Slides and Materials for the 'Corpus of Resolutions: UN Security Council' Launch Event
Creators: name: Fobbe, Seán
name: Gasbarri, Lorenzo
name: Ridi, Niccolò
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: United Nations
subject: UN
subject: Security Council
subject: International law
subject: International protection of human rights
subject: Human rights law
subject: Law
subject: FOS: Law
subject: International Law
subject: Peace
subject: Security
subject: Disarmament
subject: Terrorism
subject: Use of Force
subject: War
subject: Armed Conflict
subject: Peacekeeping
subject: Aggression
subject: Chapter VII
subject: Graph Theory
subject: Network Analysis
subject: Gephi
subject: Self-Defence
subject: Self-Defense
subject: Peacebuilding

description: Abstract

The Corpus of Resolution: UN Security Council (CR-UNSC) collects and presents for the first time in human and machine-readable form all resolutions, drafts, and meeting records of the UN Security Council, including detailed metadata, as published by the UN Digital Library and revised by the authors.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the most influential of the principal UN organs. Composed of five permanent and ten non-permanent members, its functioning is constrained by the political context in which it operates. During the Cold War, the complex political relationships between the permanent members and their veto powers significantly affected the capacity of the UNSC to address violations of international peace and security, with only 646 resolutions passed from 1946 to 1989. Since the 1990s, the activity of the UN Security Council has increased dramatically and produced 2721 resolutions up to the end of 2023. 

In this presentation I provide an overview of the main dataset and its specialized variants, a bibliographic database and the UNSC citation network. I discuss the uses of the UNSC corpus for both traditional and quantitative legal research, including a breakdown of the variable groupings and OCR quality. A special emphasis is placed on the citation data. The slides include many visual representations to provide a quick understanding of the dataset.

 

Live Demo: Keyword Search

The event included a live demo of keyword searches (with context lines) via grep, a well-known command line utility. Grep is included with all Linux systems and can be installed on Windows and Mac. Variants of grep with a graphical user interface (GUI) are available. Free grep GUI tools are AstroGrep and dnGrep.

This Zenodo record includes results from keyword searches suggested by the audience during the launch event. Results are given as a) simple text file with relevant lines extracted and b) HTML files with keywords colored and one context line above/below the relevant line.

Also included is a Bash script to replicate these findings. Instructions:



Download the Bash script

Download the TXT files for Version 2024-05-19: https://zenodo.org/records/11212056/files/CR-UNSC_2024-05-19_ALL_TXT.zip

Ensure that the Bash script and a folder containing the TXT files named "CR-UNSC_2024-05-19_EN_TXT_BEST" are in the same location

Open a terminal in this folder and run "bash UNSC_Demo_Keyword-Search_Grep_Script.sh"

All result files should now be in the same folder


 

Live Demo: Network Analysis

Following the keyword search demo I also demonstrated network analysis with Gephi. Gephi is free and open source software with a graphical user interface for interactive network analysis. The GraphML file of the UNSC dataset can easily be imported into Gephi by simply opening it. This Zenodo record also includes the Gephi project shown during the live demo, with some configuration already set.

For ideas on how to explore the network data I recommend reading through the Gephi manual. Gephi is the easiest way to explore the UNSC citation network data without code.

 

Download Data Set

Corpus of Resolution: UN Security Council (CR-UNSC)

 

Context

This presentation was delivered online on 20 May 2024 during the launch event for the Corpus of Resolution: UN Security Council (CR-UNSC), organized by the Interest Group on International Organizations (IG-IO) of the European Society of International Law (ESIL).

 

About the Speaker

Seán Fobbe is a researcher at Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich (Germany). He specializes in international human rights law, humanitarian law and international criminal law, with a particular emphasis on the protection of cultural heritage in Iraq and the prosecution of atrocity crimes committed by ISIS/ISIL. As a data scientist, his interests lie in natural language processing (NLP), quantitative peace research, data engineering and statistical computing with the R programming language.

Personal Website: www.seanfobbe.com