Introducing the PeaceKeeping Operations Corpus (PKOC)
| Author | Elio Amicarelli,Jessica Di Salvatore |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343320978693 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Introducing the PeaceKeeping Operations
Corpus (PKOC)
Elio Amicarelli
Independent Researcher
Jessica Di Salvatore
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
Abstract
Scholars have used United Nations Secretary-General’s (UNSG) reports to extract information on peacekeeping
operations (PKOs). As key peacekeeping political documents, UNSG reports contain much more information on the
politics of peacekeeping. Furthermore, manually extracting information is costly and time-consuming. By providing
a machine-readable collection of the UN Secretary-General’s Reports on PKOs (1994–2020), the PeaceKeeping
Operations Corpus (PKOC) offers highly structured and multiformat text data that connect the peace and conflict
research community to recent advancements in text-as-data techniques. Besides paving the way for the first quanti-
tative content analyses on PKOs, PKOC speeds up and expands the range of information analysable from these
documents and allows researchers to query them in a quicker, systematic and reproducible way. In this article, we
discuss PKOC’s core characteristics. As illustration of the innovative potential of PKOC, we show how text-as-data
approaches provide more nuanced understanding on PKOs’ evolution toward multidimensionality, both over time
and within missions. While last generation PKOs are assumed to be multidimensional, we show how they vary in
multidimensionality and how their complexity also changes throughout their life-cycle.
Keywords
peacekeeping, quantitative text analysis, text-as-data
Introduction
The UN produces few statistics on peacekeeping opera-
tions (PKOs),
1
but plenty of documents that talk about
them. Little effort has been made, however, in using and
analysing reports from the UN Secretary-General
(UNSG) on PKOs as text data. To this aim, this article
introduces the PeaceKeeping Operations Corpus
(PKOC), a digitized, structured collection of all UNSG
reports on PKOs from 1994 to 2020. In the quantitative
literature on peacekeeping, these reports are widely used
to extract information on missions’ activities, coopera-
tion with the government and location of blue helmets
(Clayton et al., 2017). We propose to use these docu-
ments to shed light on political and strategic aspects of
PKOs.
PKOC enables and expands the spectrum of the
UNSG reports’ usage in peacekeeping research along
three main dimensions. First, PKOC enables agile inter-
rogation of a relatively large corpus at the researchers’
fingertips. For example, to evaluate research feasibility by
checking whether a piece of information is contained in
the corpus, it is not necessary to download manually and
then read hundreds of documents; as any other digital
text, PKOC allows researchers to quickly query the
entire body of UNSG reports (1994–2020). Second,
Corresponding author:
jessica.di-salvatore@warwick.ac.uk
1
These are referred to as peace operations, particularly after the
Department of Peacekeeping Operations became Department of
Peace Operation in 2019.
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(5) 1137–1148
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343320978693
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