Reflective practices at the Security Council: Children and armed conflict and the three United Nations
| Author | Ingvild Bode |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066117714529 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117714529
European Journal of
International Relations
2018, Vol. 24(2) 293 –318
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066117714529
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JR
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Reflective practices at the
Security Council: Children and
armed conflict and the three
United Nations
Ingvild Bode
University of Kent, UK
Abstract
The United Nations Security Council passed its first resolution on children in armed
conflict in 1999, making it one of the oldest examples of Security Council engagement
with a thematic mandate and leading to the creation of a dedicated working group in
2005. Existing theoretical accounts of the Security Council cannot account for the
developing substance of the children and armed conflict agenda as they are macro-
oriented and focus exclusively on states. I argue that Security Council decision-making
on thematic mandates is a productive process whose outcomes are created by and
through practices of actors across the three United Nations: member states (the
first United Nations), United Nations officials (the second United Nations) and non-
governmental organizations (the third United Nations). In presenting a practice-based,
micro-oriented analysis of the children and armed conflict agenda, the article aims
to deliver on the empirical promise of practice theories in International Relations.
I make two contributions to practice-based understandings: first, I argue that
actors across the three United Nations engage in reflective practices of a strategic
or tactical nature to manage, arrange or create space in Security Council decision-
making. Portraying practices as reflective rather than as only based on tacit knowledge
highlights how actors may creatively adapt their practices to social situations. Second,
I argue that particular individuals from the three United Nations are more likely to
become recognized as competent performers of practices because of their personality,
understood as plural socialization experiences. This adds varied individual agency to
practice theories that, despite their micro-level interests, have focused on how agency
is relationally constituted.
Corresponding author:
Ingvild Bode, University of Kent, School of Politics and IR, Rutherford College, Canterbury, CT2 7NX, UK.
Email: i.b.bode@kent.ac.uk
714529EJT0010.1177/1354066117714529European Journal of International RelationsBode
research-article2017
Article
294 European Journal of International Relations 24(2)
Keywords
Individual agency, Michel de Certeau, practice theories, United Nations, Security
Council, thematic mandates
Introduction
In August 2016, a United Nations (UN) report documented the grave impact of conflicts
on children: in Syria, children have been maimed and killed due to the indiscriminate
use of force in civilian areas; they have been subject to arbitrary detention and torture;
children have been used in combat and support roles; and schools have been attacked
and used for military purposes (Security Council, 2016: 24–26). This description char-
acterizes the vulnerabilities that children face in situations of conflict, a topic that has
concerned the UN Security Council (UNSC) regularly for the past 19 years and, in
2005, led to the creation of a subsidiary body, the Working Group on Children and
Armed Conflict (WG).
The institutionalization of the human rights-focused children and armed conflict
(CAAC) agenda cannot be fully accounted for in existing theoretical accounts of the
UNSC. Here, research has either considered states as rational cost–benefit calculators
(Beardsley and Schmidt, 2012; Prantl, 2005; Yang, 2013) or examined how states, inter-
ested in sustaining the UNSC’s legitimacy, may use normative arguments strategically to
bolster their negotiating positions (Hurd, 2005, 2007). These arguments can, for exam-
ple, explain why member states that could be at the receiving end of UNSC interventions
related to CAAC are resistant to it. Likewise, it may be helpful for member states to
associate themselves with normative agendas such as CAAC in a strategic sense. Yet,
these accounts cannot show how the substance of the CAAC agenda’s resolutions
emerged, or present an in-depth empirical perspective that goes beyond the macro-level.
Further, they neglect the roles of actors apart from states.
I argue that to understand what shaped the UNSC’s engagement with children and
armed conflict requires a dynamic analysis of interactions between the ‘three United
Nations’ (Weiss et al., 2009)1: member states (first UN), UN officials (second UN) and
non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives (part of the third UN). The UN is
a ‘social environment’ (Johnston, 2001), characterized by ‘significant interaction’
between the three UNs that is changing the boundaries of global governance (Sending
et al., 2015: 5; Wiseman, 2015: 12). While this has been acknowledged for the overall
organization, I draw attention to how it has reached the UNSC, specifically through the-
matic mandates since the late 1990s (Popovski and Fraser, 2014).
To integrate the role of the three UNs substantively, I present a practice-based, micro-
oriented analysis of the CAAC agenda at the UNSC. Practices are patterned actions in
social context (Leander, 2008: 18) that can, as sensitizing concepts,2 allow us to study
concrete empirical phenomena such as the UNSC decision-making process among dif-
ferent actors and different ‘ways of doing things’. In this, the article aims to deliver on
the empirical analytical promise of practice theories in International Relations (IR) (see
Gadinger, 2016: 199), where debate often remains on an abstract theoretical level. In
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