegate at the Council meeting in 2020 said:

we cannot face [new] dangers using the same instruments we have inherited from the old times. As the nature and scope of threats evolve, it is imperative to rethink security and adapt approaches and tools. ⁸⁰