Global Priorities and the UN General Debate

We charted the speeches of 17 of the biggest powers in the world at the UN.

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7 October, 2014

At the General Debate of the 69th session of the UN General Assembly in New York last week, almost 200 statesmen addressed the august body. The theme of the debate was the post-2015 development agenda, but, as always, leaders were free to use their 15 minutes (an often broken voluntary guideline) to discuss any topic of their choice. So it is perhaps not surprising how often ISIL and terrorism came up and by whom. When development was raised, it is interesting who connected it to the trade and who connected it to climate change. In the graphic below, we charted the speeches by topic of 17 of biggest powers in the world.

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