Unveiling diplomatic narratives: Analyzing United Nations Security Council debates through metaphorical cognition

Abstract

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is entrusted with the responsibility of safeguarding global peace and security. Prominent global security concerns will be deliberated upon, and viewpoints will be presented within the UNSC. Analyzing the cognitive patterns from UNSC debates helps scholars gain insights into the intricacies of international relations and diplomatic discourse. In this study, our focus lies in the cognitive analysis of debates held within the UNSC. We employ metaphors and their associated concept mappings as a methodological tool to dissect the cognitive nuances present in the debates, spanning from January 1995 to December 2020. To undertake this extensive analysis from a large volume of documents, we leverage MetaPro, a state-of-the-art computational metaphor processing system to obtain the concept mappings of metaphors. We analyze cognitive variations by temporal and geographical variables. We also demonstrate the correlation between metaphor-reflected cognition and diplomatic behavior, and their recursive influence, based on large sample research. Our major finding highlights the mutual impacts of metaphorical cognition and voting behavior at the UN.