A group of Brazilian researchers is turning to large-scale data to answer critical questions on global affairs, including at the multilateral level. These initiatives are intended to highlight the utility of such tools to a wide range of stakeholders while promoting the critical work conducted in the institutions of higher education that are part of the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) initiative.
The first product, Energy Treaties Matrix or Enetrix, is a web platform for registering and monitoring international agreements related to energy. “It is a system that provides specialized resources, versatile solutions, and diversified analysis of energy agreements between countries and transnational organizations,” explained Henry Iure Paiva, Professor, and Coordinator of the Research Group on Energy Security at the Federal University of Paraíba.
Designed with the Sustainable Development Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy in mind, its main objective is to optimize access to strategic and valuable information about the energy sector, considering several search parameters. The current version has data on international agreements signed by Brazil, extracted from a database maintained by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Currently, the platform is being used by the Permanent Mission of Brazil to the United Nations and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Department of Energy in Brazil. Moreover, it is scheduled for deployment in 43 other Brazilian diplomatic posts abroad. Professor Paiva and his team’s research has already mapped over 26 countries with data that Enetrix can capture.
Researchers are developing two additional projects at the Federal University of Pernambuco. Professor Rafael Mesquita coordinates the project Multilateralism and Global Challenges: Past, Present, and Future. The study maps the trajectory of crucial United Nations topics by looking at the entire collection of more than 18,000 resolutions adopted by the Organization’s General Assembly since 1946.
According to Mesquita, “though other studies have offered overviews of the evolution of the United Nations, this is the first one in recent years to do so using citation analysis.” The researcher continued to explain that “in order to find which resolutions were the most important throughout the history of the Organization, we only need to compute which ones were cited the most by later documents.”
The study found that human rights, decolonization, development, and peace and security were the themes most referred to in the past seven decades, with around one-third of all resolutions ever adopted referring to at least one of these four issues. In addition, the research identified additional insightful patterns, such as the peaks and valleys of attention around each theme and the factors determining which resolutions received more citations.
Furthermore, Antonio Pires dos Santos, PhD candidate, has been researching the speeches delivered at the United Nations Security Council. His study analyzes which forms of intervention and conflict resolution are emphasized the most by the Council’s members based on the UN Security Council Debates dataset, co-authored by him and composed of more than 80,000 speeches from 1995 to 2020.
Preliminary results indicate, among other findings, that the Security Council behaves differently according to the region of the world under debate. Even with significant geopolitical tensions between the Permanent Members, the Security Council can agree on consensual forms of intervention, such as peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, especially in the Americas.
Another utility of the study is that it provides a way of observing the diplomatic ‘styles’ of the Permanent Members. According to Antonio, “since the dataset has a variable to identify all agenda items in multiple levels, it is possible to verify the global pattern of behavior of a given member and what are the cases in which this same member deviates from this pattern.” Through automated text analysis, the research provides insight into the actual practice of the Council.
The outputs of these university projects assist national governments and United Nations entities at once, allowing the former to chart the energy cooperation landscape and their standing in important United Nations bodies and the latter to gain insight into the trends within the Organization over the years. “This is an important demonstration of science put to the service of diplomacy,” said professor Paiva.
