The EA Written Report — How to Analyse, Not Just Describe

Power, Legitimacy and the Veto: An Investigation into the UN Security Council’s Structural Constraints

Engagement Activity — Written Report

Section A: The Political Issue

The political issue I investigated is the structural inability of the UN Security Council to respond to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine following the 2022 invasion — specifically, how Russia’s permanent membership and veto power prevented any binding UNSC resolution on the conflict. This issue is not simply a procedural problem but a fundamental question about the legitimacy of international security institutions: can an organisation that allows one of its permanent members to veto any action against itself credibly claim to represent collective security?

The key actors are Russia — which has exercised its veto multiple times to block Ukraine-related resolutions — the Western P3 (US, UK, France), non-permanent member states, and Ukraine itself as the state whose sovereign territorial integrity is at stake. China’s abstentions rather than vetoes represent a further complexity: passive non-opposition rather than active support.

I will analyse this issue primarily through the concepts of power and legitimacy. Power because the veto is a formal institutional expression of structural power — the ability to prevent collective action — and legitimacy because the UNSC’s authority depends on being perceived as a credible guardian of international security, a perception that may be fundamentally undermined when it cannot act against an aggressor who holds a permanent seat.1

Section B: The Engagement

I conducted a 40-minute semi-structured interview via video call with Dr [Name Withheld], a lecturer in international law at [University], whose research focuses on UN Security Council reform and international institutional design. I selected this engagement because I needed a perspective from someone who understands the legal architecture of the UNSC from the inside — not only its formal rules but the political logic that produced them.

I prepared seven questions in advance, focusing on: the legal basis for Russia’s veto use, whether the UNGA Emergency Special Session (Resolution ES-11/1, March 2022) represented a meaningful accountability alternative, and whether P5 veto reform is practically achievable.

Two responses were particularly analytically significant. First, when I asked whether Russia’s veto use undermined the UNSC’s legitimacy, Dr [Name] responded: “The question assumes the UNSC was designed to be impartial — it wasn’t. The veto was the price of great-power participation. The founders of the UN calculated that a Security Council with teeth but without great-power participation was useless. The veto made participation worthwhile — and the cost was that the institution can be paralysed when great powers disagree.” Second, when I asked about the UNGA ESS, Dr [Name] noted: “141 states voting to condemn Russia tells you something important — but it tells you what states think, not what they can do. The gap between normative consensus and enforcement capacity is the defining feature of the international system right now.”2

Section C: Analytical Reflection

The most significant insight from my engagement is one I had not anticipated: that the UNSC’s paralysis in the Ukraine conflict may be a feature of institutional design rather than a failure of it. Prior to the interview, I had understood the veto primarily as a problem — a mechanism that allows powerful states to block legitimate collective action. Dr [Name]’s framing challenged this: the veto was a deliberate bargain, not a flaw. The founders chose institutional effectiveness (great-power participation) over institutional impartiality (equal accountability). This reframed my analysis of the concept of legitimacy: the UNSC’s legitimacy was never based on procedural equality but on the practical reality that collective security requires the cooperation of powerful states.3

The concept of power illuminates this most precisely. Structural power — the power to set the terms under which others must operate — is exactly what the veto represents. Russia does not need to deploy military force to prevent UNSC action; it simply needs to exist as a permanent member and signal its willingness to veto. The 141-0 UNGA condemnation vote demonstrates that normative power (the ability to define what is right) can coexist with structural impotence (the inability to enforce what is right). This is what Dr [Name] meant by “the gap between normative consensus and enforcement capacity.” The Ukraine conflict has made this gap visible in a way that previous conflicts could not, because Russia — unlike Myanmar, which has no UNSC veto — is the aggressor and the veto holder simultaneously.4

The engagement also illuminated the concept of legitimacy in a way I had not expected. If the UNSC’s veto was a founding bargain rather than a design flaw, what legitimacy does a UNSC reform agenda have? Dr [Name] suggested that the UNGA ESS — where 141 states voted to condemn Russia — shows that legitimacy has begun to migrate from the UNSC to the broader international community. This is not institutionally powerful, but it may be normatively significant: states are establishing a record of what the international community considers legitimate, even if they cannot enforce it. The long-term question is whether that normative record has any effect on how future leaders calculate the costs of aggression. My engagement could not answer this — but it gave me a more nuanced understanding of how legitimacy operates in institutional contexts where enforcement is absent.

The limitations of my engagement are significant. I interviewed one academic — whose perspective, while analytically sophisticated, represents a particular Western liberal-internationalist understanding of the UNSC. I did not have access to perspectives from Russian international lawyers who would frame the veto as a legitimate safeguard for great-power sovereignty, or from Global South states that may view UNSC reform with ambivalence (many prefer a weak but universal institution to a strong but Western-dominated one). A fuller analysis would require engagement with at least two of these perspectives.5

Section D: Conclusion

My engagement deepened my understanding of the UNSC veto in a specific direction: from viewing it as a democratic deficit to understanding it as a founding political bargain whose costs have become more visible as great-power conflict has intensified. The concept of legitimacy — specifically the distinction between procedural legitimacy (whether an institution’s rules are fair) and effective legitimacy (whether an institution can do what it claims to do) — is central to assessing the UNSC’s future.

The question that remains unresolved for me is whether the UNGA’s normative condemnation record, accumulated through emergency special sessions, can over time create accountability costs that the Security Council’s structural paralysis currently prevents. That question cannot be answered from a single interview — it requires tracking the long-term relationship between normative pressure and political behaviour, which is a research project in itself. What my engagement confirmed is that international institutions operate not above politics, but within it — shaped by the same power structures they claim to regulate.6