While text-as-data has gained prominence in the study of International Organizations (IOs) over the past decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has remained absent from this research wave. We present the NATO Secretary General Documents (NATO-SGD) corpus. It features over 3,000 speeches and statements for the 1996-2024 period, covering the tenures of six NATO Secretaries General. The corpus offers a comparable body of texts that captures the Alliance’s discourse and evolving priorities across three decades of geopolitical transformation. Focusing on the Secretary General—who is NATO’s primary administrative officer, spokesperson, and authoritative voice—we present a valuable resource for scholars interested in international security, IO leadership, and public diplomacy. Beyond outlining future applications, this article showcases the analytical value of the data through temporal and cross-sectional descriptives.
Knapp et al. (Thu,) studied this question.