The UN Security Council debates 1992-2023

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive dataset of over 106,000 speeches from the UN Security Council (1992-2023), enabling detailed analysis of debates, trends, and key issues over three decades.

Contribution

It provides an updated, detailed dataset of UNSC speeches with metadata, facilitating new research on debate patterns and emerging global issues.

Findings

Increased presence of UN bureaucracy in debates

Trend towards longer open debates

Emergence of new key issues like Women, Peace, and Security

Abstract

This paper presents an updated dataset containing 106,302 speeches held in the public meetings of the UN Security Council (UNSC) between 1992 and 2023. 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. The corpus is available online: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KGVSYH