Open Journal of AI-Assisted Global Inquiries (OJAIGI) · Issue 1 · Autumn 2026
Student reports, PSIA Autumn 2026
Final group research projects from the course on AI-assisted data analysis
for the social sciences, Sciences Po PSIA, autumn 2026. Each team asked a question about
international politics and answered it with data, text analysis and Claude Code.
The results are five interactive reports.
The verdict is familiar: the Security Council no longer works and the five
permanent members simply ignore it. The team tested that verdict against 34 years of what the
five actually said and did.
Aakriti Sharma, Abdullah Makhlouf, Abhinav Poludasu, George Newcomb, Sergio Sartori
The team read 7,232 speeches (about 5 million words) and 955 voted decisions,
including 62 veto votes, on 18 violent conflicts. They used six methods, from vote analysis
to word distance and AI-coded legitimacy claims.
The P5 never left the room. They gave 8.7 times as many speeches a year in 2022–24 as in
the 1990s, and 81% of decisions still passed unanimously.
The break came in 2011–2014, in votes and in words at the same time. In those years,
vetoes became routine.
It is not two camps but one against four. Russia drifted away from everyone, China
included. Russia and China vote together but do not speak alike.
The Charter became ammunition. Commitment is conditional: when a member has a stake in a
conflict, it votes something other than yes 72% of the time, against 32% otherwise.
This is a network analysis of 12,757 forwards linking 748 German-language
right-wing, "alternative media" and conspiracy channels. The window runs from 1 June to
30 September 2026 and includes the 6 September vote.
The network works as an ecosystem, not a campaign. It forms twelve communities, each with
its own agenda, and a few distributors move content between them. One channel made 22% of all
forwards.
The most influential source forwarded only 12 times, and AfD party channels supplied under
1% of forwards. Distributors decide, not authors.
Channels are aligned but not coordinated: only 2 of 820 channel pairs were flagged.
Before the polls closed, Russia/Ukraine content was forwarded more often than election content.
The vote raised the volume of election content (8.9 to 15.5 forwards a day), but through
the same leaders.
China built its lead in rare earths with quotas, licences and bans. The West
now answers with "economic sovereignty" policies. Do any of these policies actually move
trade, or do they only put a label on changes already under way?
Anna Carminati, Parth Piyush Prasad, Yury Koloskov, Pietro Ceccone
The team combined bilateral trade data for six rare-earth product codes
(1995–2024), a text analysis of 576 Chinese government documents (1999–2026), a list of 60
policy events and a what-if model that removes China as a supplier.
Beijing first justified its monopoly as an environmental choice, then as a matter of
security. The monopoly itself never ended.
Replacing China works on paper, not in practice. Japan cut its direct dependence on Chinese
magnets from 65% to 36%, but counting one hop back it still depends on China for 68%.
The monopoly moved up the chain. China has been a net importer of rare-earth compounds
since 2018, yet it makes about 94% of the world's permanent magnets.
The usual account says the region is choosing sides, that Chinese loans buy
its ore and that US policy is winning it back. This site tests that account against the
record, year by year and country by country.
Domenico Bencivenga, Mateo Wilde Maldonado, Nicolas Martinez Patiño, Dieu-Linh Phan, Paolo Maselli Zepeda, Maolan Yang
This research platform covers 20 countries and 20 minerals, with trade,
finance, investment, UN votes, parliamentary records, press coverage and 394 coded
political statements.
The ore went to China. China's share of the region's reported mineral exports rose from 6%
in 2000 to 45% in 2025, while the US share fell from 16% to 11%.
Beijing's money came and went before trade peaked: US$77 bn in Chinese commitments in
2015–21, against US$7 bn from the US. Washington's attention came afterwards.
Elections did not change the buyer. The region does not talk like a region choosing sides:
72% of 200 executive statements name neither power.
Where in the mine-to-cell chain does Europe's dependency on Chinese battery
technology bind, and how does Europe think about it?
Pedro Ezquer Parejo, Laura Valdivia
The team followed the goods, using trade data along the graphite battery
chain, and the words, using 14,577 paragraphs from EU institutions and the press
(February 2022 to September 2026). Then they put the two side by side.
Europe diversified the mines, but China kept the chokepoint. China's share of mined graphite
exports fell from 60% to 24%, but 97% of the EU's battery-grade artificial graphite still comes
from China. Europe makes only about 1.5% of the anode graphite it needs.
The graphite is made in Korea but refined in China. Up to 98% of the EU's coated anode
imports trace back to China.
Europe's talk cannot find the chokepoint. 68% of claims about dependency on China name no
step of the chain, and the talk reacts to trade late and vaguely.