State-Level Determinants of Rhetorical Position-Taking on Terrorism

Abstract

The United Nations has not agreed on a single comprehensive definition of terrorism despite decades of debate, and existing accounts generally attribute this stalemate to either cynical posturing or genuine contestation over meaning. Yet we still lack broad, text‑sensitive evidence showing how states actually use the term and which mechanisms, particularly those concerning material and strategic factors, structure variation in rhetoric across time and place. I assemble every identifiable English‑language use of “terrorism” in United Nations General Debate speeches from 1947–2022 (20,109 instances) and extend conText embedding regression with multiple imputation, fixed‑effect removal in embedding space, and projection onto three spatial dimensions that capture states positions on salient issues in the international politics of terrorism—dimensions pertaining to terrorism’s ‘Causes’, ‘Responses’, and ‘Perpetrators’. Between countries, state attributes and politico‑geographic regions strongly predict terrorism rhetoric; within countries, changes explain little movement, with the operation of a legislature the only robust signal in baseline models, and with higher democracy associated with movement toward terrorism rhetoric invoking “root causes” and state violence, and higher domestic terrorism associated with movement toward state perpetrators. These patterns imply that international rhetoric on terrorism is highly structured between countries but its evolution within countries finds limited explanations in state-level covariates. The findings refine debates over ambiguity versus contestation in the international politics of terrorism and provide an adaptable measurement framework for inference on meaning in large political text corpora.

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