What the record shows
Analysis
Short pieces on what the data compiled here turns out to say. Every figure in them is queried from the corpus when the page is built, so an article cannot drift from the record it describes — and if the data it reads stops being published, the article stops with it.
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The most vetoed question at the UN is who gets to join it
Not war, not sanctions, not the Middle East. The subject the Security Council veto has been used on most often since 1946 is membership itself.
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Who actually keeps the peace
The states supplying UN peacekeepers are almost none of the states holding the vetoes -- and how many of them are women depends far more on the job than on the country.
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Refugees go next door
The states hosting the most displaced people are mostly the ones bordering the crisis, and several are producing refugees and sheltering them at the same time.
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The General Debate got shorter as the UN got bigger
The typical speech from the green marble rostrum is now less than half the length it was at its peak, and the reason is arithmetic: the same number of days, far more member states.
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Everyone signs. Ratifying takes about three years.
Across nearly six thousand cases where a state both signed and ratified a UN treaty, the middle one took 1,008 days -- and some of the newest conventions have dozens of signatures and almost no parties at all.
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The shape of the Consolidated List
The Security Council's sanctions list is not one list but fourteen, and both its largest regime and its busiest single year point at the same event.
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The median UN mission has nine diplomats. The largest has 153.
Every member state gets one vote in the General Assembly and one turn at the rostrum. What they can do with the rest of the building depends on a headcount that varies by a factor of more than a hundred.
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Most states that receive aid spend more on their armies
Among states that both receive development assistance and report military spending, more than four in ten spend more on the second than they receive of the first.
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The floor rose faster than the ceiling
Since 1960 the best life expectancy in the world has improved by about a decade. The worst has improved by twice that, and the distance between them has closed by a third.