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This article introduces the first complete record of draft Security Council resolutions and what happened to them. In addition to ca. 2,600 drafts that have been adopted as resolutions and ca. 200 drafts that have been vetoed by one of the permanent members (1946–2021), another ca. 300 draft resolutions have failed to be adopted for other reasons than the veto. The article first presents an overview of the record of draft resolutions. It then turns its attention specifically to drafts that have been rejected by Council majority, i.e. drafts that have failed to receive the required number of positive votes. It relates to previous research on the elected members of the Security Council and illustrates how a concern with rejected drafts provides new insights into the legitimacy of Security Council decision making, discussions about Council reform, and changing working methods.

Peace can take many different forms and be expressed in a myriad of different ways that go well-beyond “peace as the absence of war”. Though recent scholarly contributions within this vein of research acknowledge the empirical reality of a variety of “peaces”, we are yet to understand how – methodologically – researchers can go about the endeavor of developing tools that allow us to describe and classify varieties of peace.  Our effort in this paper addresses this knowledge gap. We bring attention to different methods for empirically capturing varieties of peace when peace is approached as a situation, as a relationship or as an idea. Though our purpose is to illustrate a “smorgasbord of methods” for analyzing varieties of peace, we also argue that any effort to approach such an analysis ought to be based on theoretically coherent sets of types. This is so because it will allow the researcher to provide a more nuanced picture of different varieties of peace.

For decades, peace and conflict studies have devoted more attention to conflict than to peace, and despiteits centrality, peace itself has been under-conceptualized. In this paper, we propose a theoretical frameworkand methodologies to make peace beyond the absence of war researchable. The framework is designed to capture varieties of peace between and beyond dichotomous conceptions of positive versus negative peace, or successful versus failed peace processes. To capture the complexity of peace in its empirical diversity, our framework approaches peace in three different ways: as a situation or condition in a particular locality; as a web of relationships; and as ideas or discourses about what peace is or should be. These approaches provide different avenues for researching peace, and taken together they provide a fuller picture of what peace is, how it is manifested, experienced, and understood. We argue that this framework provides a way forward in advancing conceptual understandings and empirical analyses of peace that can facilitate systematic, comparative, qualitative analyses while at the same time accounting for the complex, multifaceted nature of peace.

The concept of resilience is currently making its way into the field of peace and conflict studies, but it is a concept with different meanings and implications. The argument advanced in this paper is that in order to make the most of resilience thinking, the field should not conceive of resilience merely as the ability to bounce back to an original state after a disturbance, a conceptualization usually referred to as “engineering resilience.” Instead, it should engage with “ecological resilience,” which refers to the amount of disturbance that a system can absorb before being pushed across a threshold from one stable state to another. I also relate these different types of resilience to another distinction between specified resilience to anticipated disturbances and general resilience to unknown ones. Finally, I consider a few other implications of resilience thinking for research on peace and conflict.

The Varieties of Peace research program aims to analyze long-term effects of peace processes in conflicts that ended in the 1990s. The central research questions are: What characterizes peace after the peace processes initiated in the 1990s and how does it vary? How can this variation be described and explained? Peace processes have been studied using short time perspectives, usually in "lessons-learned" evaluations five years after conflict termination, and usually with theories of conflict as a starting point. The Varieties of Peace research program is an ambitious initiative, which starts from a theoretical understanding of peace, its quality and character, and views peace and peace processes as dynamic and transformative. It will investigate and evaluate different types of peace processes from a comparative perspective and 25–30 years after they started, with the ambition of producing generalizable knowledge about peace, what it is and how it can be achieved. As a starting point, the program studies explanatory factors in five areas: 1) the actions, capacity and resilience of civil society, 2) the interests and strategies of the elites, 3) the aims and character of the agreements, 4) the societies' institutions and resilience, and 5) international involvement. These issues will be studies in at least ten projects, with the ambition to capture and explain variation, internal dynamics and ultimately the results and effects of peace processes, studied over a longer period of time. The Varieties of Peace program is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond: the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, 2017-2024. For more info, please visit our webpage at www.varietiesofpeace.net.