The Evolving Politics of UN Sanctions in Security Council Debates, 1992–2023

UN sanctions are an important tool for maintaining international peace and have shaped the global security order since the end of the Cold War. However, given contemporary UN Security Council (UNSC) dynamics, new sanctions regimes have become rare, and policymakers are pessimistic about the future of the tool. We evaluate this pessimism by offering a long-term perspective, analyzing all UNSC members’ positions on UN-mandated and unilateral sanctions from 1992–2023. We examine 6.044 sanctions-related Council speeches through a large language model, verify this procedure with manual coding, present further descriptive analyses, and conduct expert interviews. The analysis focuses on Russia, China, and non-Western elected members and traces their positions in detail. We find that Russia turned from limited support of UN sanctions in the 2000s to total opposition in the mid-2010s, while China has persistently been opposed, offering at most begrudging tolerance. The P3 (France, UK, US) have consistently been supportive. Meanwhile, non-Western elected members hold a distinct intermediate position, opposing unilateral sanctions while cautiously supporting UN-mandated sanctions. This finding cuts against an assumption of Global South opposition to sanctions in general. Finally, we offer an outlook on the future of UN sanctions, multilateral UN action, and global security governance.