Ridi & Gasbarri: The Role of Previous Resolutions in the Practice of the Security Council

Niccolò Ridi (King's College London - Law) & Lorenzo Gasbarri (Bocconi Univ.- Law) have posted The Role of Previous Resolutions in the Practice of the Security Council. Here's the abstract:

In this article, we carry out the first large-scale examination of the Security Council’s practice of citing previous resolutions. We ground our study in an analysis of the referencing patterns extracted from a corpus comprising all the 2489 Security Council Resolutions adopted up to the end of 2019, creating a dataset including 21,274 unique references to previous SCRs. By employing network analysis and automated text classification, we seek to unpack the practice, discussing its normative and methodological implications. After illustrating our findings, we discuss methodological consequences for the way SCRs are interpreted, the validity of controversial measures, the formation of customary law and substantive consequences insofar as it provides a channel for norm diffusion within the institutional practice of the Security Council and beyond. The article moves in four parts. After the present introduction, Part 2 briefly problematizes the practice of referencing previous SCRs and engages with the literature on the topic. Part 3 introduces our methodology and dataset, illustrating the general characteristics and topology of the resulting citation network, including its evolution over time and ‘extreme points’. Part 4 discusses the methodological and normative implications of the practice. We then offer a conclusion.