I just stumbled across this interesting research project (and job announcement). So, as I understand it, they are going to look at which countries supported or opposed which (parts of) various UN resolutions in their speeches at the General Assembly. I wonder whether they will consider the assembly as the locus of interactions (e.g. that speeches are given in a particular order) or whether the assembly is just a label that guides the selection of the documents which will then be analyzed as documents rather than as speeches given in a particular context. In other words: is this project about the UN general assembly as a meeting or as a source of documents?
I paste the message below FYI.
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We have a vacant position for a fulltime PhD student as part of my research project on “Agenda Setting in the UN General Assembly” funded by DFF (Deadline: 1 October). The successful candidate will be enrolled in the Aarhus BSS Graduate Program in Political Science , which offers excellent academic working conditions as well as an attractive salary.
For more information about the Aarhus BSS Graduate School: Political Science
The call can be found here: Special call: Agenda Setting in the UN General Assembly
The research project offers a unique opportunity for writing a PhD thesis on international cooperation inside the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). An interesting thesis could have a focus on either a particular world region, a selected group of states or a specific field of international politics (e.g. disarmament, human rights). The PhD candidate should be interested in either international or legislative politics and have a basic knowledge of quantitative methods.
In the project, we analyse the patterns of co-sponsorship in the UNGA using quantitative social science methods. The draft resolutions and decisions will be integrated in a machine-readable text corpus that, subsequently, can be used to analyse latent patterns of conflict and cooperation. The systematic enumeration of documents allows us to match draft resolutions to the corresponding speeches as well as the recorded votes. Matching these data sets enables us to analyse the decision-making processes in the UNGA over the course of the last 30 years.
Best Regards,
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Dr. Daniel Finke, Professor
Department of Political Science
Aarhus University
Phone: +45 871 65 639
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