Russia and China in UN Security Council Debates on Sanctions, 1992–2023: Attitudinal Shifts on Multilateral Action and the Global Security Order

UN sanctions are a central tool for maintaining international peace and security (Art. 24, 41 UN Charter) and have become an important enforcement instrument for upholding the global security order since the end of the Cold War. The authorization of UN sanctions crucially depends on the willingness and working relationship of the UN Security Council’s Permanent Five members (P5). However, there is surprisingly little systematic evidence on P5 attitudes on the use of sanctions over the decades. We present a systematic, comparative account of how the P5’s attitudes on the tool have changed from 1992–2023. We argue that this allows us to draw broader conclusions about the evolution of the P5’s working relationships and their approaches to the global security order. Applying a new tool for large language model (LLM) stance detection (GPT4o-mini) and drawing from expert interviews, we trace and characterize each P5 member’s attitudinal stance towards UN sanctions over the years. We find that China and Russia have changed their position from relative opposition and begrudging tolerance (China) and careful support of multilateral sanctions (Russia) in the 1990s to very vocal and frequent objection in recent years. We argue that this is also driven by US overreliance on unilateral sanctions. Meanwhile, the US, UK, and France have consistently favored and set the agenda on UN sanctions. On this basis, we draw conclusions for the future of UN sanctions narrowly, the global security order, and the working relationships of the P5 more broadly. While common interests such as fighting transnational crime and terrorism persist, the recent history of UN sanctions suggests that the Council will be increasingly hamstrung in addressing global security challenges.