ABSTRACT
This book has developed a novel Security Council committee governance concept and, based on five intriguing sanctions regimes as well as a multitude of data sources, explored how and with what consequences delegating tasks to a committee affects the logic of decision-making among Council members. Security Council sanctions governance demonstrates a remarkable design for introducing formal and informal rules to a setting shaped by strong national interests and power politics. The findings reveal that committee governance prompts decision-making based on criteria, rules and evidence. This effect can be attributed to separating rule-making and subsequently implemented sanctions based on such rules. I find emerging patterns of rule-based governance across four considerably different Council sanctions regimes, while the Sudan sanctions regime illustrates the mechanism’s limitations. The findings exemplify that committee governance works even for “high politics” security institutions such as the Security Council, in which the same group of members decides about all key aspects.
