A Review of the Academic Debate about United Nations Security Council Reform

This article outlines and discusses the research on UNSC reform. The interdisciplinary field of UNSC reform research can be placed into two broad categories and four sub categories, each indicating the degree to which scholars believe in the benefits of either structural or working methods reform. These include topics such as legitimacy and efficiency and the question of (un)equal representation. The role of The Global South will feature heavily in analyses of how best to reform the UNSC, and of which actors or structures mainly prevent a reform from materialising. There has been a significant gap in research focusing on how the factors that feature as instruments of opposition, e.g. the presented benefits and detriments of the different approaches to reform, can potentially be converged to rethink the direction of the research.