About

Welcome to Youth Delegate Search!

This is a platform for researching speeches held by Youth Delegates to the UN General Assembly.

Youth Delegate Search offers practitioners, academics, and interested researchers the possibility to access all speeches given by Youth Delegates to the General Assembly since the official start of the programme in 1982 until 2015 – and this all in one place. It also allows users to filter the speeches by keyword, time range, gender of the respective youth delegate, state or hemisphere, and thus serves as the basis for further research on the Youth Delegate Programme and on youth participation in the international sphere more broadly. For information on the categories used on this website see here.

The statistics section of the website provides relevant figures based on our initial analysis of the data collected. We are currently working on a deeper analysis of the speeches that also considers possible similarities and patterns of argumentation across the speeches and how they may or may not have been received within the UN system.

As this platform is a work in progress, we warmly encourage everybody to inform us about any mistakes we might have made or speeches we might have missed. You can do so via email.

Background

Youth Delegate Search is a project of the X-Student Research Group “Youth, Peace and Security – Analysing the Reception of Youth Delegates’ Speeches by the UN Security Council” at the Department of Law of Freie Universität Berlin.

The X-Student Research Group was established in April 2021 and is led by Julian Hettihewa, Felix Schott, and Dr Hannah Birkenkötter. It is funded by the Berlin University Alliance, a consortium of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal Government and the Länder.

The project is supported by the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the members of the X-Student Research Group Muhammed Furkan Duran, Daniel Manvell, Maria Kristin Trumsi, and Lewis Wattenberg for their hard work in collecting the relevant UN documents, uploading and analysing the data, and tagging the speeches. Special thanks also to fellow member Erik Tuchtfeld for administering the technical aspects of this website.