Abstract This article presents a new dataset that compiles every available public transcript of the United Nations Security Council from 1946 to 2024 in a machine-readable format. Encompassing over 160,000 speeches and more than 87 million words, it offers unprecedented historical depth, capturing both Cold War dynamics and post-Cold War institutional transformations. The dataset's granular structure—preserving speaker identity, affiliation, and exact speaking order—enables detailed analysis of how diverse actors articulate security concepts across time. We demonstrate its analytical potential through 3 illustrative applications combining traditional and transformer-based text analysis: examining sovereignty's evolution from right to responsibility, tracing the dramatic transformation of human rights discourse following the Cold War, and identifying institutional champions of the humanitarian turn. By spanning nearly eight decades of deliberations, this resource supports diverse research agendas on global security norms, institutional discourse, and the complex interplay between language and international policy.
Sakamoto et al. (Mon,) studied this question.