International Bureaucrats in Global Policy Debates: Actor Prominence and Topic Salience in the UN Security Council Debates on Afghanistan (1996-2017)

Bureaucrats of the United Nations (UN) secretariat were the sixth most frequent speaker in the UN Security Council in the 1996 to 2017 period. This raises the pressing question, whether and how bureaucratic speakers shape the debates taking place among member states in this body. Focusing on the Council’s meetings on the ‘Situation in Afghanistan’ we select a case for which we expect a significant shift in the discourse following the US intervention after 09/11. In particular, as subject-matter expert, UN bureaucrats should shape the discourse in becoming more active as speakers and introducing new topics that may – or may not – be picked up by other speakers. Unsupervised topic modelling of all 2,655 speeches on Afghanistan between 1996 and 2017 allows identifying topics in the discourse, understood as issues to which speakers repeatedly refer with a similar set of words. Based on the frequency with which each speaker refers to a given topic, we create a speaker-topic network. Annual changes in the network allow inferring on bureaucratic discourse shaping at three levels: attention getting* (changes in actor centrality), agenda setting (introduction of new topics) and topic adoption by other speakers (changes in topic centrality)**. We find that the centrality of the bureaucracy indeed rose sharply in 2001/2002 and that the bureaucracy introduced new topic in the immediate years after the intervention. These topics were partially picked up by others. Our findings highlight the utility of the conceptual framework and add new detail to our understanding of the role of the bureaucracy in international policy-making.