How to measure disruption in International Organizations? A corpus-based approach

In policy and academia, it has become common to characterize the current time as an acute “polycrisis”, in which the rules of the international order are flouted and its institutions imperiled. Yet, assertions about the gravity or the intensity of these shocks have little utility in the absence of measurement criteria that would allow us to compare the current tribulations with previous ones – or even with a baseline period of tranquility. This paper seeks to cover that gap by using the documental wealth generated by international organizations to identify and measure continuity and change. By applying network analysis and Natural Language Processing to the 27,686 resolutions adopted from 1946 to 2022, we identify periods of disruption, as measured by shifts in citation patterns and language. Specifically, we observe when citations of newer resolutions were redirected from traditional sources to alternative ones, leading to changes in dyad age and in modularity scores; and vocabulary renewal over the years on the level of word proportions and of drifts in topic distributions. Results show that the 1960s and early 1990s concentrated a higher rate of innovation, as evidenced by 7 to 8% increments in preference for recent jurisprudence and by changes in the vocabulary distribution of approximately 30%. The tools tested in the current study could be used in corpora from other organizations or in a targeted a manner for policy areas of choice.