Introducing the PeaceKeeping Operations Corpus (PKOC)

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 quantitative 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.