Conflicting Visions for Global Development: An Analysis of Debates in the UNGA’s Main Committees

The UN resolutions on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia have shown that not all countries of the Global South are reliable partners of the West. Each of them follows their own economic and geostrategic agenda, yet many are bound together by an emphasis on national sovereignty and global justice. On many issues, the resulting vision for global politics conflicts with that of the richer Northern states. This conflict is most visible in the area of development cooperation. The Northern donors prefer ODA conditional on institutional reforms. For the South conditionality is a challenge to national sovereignty. The Northern donors emphasize the liberal economic model, based on free trade, competitiveness, and incentivizing private investments by encouraging market reforms. By contrast, the South prefers to draft their own national development plans for which they request public funds. Over the last decade, this conflict has intensified. On the one hand, funds became increasingly scarce. The West experienced a financial and, subsequently, fiscal crisis that led to cuts in development aid. The South fears that the necessary funds for climate initiatives will in fact be taken from existing ODA budgets. On the other hand, emerging powers like China and Russia are doing their bit to fuel the North-South conflict. The present paper analyses this conflict where it is most visible: in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). To this end, we present the first analysis of the more than 50,000 speeches held by member states’ delegations in the Second and Third Main Committee of the UNGA between 1993 and 2019. Combining latent topic modelling, the Wordfish scaling algorithm and factor analysis, we identify member states’ changing positions on two latent rhetorical conflicts. A first conflict revolves around economic and sustainable development, whereas a second conflict revolves around human rights and human development. We find that positions on both conflicts are a function of states’ state of economic development as well as their regime type. Analysing the committee debates, we clearly find evidence for an increasing polarization which, however, is limited to reasonably democratic countries. Finally, we track the changes of selected UN member states’ positions along key explanatory variables.