The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is a place where states can seek international status by campaigning for its ten elected seats. Beginning from this premise, in this dissertation I ask: how do states seek status through their competitions for seats on the UNSC? Drawing on the concerns of IR theorists as well as historians, this is a process-driven question. I am interested in the process of status-seeking, not simply status itself, and I am concerned with the ways that status-seeking has evolved from 1945 to the present in the lifetime of the UN. I understand status as membership in a club embedded in larger hierarchies and examine both the nature of the hierarchies and the responsibilities associated with that membership. Similarly, I take a relational view of status that is predicated on recognition and social closure.
While the UN and the UNSC are embodiments of liberal internationalism, they are also embodiments of global and historical imperialism. This imperialism structures the hierarchy under which status-seeking occurs. Status, as membership, comes with shared expectations of behaviour, responsibility, practices, and resources. I argue that status-seeking thus requires relating to these expected behaviours, responsibilities, and practices. Thus, states conduct their campaigns in terms of articulating how they plan to use their status and contribute to the UNSC's (liberal) mandate. By speaking to these liberal responsibilities and the use of status, states are also articulating their relationships to global imperialism at different points in time through the process of status-seeking. In supporting this argument, I examine Canada's nine campaigns to the UNSC in 1946, 1947, 1957, 1966, 1976, 1988, 1998, 2010, and 2020. Using a combination of historical methods (interviews, archival work, policy document analysis), I use a genealogical lens to trace the process of status-seeking in the 20th and 21st centuries.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/44066 |
| Date | 16 September 2022 |
| Creators | Dunton, Caroline |
| Contributors | Vucetic, Srdjan |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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