Description
Voting at the United Nations General Assembly is often used to evaluate the foreign policy positions of states relative to one another. The voting record indicates a persistent divide between the Global North and Global South in terms of their assessments of US leadership and the liberal international order. This paper expands the focus beyond voting to investigate what other indicators can tell us about the foreign policy positions adopted by different states across the Global South. Through text analysis of United Nations General Debate speeches 1991-2021, the paper demonstrates that high-income, politically liberal states are more likely to discuss human rights and humanitarian issues in their speeches, whilst lower-income and economically peripheral states are more likely to discuss poverty, injustice and development. Additionally, a cluster analysis of foreign policy behaviours of states 2012-2016 further confirms the existence of a North-South foreign policy divide, but also indicates substantial heterogeneity in the Global South. ‘Critics’, ‘rejectionists’, ‘conservatives’ and the ‘true non-aligned’ differ from one another in terms of the aspects of the liberal international order they reject, criticise or endorse. There is diversity in the discontent of the Global South.
