Abstract :
The mainstream literature on the UN has been underlain by a methodologicalindividualist philosophy, according to which all social phenomena, and particularly thefunctioning of all social institutions, should always be seen as resulting from the decisionsof individual actors, as if the whole (organisation) was never more than the sum of its parts(members of an organisation). Such a fallacy has been denounced by social constructivistapproaches which account for the existence of certain emergent properties of the UN, suchas collective identity, which cannot be reduced to its constituent units, namely, states. Theseaccounts, however, have offered a partial picture of the holistic understanding of the UN,as they have failed to comprehend, or perhaps simply ignored the causal powers of suchemergent properties. This article enhances constructivist approaches by dint of the criticalrealist models of Synchronic Emergent Powers Materialism and Transformational Model ofSocial Activity. The value added of these two models in comprehending the powersassociated with the UN Security Council lies in their ability to function as instructivemetaphors; they allow for the independent and irreducible existence of certain mechanismsby which the Council controls international conflicts but nevertheless recognises that thesecan only emerge from the mutual interaction between agents (states) and structure (UNinstitutions).
