Introducing UNSCdeb8 (beta): A Database for Corpus-Driven Research on the United Nations Security Council

Abstract

The Working Papier introduces the database UNSCdeb8 (pronounced UNSC debate), which was developed within the project "Which region? The politics of the UN Security Council P5 in inter-national security crises". The project was jointly run by the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zürich, the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Geneva, and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). UNSCdeb8 is a database of all verbatim statements given by the representatives of permanent and non-permanent members during public meetings of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) between 2010 and 2017. It is comprised of all the records of these statements that have been made publically available by the UN, in either their English original or the UN’s translation of a statement into English. All the textual data in UNSCdeb8 is aligned with metadata about the particular statement and meeting in which it was articulated, such as speaker-nationality, speaker-role, date/time, meeting number and agenda title of the meeting. It is primarily designed to facilitate corpus-driven social science research, but can also be used for other methodological approaches. UNSCdeb8 is accessible via a web-based query tool (https://unscdeb8.swp-berlin.org and https://unscdeb8.ethz.ch) that enables researchers to quickly and intuitively assemble sub-corpora of UNSC-debates.