Informal Interactive Dialogue (Security Council)

The Informal Interactive Dialogue (IID) is a consultative format developed by the United Nations Security Council to engage directly with parties whose participation in a formal Council meeting would be procedurally awkward, politically sensitive, or legally constrained. The format has no foundation in the UN Charter itself, nor in the Council's Provisional Rules of Procedure (S/96/Rev.7), which remain provisional precisely because the Council has preferred to evolve its working methods through practice rather than codification. The IID derives its legitimacy instead from the Council's Notes by the President on working methods, principally the consolidated S/2017/507 issued under Japan's presidency, which catalogues the array of informal formats — including Arria-formula meetings, informal consultations of the whole, and informal interactive dialogues — that Council members may convene by consensus.

Procedurally, an IID is convened at the initiative of one or more Council members, typically the penholder on a given file or the chair of a sanctions committee, and requires the agreement of all fifteen members. Unlike a formal Council meeting, the IID is not held in the Council Chamber; it takes place in a conference room, most commonly the ECOSOC Chamber or a smaller venue in the Secretariat building. There is no official record, no webcast, no interpretation into all six official languages unless specifically arranged, and the meeting does not appear in the Journal of the United Nations as a Council session. No outcome document — no resolution, presidential statement, or press elements — is adopted. Participation is restricted to the fifteen members and the invited interlocutors, although the Secretariat may attend in support.

The defining mechanical feature is the interactive character of the exchange: Council members and invitees engage in genuine back-and-forth rather than the sequential set-piece statements that dominate open debates. Invitees may include heads of state or government of non-Council members, regional organisation officials, civil society representatives, special envoys, or — most significantly — parties to a conflict whose direct address to a formal Council meeting would imply a recognition the Council is unwilling to extend. Because the IID is not a meeting of the Council in the Article 28 sense, the rules on invitations under Rules 37 and 39 of the Provisional Rules do not apply, freeing the format from disputes over the credentials or status of participants.

Recent practice illustrates the format's utility. Council members have used IIDs to hear from the African Union Peace and Security Council ahead of mandate renewals for missions such as MINUSMA before its 2023 termination and the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS). The chairs of the 1267/1989/2253 ISIL (Da'esh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee and the 1988 Taliban Sanctions Committee have convened IIDs with Member States affected by listings. Following the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021, Council members held informal interactive exchanges on Afghanistan that allowed engagement with humanitarian actors without conferring procedural standing on de facto authorities. The format has also been deployed on Myanmar, Venezuela, and Syria, where the political cost of a formal briefing would have triggered procedural objections from a permanent member.

The IID must be distinguished from the Arria-formula meeting, with which it is frequently confused. Arria-formula meetings, named after Venezuelan Ambassador Diego Arria who pioneered the format in 1992, are convened by one or more Council members but are not meetings of the Council as such; they may be open or closed, are increasingly webcast, and routinely include NGOs and human rights defenders. The IID, by contrast, is convened by the Council collectively, is invariably closed, and is oriented toward confidential dialogue with states or quasi-state actors. It also differs from informal consultations of the whole, which are intra-Council deliberations held in the consultations room adjacent to the Chamber and do not include outside participants.

Controversy attends the format's opacity. Elected members (the E10) have periodically complained that IIDs are used by the permanent five (P5) to shield politically inconvenient discussions from public scrutiny, while civil society organisations note that the absence of records frustrates accountability. Conversely, defenders argue that the format preserves diplomatic space in situations — Yemen, the Great Lakes, the Korean Peninsula — where any public Council engagement risks hardening positions. The Accountability, Coherence and Transparency (ACT) group, founded in 2013, has pressed for clearer criteria on when IIDs should be used in lieu of formal briefings, and the question recurs in the annual debate on the Council's working methods convened by the Informal Working Group chaired in recent cycles by Japan, Kuwait, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Albania.

For the practitioner — whether a desk officer drafting talking points for a permanent representative, a researcher tracking Council dynamics, or a journalist covering Turtle Bay — recognising the IID for what it is matters operationally. An IID signals that the Council is engaging substantively on a file without yet being prepared to legislate; it often precedes, by weeks or months, a presidential statement or resolution. Read backs are typically circulated by participating missions to capitals on a confidential basis, and leaks, while not unknown, are professionally penalised. Tracking the cadence and subject matter of IIDs — even without access to their contents — provides a reliable indicator of where Council attention is migrating and which files are ripening toward formal action.