ABSTRACT
Introduction: This article investigates the evolving landscape of diplomacy in the digital age, focusing on diplomats at the United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York. The central inquiry revolves around how diplomatic actors use digital tools to complement or augment traditional face-to-face diplomacy. Methods: We systematically compare a substantial corpus of X posts (tweets) from UN diplomats with their public statements at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), employing advanced computational social science techniques. This study applies a range of large-scale text analysis methods, including word embedding, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis, to investigate systematic differences between offline and online communication. Results: Our analysis reveals that, while the essence of diplomacy remains consistent across both domains, there is strategic selectivity in the use of online platforms by diplomats. Online communication emphasizes non-security topics, ceremonial matters, and prominent policy stances, in contrast to the operational issues common in UNSC deliberations. Additionally, online discourse adopts a less confrontational, more public diplomacy-oriented tone, with variations among countries. Discussion: This study offers one of the first systematic comparisons between offline and online diplomatic messages. It illuminates how diplomats navigate the digital realm to complement traditional roles. The findings indicate that some elements of public diplomacy and nation branding, directed toward a wider audience far beyond the council chamber, have become an integral part of multilateral diplomacy unfolding at the UNSC.
ABSTRACT
Despite considerable scholarly attention on the institutional and normative aspects of development cooperation, its longitudinal dynamics unfolding at the global level have rarely been investigated. Focusing on aid, we examine the evolving global structure of development cooperation induced by aid flows in its entirety. Representing annual aid flows between donors and recipients from 1970 to 2013 as a series of networks, we apply hierarchical stochastic block models to extensive aid-flow data that cover not only the aid behavior of the major OECD donors but also that of other emerging donors, including China. Despite a considerable degree of external expansion and internal diversification of aid relations over the years, the analysis has uncovered a temporally persistent structure of aid networks. The latter comprises, on the one hand, a limited number of major donors with far-reaching resources and, on the other hand, a large number of mostly poor but globally well-connected recipients. The results cast doubt on the efficacy of recurrent efforts for "aid reform" in substantially changing the global aid flow pattern.
Subject(s)
International Cooperation , ChinaABSTRACT
Dryland pastoralism has long attracted considerable attention from researchers in diverse fields. However, rigorous formal study is made difficult by the high level of mobility of pastoralists as well as by the sizable spatio-temporal variability of their environment. This article presents a new computational approach for studying mobile pastoralism that overcomes these issues. Combining multi-temporal satellite images and agent-based modeling allows a comprehensive examination of pastoral resource access over a realistic dryland landscape with unpredictable ecological dynamics. The article demonstrates the analytical potential of this approach through its application to mobile pastoralism in northeast Nigeria. Employing more than 100 satellite images of the area, extensive simulations are conducted under a wide array of circumstances, including different land-use constraints. The simulation results reveal complex dependencies of pastoral resource access on these circumstances along with persistent patterns of seasonal land use observed at the macro level.
