International Treaty Database
Abstract
This research project focuses on the analysis of international treaty texts, with the objective to systematically analyze patterns of international cooperation. While there is a growing understanding of international cooperation through international organizations, relatively little is known on the type of obligations countries commit to through international treaties in a systematic manner. This research project aims to fill this gap and foster greater awareness of the importance to consider treaty texts.
More specifically, we aim to build a novel database on international treaties and their content based on one of the most comprehensive library of international treaty texts, handled by HeinOnline. This database will have the specificity to cut across multiple policy areas, where most of the existing treaty databases do not allow for such comparisons (see for example, DESTA, EDIT, PA-X). While other databases do cross-cut policy areas (e.g. UNTS, League of Nations Treaty Series), this novel database will offer a novel historical perspective of treaty-making including treaties since the 16th Century with varying degrees of institutionalization or formality.
The analysis of the HeinOnline library content raises a number of empirical challenges that we aim to address using advanced machine learning and NLP models. First, numerous treaty texts are written in another language than English. Second, books included in the collection record treaty texts but also other type of content not relevant for our database. Third, the scope of documents does not allow for a qualitative or manual coding of the treaty content. Additional empirical issues that we aim to address are poor text quality due to OCR issues as well as challenges to isolate each individual treaty text given the current structure of the library.
