List of members of the United Nations Security Council
Membership of the United Nations Security Council is held by the five permanent members and ten elected, non-permanent members.
Being elected requires a two-thirds majority vote from the United Nations General Assembly. Elected members hold their place on the council for a two-year term, with five seats contested in even years and five seats contested in odd years. An outgoing member cannot be immediately re-elected.
Elections usually begin in October for a term starting January 1. Because of the two-thirds majority requirement, it is possible for two evenly matched candidates to deadlock with approximately half the vote each, sometimes needing weeks of negotiations to resolve.
Non-permanent seats are distributed geographically, with a certain number of seats allocated to each of the five United Nations Regional Groups.
The ten non-permanent seats have the following distribution:
In addition, one of the five African/Asian seats is an Arab country, alternating between the two groups. This rule was added in 1967 for it to be applied beginning with 1968.
* The representative of Arab nations alternates between these two spaces.
The odd/even distribution was effectively decided by the January 1946 and December 1965 elections (the first ever election, and the first election after the expansion of seats). For each of the six and four members in the newly created seats, the UN General Assembly voted to grant either a 1-year or 2-year term.
From 1946 to 1965, the Security Council had six non-permanent members. Due to a lack of African and Asian member states, the seats had the following distribution:
As decolonization increased the number of Asian and African member states without a group, they began to contest other seats: Ivory Coast substituted a member of the Commonwealth in 1964-1965, the Eastern European seat regularly included Asian countries from 1956, Liberia took the place of a Western European country in 1961, and Mali successfully contested the Middle Eastern seat in December 1964 (the Security Council would be expanded before Mali's term began).
An amendment to the UN Charter ratified in 1965 increased the number of non-permanent seats to 10, and the Regional Groups were formalized. The amendment effectively created three African seats and one Asian seat (if treating the Commonwealth seat as a WEOG seat and the Middle Eastern seat as an Asian seat[a]).