Heidegger and the Ontology of UN Decision-Making: A Reinterpretation of Security Council Practices

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_87How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Heidegger; ontology; United Nations Security Council; world-disclosure; International Relations theory

Abstract

This paper develops a Heideggerian ontological framework for rethinking decision-making in the United Nations Security Council, arguing that the Council’s procedures do more than regulate international behaviour; they also participate in disclosing the conditions under which global political reality becomes intelligible. Mainstream International Relations (IR) theories—realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism—explain outcomes in terms of power, cooperation, or norms, yet largely presuppose the ontological categories of sovereignty, legitimacy, and threat. Drawing on Heidegger’s concepts of being-in-the-world, worldhood, and readiness-to-hand, the paper conceptualizes the Security Council as a site of world-disclosure in which diplomatic practices, procedural rules, and institutional language actively constitute the horizon of global political intelligibility. Voting, veto power, informal consultations, and resolution drafting are thus understood not as neutral instruments but as practices that shape what counts as politically meaningful. This is illustrated through the 2003 Iraq War crisis, where disputes over authorization revealed competing disclosures of “threat” and “legitimate action,” and where the breakdown of consensus functioned as ontological disclosure by making visible the tension between effectiveness and legality that sustains collective security. The Council’s decision-making should therefore be understood as a process of world-formation in which global political reality is continuously disclosed, contested, and reconstituted.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Zhetong Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - Heidegger and the Ontology of UN Decision-Making: A Reinterpretation of Security Council Practices
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 798
EP  - 809
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_87
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_87
ID  - Zhang2026
ER  -