Mapping Autocracies in International Law

The debate about democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarian regimes has alerted scholars and politicians concerned about the liberal international order and multilateralism. As this order is embedded in international law, the debate reached a point of speculation about the emergence of “authoritarian international law”. Such an emergence should be visible in the negotiations and adoptions of legal resolutions adopted by states in the United Nations General Assembly. However, beyond speculations and anecdotal evidence, we don’t know much about the empirical reality of authoritarian regimes as lawmakers in the General Assembly. In this paper, we map how autocracies shape the development of legal resolutions adopted between 1990-2019 with regard to number, domain, and type. We build a text corpus containing all resolutions adopting conventions and declarations on all domains in international law. we use natural language processing and network analysis to identify autocracies’ positionality towards substantive issues in international law and substantiate our quantitative analysis with selected qualitative illustrations. Overall, we provide a more differentiated picture of the role of authoritarian regimes in international law and the contestation of the liberal international order.