AI for Global Affairs

Every year since 1946, the United Nations General Assembly has begun with the General Debate.

The General Debate consists of the leaders of all UN member states delivering an annual address in which they emphasize the issues in global politics they regard as the most important, they reveal their positions on these issues, and seek to persuade other states of the merits of their perspective. These annual statements are, therefore, an invaluable source of multifaceted information for scholars of international relations, which are comparable globally over time.

However, these texts are often stored as poor quality images, preventing researchers from applying natural language processing and data science methods to these speeches. In this project, we create the UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC), which covers the entire 1946-2022 period. The dataset is annually updated and at present contains over 10,000 speeches from 202 countries -- which includes historical countries -- making it the most comprehensive, unique, and ready-to-use collection of global political speeches.

It is widely recognised that international human rights language has come to dominate world politics. Some scholars have expressed optimism about the potential for this growth of human rights rhetoric to bring about improvements in human rights. However, many others have questioned this view, pointing to the use of human rights language by states that commit rights abuses and the willingness of repressive states to ratify international human rights treaties. These scholars argue that human rights commitments are examples of `cheap talk'. In this project, we examine this issue using new empirical evidence. We argue that to date, insufficient attention has been given to the types of human rights rhetoric used by different states.

This project investigates the causal narratives employed by Directors General of the World Trade Organization in their speeches, examining how these narratives seek to persuade member states to maintain open markets and advance trade liberalisation. We analyse assumptions about the benefits of free trade and organisational deadlocks and diminished legitimacy. We investigate the types of causal narratives to determine responsiveness to context and leader background. We assess the narratives that trade facilitates general prosperity, development, and peace through economic interdependence. We are interested in assumptions, adaptiveness to global shifts, and priorities in the WTO's highest office.