Abstract

Since its foundation in 1946, the UN General Assembly has adopted more than 18 thousand resolutions on all matters relating to international politics. This wealth of information provides a unique source to identify the main themes of international relations in the past 75 years, though the usage of these data, due to their sheer scale and also due to the antiquity of some files, presents a challenge. Hence, fundamental questions, such as what are the most cited UN resolutions of all time, have so far remained unexplored. In light of this gap, this project has 3 goals: (i) to make the whole corpus of ca. 18,000 resolutions approved by the UN General Assembly since its foundation publicly available as electronic text, suitable for digital analysis; (ii) to apply text-as-data methods, specifically citation analysis, to retrieve information on the most central resolutions approved by the General Assembly in its 75 years history and to identify thematic clusters; (iii) to use these inputs and ERGM models to understand the underlying structure of normative output in the UN.

Principal Investigator