AFRICA AND UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL REFORM: A REVIEW OF SCHOLARLY DEBATES ON REPRESENTATION AND EQUITY

The United Nations Security Council was designed in 1945 by and for the states that won the Second World War. Africa, which was almost entirely under colonial occupation during this period, had no say in that design. Eighty years later, that original arrangement still guides the council and Africa today now has fifty-four sovereign states and accounts for more than sixty percent of what the Security Council actually spends its time discussing, yet holds no permanent seats in the body that makes the decisions. This paper reviews what scholars have argued about that situation specifically about whether the reform proposals being debated are sufficient to actually fix it. The argument this paper makes is twofold. First, representation and equity are not the same thing. Getting Africa into permanent membership without veto rights is a different arrangement that looks like reform but is not reform. Second, and less comfortably, Africa’s reform strategy has focused almost entirely on what it deserves and almost nothing on what it must demonstrate. Deserving a seat and being positioned to hold it credibly are not the same thing either. This paper draws on power transition theory, democratic theory, and postcolonial theory to explain why Africa’s demands are legitimate and why twenty years of legitimate demands have produced nothing.