Words to unite nations

The complete United Nations General Debate Corpus, 1946-present

Bibliographic Data

ID3916665
AuthorsSlava Jankin (0000-0001-6915-177X, University of Birmingham, corresponding author), Annette Baturo (0000-0002-1108-5287, Dublin City University), Niheer Dasandi (0000-0002-8708-837X, University of Birmingham)
Year2025
Volume62
Issue4
Pages1339-1351
Publication date2025-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Peace Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-3433 • E-ISSN: 1460-3578
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00223433241275335
OpenAlexW4404705351
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited43

Every year since 1946, the General Debate has taken place at the beginning of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly session. Representatives from all UN member states deliver an address, discussing the issues that they consider most important in global politics, revealing their governments' positions, and seeking to persuade other states of their perspectives. The annual UN General Debate statements provide invaluable information for scholars of international relations - comparable globally and over time. However, these texts are stored as poor quality images without relevant metadata, preventing researchers from applying data science methods. This paper introduces the complete UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC). Building on a previous incomplete release of UNGDC, we have extended the corpus to cover the entire 1946-present period, included additional data on all speakers and provided advanced search and data visualization tools on a new website. The complete corpus contains over 10,000 speeches from 202 countries, including historical countries - making it the most comprehensive, unique and accessible collection of global political speeches. We discuss the complete UNGDC, provide relevant information for data users and present illustrative examples of how the corpus can be employed to address key questions in world politics

Epistemology · General assembly · International relations · Metadata · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Quality (philosophy) · Session (web analytics) · World Wide Web · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Computer Science · Law · Political Conflict and Governance · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies

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Open DOIOpen Access