Governance, legitimacy and peacekeeping
an automated content analysis of democracy in UN resolutions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22456/2178-8839.147996Keywords:
UN; Post-Cold War; AfricaAbstract
The reestablishment of the multipolar and liberal order of the 1990s allowed international organizations, such as the UN system, to promote international humanitarian aid efforts and violence containment to promote peace in countries affected by civil wars. The democratic pathway stands as the main model for reconciliation of the parties to a conflict, between incumbent members of the government and rival or rebellious political groups. However, democracy still occupies an embryonic space in the paradigms of peacebuilding. Thus, this work aims to answer: how is the treatment given by the General Assembly and the Security Council regarding the issue of democracy based on the resolutions produced between 1991 and 2021? Content analysis of UN resolutions on the topic of democracy was carried out, with a view to identifying the main terms and thematic correlations present in the corpus through the use of the Descending Hierarchical Classification (DHC) technique via the Iramuteq software. It was concluded that the UN presents profuse normative diversification and the increase in terms related to hybrid governance such as “local”, “pluralism” and “civil society”. In addition, the word “democracy” showed high frequency but low co-occurrence with the generated word classes.
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Accepted 2025-09-29
Published 2025-10-23
