Agency of Small Island States in Addressing Sea-Level Rise

This bachelor thesis examines how small island developing states (SIDS) present climate change in their speeches to the United Nations General Assembly. It focuses on speeches delivered by Antigua and Barbuda, Kiribati, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu between 1994 and 2024. The aim is to identify the thematic and linguistic features shaping their climate discourse, trace its development over time, and compare the approaches of individual states. The analysis is based on a corpus of 138 speeches and uses corpus-linguistics methods with the LancsBox X software. The results show that climate change constitutes a central theme in SIDS discourse, appearing consistently across the entire period. States associate it primarily with issues of survival, security, sustainable development, and international responsibility. Compared to other UN members, SIDS devote substantially more attention to climate issues and employ normative and often metaphorical language. Differences nevertheless exist between individual states: Kiribati and Tuvalu focus almost exclusively on the climate agenda, while Antigua and Barbuda and the Maldives address a broader range of issues. The Marshall Islands repeatedly highlight the lasting consequences of nuclear testing in the Pacific. This thesis contributes to understanding the agency of small states in international organizations and demonstrates that SIDS can actively promote climate issues through consistent and normatively oriented discourse. Methodologically, it introduces a systematic application of corpus linguistics to international relations research, an approach that remains underutilized in this field.