UN General Debates

Every year since 1947, representatives of UN member states gather at the annual sessions of the United Nations General Assembly. The centrepiece of each session is the General Debate. This is a forum at which leaders and other senior officials deliver statements that present their government’s perspective on the major issues in world politics. These statements are akin to the annual legislative state-of-the-union addresses in domestic politics. This dataset, the UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC), includes the corpus of texts of General Debate statements from 1970 (Session 25) to 2016 (Session 71).