Words of Power: Introducing a Comprehensive Corpus of UN Security Council Resolutions [ESELS Conference Toulouse 2025]

Abstract The United Nations Security Council is the most influential and powerful of the principal UN organs. Article 24 of the UN Charter assigns the UNSC “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security”. Chapter VII of the Charter grants the Council unique binding powers, but the UNSC plays a prominent role in all affairs of the UN. We introduce a novel international legal dataset containing texts and metadata for all resolutions of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) from resolution 1 (1946) through resolution 2722 (2024). The dataset provides resolution texts in all six official UN languages, draft texts and meeting records in English, as well as extensive metadata, for a grand total of 82 variables. The computational workflow is engineered end-to-end as a fully automated extract-transform-load (ETL) data pipeline with citation analysis and NLP components, unit tests and complex reporting. The declarative workflow is fault- tolerant, resumable and stores intermediate results in over one hundred individual checkpoints. The underlying code is published open source under the GPL-3. In an international community founded on the rule of law the activities of the United Nations must be public, transparent and defensible. In these troubled times where the rule-based international order is under attack it is more important than ever to document, understand and promote systematic approaches to international law. Context The presentation was delivered by Seán Fobbe at the ESELS Conference Toulouse 2025 in Panel 6.1 on 20 June 2025. 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