(Dis)engagement and Contestation in the International Refugee Regime: Insights from the UNHCR ExCom Data Corpus (1974-2024)

As emergent, often times authoritarian powers make pressure to assert their new weight in established UN organizations, traditional sponsors tend to step back on their original engagement, often under the lead of right-wing populist leaders. Such shifts can potentially undermine both the functioning and legitimacy of UN organizations or redirect their focus away from their liberal origins. Instead of explicit obstruction through opt-outs and exits, we see that authoritarian and populist regimes often remain in UN organizations, while simultaneously scoring political points by ignoring concurrent commitments and withholding monetary support. However, we know only little about how these states’ discursive participation in UN organizations has evolved over time, and to what extent authoritarian leaders abide to the 'rules of the talk', engage in overt obstruction, or more subtle instrumentalize UN organizations. Against this backdrop, the paper launches the UNHCR Executive Committee Data Corpus providing an inside view on states (dis)engagement and contestation in this preeminent institution of the liberal international order. The Executive Committee of the UN High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR ExCom) is the only specialized multilateral forum contributing to the development of the global governance of refugees (Fresia 2014:514). UNHCR ExCom compiles the summaries (so-called Summary Records) of all statements by 191 UN member states and organizations between 1974 and 2024, showcasing the "public face of diplomatic efforts to promote international refugee protection” (Barutciski 2009: 133). The corpus of over two Million words was collected physically through photographing UN Summary Records documents in UNHCR’s archives in Geneva (for the ExCom sessions in 1974-1989) and downloaded online from UN online archive (for the ExCom sessions 1990-2024). With this unique data, we ask how do shifts in power and the tensions between liberal democracy, authoritarianism and democratic backsliding reflect obstructionism of the refugee regime? Methodologically, we study (dis)engagement and discursive obstruction via multi-methods approach to text-analysis. Utilizing the entirety of the dataset we map and compare discursive practices of states by analysing statements’: frequency; sentiment; network centrality; topic analysis. We compare the discursive practices of states along two dimensions: power and regime type. To complement our quantitative text analysis, we conduct an in-depth frame analysis of speeches from states including China, Hungary, Russia, Türkiye, the US, and Venezuela.