Description
A major objective in the study of international relations and foreign policy is to identify the diverse positions of states on the issues that animate world politics, and investigate the most important lines of disagreement. The United Nations provides a forum in which states can communicate these positions. The United Nations General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) collates the speeches of all UN member states made prior to the annual session of the General Assembly. Text-as-data techniques can be used to explore the UNGDC, using the text of the speeches made by the official representatives of states to generate indicators of foreign policy concerns, priorities and positions. In this paper, a new set of tests of the hypothesis that disagreements between states of the Global North and the Global South are in evidence at the UN General Debate will be provided. The paper will, furthermore, demonstrate that that whilst a clash of ‘liberal’ vs. ‘developmentalist’ priorities for multilateralism exist are in evidence at the UN, the Global South is itself diverse and contains groups of states that express distinct foreign policy concerns. This advances the systematic, comparative study of foreign policy positions by taking us closer to the substance of political disagreement in world politics.
