Small State Studies: Austria’s Bid to get Elected on the UNSC

Authors

  • Baldur Thorhallsson University of Island
  • Thomas Stude Vidal Faculty of Political Science, University of Iceland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15203/ozp.4068.vol51iss4

Abstract

This article provides an overview of small state studies and offers a comparative study of the respective 2008 United Nations Security Council campaigns by Austria and Iceland. It examines how quantitative and qualitative characteristics between small states play a decisive role in mounting successful UNSC bids. The analysis indicates that Austria’s ‘smallness’ did not significantly impact the country’s ability to garner votes towards a seat, and that its size and status was utilised in concurrence with skilful diplomacy to meet objectives. Iceland, on the other hand, was thwarted not only by its limited size, but also by a lack of political and diplomatic commitment to the cause, and an inability to ‘absorb’ an untimely exogenous shock that damaged the country’s reputation.

Author Biography

  • Baldur Thorhallsson, University of Island
    Professor in Political Science and Research Director of the Centre for Small State Studies

Downloads

Published

2023-01-05

Issue

Vol. 51 No. 4 (2022): Austrian Foreign Policy: Reinvigorating the research agenda

Section

Forum

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Baldur Thorhallsson, Thomas Stude Vidal

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The OZP is the authorized quarterly publication of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politikwissenschaft (ÖGPW, Austrian Political Science Association)

The author of an article (in case of multiple authors: the corresponding author, responsible for releasing this material on behalf of any and all co-authors) accepted to be published in the OZP hereby acknowledges the following Copyright Notice:

  1. The author retains the copyright to the article.
  2. It is the responsibility of the author, not of the OZP, to obtain permission to use any previously published and/or copyrighted material.
  3. Publication of a submitted text is dependent on positive results from the peer reviewing. In such a case, the OZP editors have the right to publish the text.
  4. In case of publication, the article will be assigned a DOI (digital object identifier) number.
  5. The author agrees to abide by an open access Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY nc) license. The license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article in any non-commercial way, so long as appropriate credit is given to the author and source of the work. 
  6. The license ensures that the author’s article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive. In order to facilitate distribution, the author agrees that the article, once published, will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the OZP.
  7. In addition, the author is encouraged to self-archive the article, once published, with reference to the place of the first publication.
  8. After the contribution appears in the OZP, it is still possible to publish it elsewhere with reference to the place of the first publication.
  9. The finished article, if published, will include a correspondence address (both postal and email) of the author.
  10. If written under the auspices of a grant from one or more funding agencies, such as FWF (Austrian Science Fund), ERC (European Research Council), and Horizon 2020 (EU Framework Programme), an article accepted for publication has to be deposited in an Open Access archive. The OZP’s archiving policy is compliant with these provisions. (In case the article derives on funding from a different source, the author is responsible to check compliance of provisions.)