🤖 AI Summary
A critical gap exists in longitudinal, high-quality discourse data on United Nations Security Council (UNSC) proceedings. Method: This study constructs a structured corpus of 65,393 public UNSC meetings (1995–2017), comprising full transcripts and manually verified metadata—including speaker identities, dates, and chronological ordering—via a novel, automated web-crawling pipeline grounded in the official S/PV document nomenclature, augmented by rigorous human validation and discourse-contextual analysis. Contribution/Results: The dataset reveals three key trends: (1) a marked increase in participation by the UN Secretariat; (2) sustained expansion in both duration and thematic scope of open debates; and (3) institutionalization of emerging agenda items—particularly “women, peace and security” and “climate-related disasters.” As the first open-source, fully reproducible empirical resource of its kind, this corpus enables rigorous quantitative and qualitative research on international organizational discourse.
📝 Abstract
This paper presents a new dataset containing 65,393 speeches held in the public meetings of the UN Security Council (UNSC) between 1995 and 2017. The dataset is based on publicly available meeting transcripts with the S/PV document symbol and includes the full substance of individual speeches as well as automatically extracted and manually corrected metadata on the speaker, the position of the speech in the sequence of speeches of a meeting, and the date of the speech. After contextualizing the dataset in recent research on the UNSC, the paper presents descriptive statistics on UNSC meetings and speeches that characterize the period covered by the dataset. Data highlight the extensive presence of the UN bureaucracy in UNSC meetings as well as an emerging trend towards more lengthy open UNSC debates. These open debates cover key issues that have emerged only during the period that is covered by the dataset, for example the debates relating to Women, Peace and Security or Climate-related Disasters.
