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Salient discourses in international society: When and how have United Nations global conferences acted as catalysts?

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Abstract

Salient discourses shape the way actors perceive and engage in global politics. How and to what extent terminology becomes salient in international society, however, is not well understood. This article investigates one potential source of discursive change: global conferences convened by the United Nations (UN). Conceptually, we combine insights from scholarship on discursive shifts with an emphasis on how salient terms become in a given venue and points in time, in order to better understand when and to what extent a discursive shift is sustained. Quantitative analysis of all speeches in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) General Debate between 1970 and 2020 robustly illustrates correspondence between UN global conferences and shifts in the salience of core terms by means of two independent indicators and interrupted time series analysis. We identify three significant discursive shifts following UN global conferences with wide and puzzling variation in their trajectories: sustainable development, social development, and gender (equality). To understand this variation, we qualitatively investigate scope conditions of discursive shifts and salience of these and several related terms. Our findings include that differences in terms’ versatility and formal institutionalisation correspond with their rise and fall in salience after global conferences.

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Notes

  1. We thank an anonymous reviewer for comments on this point.

  2. UN-sponsored global summits are considered here as a subset of UN global conferences. The history of UN global conferences is documented in existing literature (see, for example, Schechter 2005 and Emmerij et al. 2001).

  3. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0TJX8Y.

  4. The dataset does not include the statements made by the UN Secretary-General (who has spoken annually since 1997 on an agenda item on the Report of the Secretary-General on the work of the Organization) and the UNGA President (who has delivered a statement annually since 2005), which appear at the beginning of the provisional verbatim records.

  5. The Jupyter notebook used to perform this analysis is available from the corresponding author upon request.

  6. We also measured the proportion of speech (terms to the total number of terms per speech) for each search term, but because this tracks our measure of occurrence per 100,000 words nearly identically, we do not report it separately.

  7. The number of UN member states increased from 127 in 1970 to 193 since 2011. Representatives of three non-member state observers deliver statements at the UNGA GD and appear in the data: Holy See in 1979 and since 2004, Palestine since 1998, and the European Union since 2011.

  8. Delegations simply provided estimated speaking times until 1997, when the GA indicated ‘a voluntary guideline of up to 20 minutes per statement,’ (A/RES/51/241, ¶21). Since 2001, the GA has had a ‘voluntary time limit of up to 15 minutes for each statement' (see A/56/PV.44, p. 4, which was extended in GA decision 56/468, 1 May 2002, see A/56/49 (Vol. III), p. 97, and subsequently continued). While some exceed these guidelines, there was a general decrease in the average number of words per statement.

  9. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf (Section 1(3), ¶27).

  10. For social development, search terms also included ‘social and economic development’ and ‘socioeconomic development.’

  11. The most frequently occurring terms within two words after gender are shown in a supplemental file.

  12. The baseline year is the year before the UN resolves to hold the global conference and to begin preparatory meetings.

  13. Symbols +/− signify directionality (+ increase, − decrease).

  14. Provisional verbatim records of UNGA GD speeches are available on the UN’s Official Document System: https://documents.un.org (last accessed 3/2024). All GD speeches delivered in 1982, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 were studied. These years were selected for a representative sample and insights into current trends.

  15. See UNGA, 23 Aug. 2013, A/RES/67/290.

  16. References to ‘environment’ most often refer to the natural environment. Less frequent uses include international economic environment or security environment (which have not been removed from Fig.3). The grey dashed line might slightly overrepresent references to the natural environment.

  17. In Figs. 3–5 (c) and (d), lines represent averages within each group in given years. The number of countries in each regional group varies over time. See https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/regionalgroups (last accessed 3/2024).

  18. A/CONF.166/9.

  19. We thank Sebastian Haug for this insight.

  20. Author’s interview with a retired Romanian diplomat via e-mail, 31 Jan. 2021.

  21. United Nations. (2021): Our Common Agenda. Report of the Secretary-General, pgs. 6-7, 29. https://www.un.org/en/content/common-agenda-report/assets/pdf/Common_Agenda_Report_English.pdf

  22. UNGA, 1999 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development: Globalization, Gender and Work, A/54/227, p. 9.

  23. Author’s interview with a senior UN official via Zoom, 29 Oct. 2020.

  24. UNGA, 21 July 2010, A/RES/64/289, pgs. 8-9.

  25. Author’s interview with a senior UN official via Zoom, 29 Oct. 2020. See also A/54/227, pgs. 7-8; Krook and True (2010: 115).

  26. UNGA President, Mr. Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, UNGA 30 Sept. 2019, A/74/PV.13, p. 38.

  27. UNGA, A/73/PV.6-PV.16.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Jörg Rottler for help with the quantitative analysis of the corpus. An earlier version was presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Nashville in 2022. For helpful comments, we thank conference participants, Nadine Benedix, Sebastian Haug, Leonie Holthaus, Sylvia Hordosch, Johannes Klassen, Miranda Loli, Matias Margulis, editors of the Journal of International Relations and Development and the anonymous reviewers. This research was begun at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Universität Duisburg-Essen, where both authors held fellowships in 2019-20, and whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, 251-1855 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2, Canada

    Catherine Hecht

  2. Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Residenzschloss 1, 64283, Darmstadt, Germany

    Jens Steffek

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Correspondence to Catherine Hecht.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Overview of selected relevant institutionalisation processes and shifts in salience of core search terms in the UNGA GD

 

UN global conference year

Prior global conferences or events on related issues

Follow-up conferences or reviews (selected)

Formal institutions & institutionalisation

(selected)

Features of institutionalisation of term in UN system

Salience: trends

Sustainable development

1992

1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment

WSSD (2002)

Rio + 20 (2012), Annual UNFCCC COP conferences

UNEP, CSD, SDGs and 2030 Agenda (2015), HLPF, high civil society mobilisation on environment

1972-1987: None

1992-2012: Moderate-fluctuating; use as umbrella term

2001-2012 suppressed by MDGs

2012/2015 to present Increased with links to SDGs, High density

Sharp rise at 1992 conference, then plateaued until a significant increase after 2012

Social development

1995

(no comparable prior global conference)

Copenhagen + 5, overlap in content with Millennium Summit (2000)

CSD, low to moderate civil society mobilisation on social development, UNRISD

Since 1995: Low/moderate; Fragmented in different policy areas, limited scope of term, incorporated into other development agendas

Peak around 1995, decline between 1996 and mid-2000s, then plateaued at a lower level

Gender

1995

1975, 1980, 1985: First, Second, and Third World Conferences on Women

Beijing +5, +10, 15, +20, +25, Annual CSW sessions

CEDAW (since 1979); UN Women (since 2010); MDGs, SDGs, high civil society mobilisation

1975-1995:

Low

After 1995:

Gradual increase;

Since 2010: Increasing density

Gradual rise since 1995, with slight acceleration since 2010.

Appendix 2

Figs. 7 and 8 below complement Figs. 3–5 with additional data.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Panels (a, b, c, d, e, f): Trajectories of sustainable development, social development, and gender in the UNGA GD, occurrence per 100,000 words, disaggregated by the UN regional groups

Full size image
Fig.8
figure 8

Trajectory of women in the UNGA GD, 1970-2020. Panels (a, b): Percentage of speakers from each of the UN regional groups making at least one mention in their statements. Panels (c, d): Occurrence per 100,000 words, disaggregated by the UN regional groups

Full size image

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Hecht, C., Steffek, J. Salient discourses in international society: When and how have United Nations global conferences acted as catalysts?. J Int Relat Dev (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-024-00324-7

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