The pace of action in the UN Security Council: an event-level analysis

This paper examines how the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) processes agenda items by measuring its pace of action: the time between an item’s formal entry on the agenda and subsequent institutional actions (e.g. resolutions and statements). Shifting attention from crisis-response timing to internal workflow, this approach enables systematic comparisons of processing time across items and analysis of factors linked to faster or slower decision-making. We operationalize pace of action with a new event-level dataset linking agenda items to resolutions and statements (2000–2024). Africa serves as proof of concept, but the results also show an elevated pace for counterterrorism.