Combining Computational and Archival Methods to Study International Organisations: Examining the Visibility of Refugees in Over 90 Years of the International Labour Organization’s Agenda

The computational turn has afforded advances on data analysis across many domains. In this paper, we demonstrate how combining computational linguistics and qualitative archival methods generates insights that would not have necessarily arisen from using either approach individually. Specifically, using a new dataset of 93 years of International Labour Organization (ILO) annual reports spanning 1919-2015, we ask how and to what extent have refugees been salient in the ILO’s high-level agenda over the 20th century. Choosing the ILO is somewhat counter-intuitive: it is not necessarily an organization associated with refugee issues. Nevertheless, using part-of-speech tagging as well as frequency and keyword analysis, we actually find three key moments in the ILO’s history during which refugees were especially visible: the interwar period (1921-28), post-WWII (1948-52), and when the ILO and UNHCR signed a memorandum of understanding on refugee protection (1982-84). Further archival analysis during these moments paints a richer picture of the ILO’s relationship with refugees and refugee-serving organisations, suggesting that the ILO becomes involved in refugee affairs when refugees are more broadly depicted as either labour migrants or when their self-reliance and livelihoods are encouraged by humanitarian agencies. Our methods and analysis show how scholars studying international organizations—or anyone using growing amounts of documentary evidence thanks to digitization—can efficiently handle textual data, preserve qualitative access to that same data, and generate original findings based on this unique mixed methods approach.