Deliberating international politics: Listening and consensus-orientation in the United Nations Security Council

Abstract The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is typically seen as a forum in which states engage in bargaining: Powerful states pressure others to vote in their favor, and weaker states go along with this in exchange for support on other issues. We complement this view by redirecting the analytical lens from voting outcomes to the discursive processes that shape them. We argue that UNSC members also engage in deliberative behavior – specifically, listening and consensus-orientation – to foster cooperative solutions. We suggest that variation in deliberative practices can be explained by selected debate- and speaker-related factors. To test our claims, we analyze 27,812 speeches from UNSC meetings between 1995 and 2020, using a custom dictionary to identify deliberative cues, and corroborate our findings through six interviews with current and former UNSC members. We show that listening and consensus-orientation are indeed central to UNSC debates but vary based on the timing and format of a debate, the contestedness of the issue, and the economic wealth of a speaker’s country. This article calls on scholars to take deliberative behavior in the study of UNSC politics seriously to develop a more comprehensive understanding of international cooperation.