Changelog

Timeline of new datasets, data refreshes, and reader-facing features added to the RiskA·Lab Data Bank.

Career Trajectories of IO Officials database launched

new datasetfeature
  • •Added the Career Trajectories of IO Officials database: a biographical record of 6,870 officials who have served at international organizations — UN agencies, FAO, WHO, World Bank, ILO, UNESCO, IAEA and many others — with 69,473 career entries (21,794 flagged as IO positions; the rest covering pre- and post-IO positions in states, NGOs, academia, and the private sector), 17,569 education records, 8,407 family ties, and full language profiles. Career data spans 1852–2025. Maintained on the site by Songpo Yang in collaboration with Xun Pang.
  • •6 sub-pages: Dashboard (top IOs, top nationalities, gender mix), Trends (gender share by birth decade, organization-type mix by career decade, IO career growth), Education (highest-degree distribution, top 20 institutions, discipline mix), Geography (nationality and birthplace breakdowns), Dynasties (interactive family-network graph among tracked IO officials), and Members (searchable directory of all 6,870 with filters for nationality, gender, and primary IO).
  • •Members page ships the full directory client-side (~400 KB compressed) for instant in-memory filtering and search across name, organization, position, and nationality.

Bilateral Swap Agreements database launched

new datasetfeature
  • •Added the Bilateral Swap Agreements (BSA) database: 315 currency-swap agreements signed between 51 central banks and monetary authorities across 96 unique bilateral pairs, 2002–2021. Maintained on the site by Xun Pang in collaboration with Qi Liu (Harvard University).
  • •4 sub-pages: Dashboard (annual signings, top signatories, currency-cap mix), Network (interactive ego-net graph with year-range slider and click-to-detail), Timeline (signings, active counts, top-signatory trajectories, cap mix), and Agreements (fully searchable agreement-level table with primary-source links).
  • •Currency swap lines are one of the major layers of the global financial safety net — the dataset captures both originals (122) and renewals (193), with cap denomination (USD / EUR / no-cap / bilateral-local) and term length tracked per row.
  • •Underlying research: Liu & Pang (forthcoming, International Studies Quarterly) and Liu, Pang & Vreeland (Review of International Political Economy, 2026).

Critical Raw Material Mining (Africa) database launched

new datasetfeature
  • •Added the Critical Raw Material Mining (Africa) database: 527 mines across 29 African countries, 132 sub-national provinces ever treated, 2000–2024. Maintained on the site by Jingtian Hu under Xun Pang's supervision.
  • •4 sub-pages: Dashboard (treatment uptake, top countries, commodity mix), Map (interactive ADM1 choropleth + mine scatter with year slider, country and commodity filters, click-province-for-detail), Timeline (province × year heatmap + uptake curve), and a Methodology page describing the panel construction.
  • •Phase 1 ships the CRM treatment view only — where and when mining is active. Conflict (UCDP), protest (ACLED), and World Bank governance overlays are noted as a planned future expansion in the Methodology tab.
  • •Added Jingtian Hu's profile card to the People page under Database Maintainers (placeholder bio; full details forthcoming).

Climate Negotiation Dyadic Relations database launched

new datasetfeature
  • •Added the Climate Negotiation Dyadic Relations database: 45,012 LLM-extracted bilateral statements from 30 years of Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) coverage of UNFCCC conferences (1995–2024), spanning 401 negotiating entities and 38 negotiation topics. Maintained on the site by Xun Pang.
  • •5 sub-pages: Dashboard (yearly trend, top countries, topic treemap), Country Dyads (filterable network with ego-net mode), Topics (drill-down on 5 headline topics + 33 others), Conferences (per-COP master-detail), and a Quote Explorer over the full corpus.
  • •Quote Explorer offers instant filtering and substring search across the full corpus (45,012 statements) with country, topic, conference, year-range, and tone facets.

Mingkun Maritime Domain Awareness overview added

new datasetcontent
  • •Added an overview page for the Mingkun Maritime Domain Awareness (MK-MDA) platform, maintained by Bo Hu (PKU SIS, Director of the Center for Maritime Strategy Studies and SCSPI).
  • •Raw data is not redistributed here — the page summarises the system and links out to the live platform at db.mk-mda.com.
  • •Included two screenshots provided by the research team (desktop dashboard + mobile).

Collaborator affiliations on every dataset page

contentux
  • •Added school affiliations after each external collaborator name on the US Congressional Legislators and OECD Ministerial Officials pages (Yifei Zhu & Jiangnan Zhu — University of Hong Kong; Junyan Jiang — Columbia University).
  • •Going forward, any collaborator not featured on the /people page will have their school shown in parentheses.

Global Cobalt Supply Chain database launched

new datasetfeature
  • •Added the Global Cobalt Supply Chain database (225 countries, 1998–2019, based on Ouyang et al., *Systemic risks and cascading dynamics in the global cobalt supply chain*). Maintained on the site by Xun Pang.
  • •4 sub-pages: Dashboard, Fragility & Exposure (world map + scatter + per-country time series), Network Structure (9 yearly structural indicators), Communities (Infomap community graphs at 3 nested levels).
  • •Aggregated views are published; the raw 13M-row avalanche network is intentionally not redistributed per the dataset's authorization terms.
  • •Added Cobalt to the Home and Databases landing grids and cross-linked from every other dataset's 'Other databases' section.

GDELT US-China Events database launched

new datasetfeature
  • •Added the GDELT US-China Bilateral Events database (1,772,126 events, 1979–2026-04) with 6 interactive sub-pages: Dashboard, Timeline, Event Types, Risk Analysis, Geography, Event Explorer.
  • •Added 20 curated historical turning-point markers (e.g., Trade War, Pelosi Taiwan visit, spy balloon) on the Timeline page's Goldstein chart.
  • •Added world map base layer to the Global Event Map using Natural Earth 110m country outlines.
  • •Added /changelog page documenting site updates.

OECD period labels refined

data
  • •Replaced the oversized 'Pre-2000' bucket in the Trends page with 12 finer 5-year periods (Pre-1970 through 2020+) so the distribution is balanced.

OECD Ministerial Officials database launched

new datasetfeature
  • •Added the OECD Ministerial Officials database: 3,642 officials across 38 OECD member nations.
  • •6 sub-pages: Dashboard, Trends (gender/role/ideology), Education (levels/universities/careers), Geography (country distribution/migration), Dynasties (family networks), Member Search.
  • •Identified 28 political dynasties and 65 minister-to-minister family links.

Site branding and People section

uxcontent
  • •Renamed the site to RiskA·Lab Data Bank and rebranded cards around the PKU Analytics Lab for Global Risk Politics.
  • •Added People page with profiles for Xun Pang (Lab Director) and Songpo Yang (Assistant Director).
  • •Added collaborators section to each database dashboard (Yifei Zhu, Jiangnan Zhu, Junyan Jiang).
  • •Cross-linked datasets via an 'Other databases' section on each dashboard.

US Congressional Legislators database launched

new datasetfeature
  • •Launched the first dataset: US Congressional Legislators (8,841 members, 1757–2025).
  • •6 sub-pages: Dashboard, Trends (party/gender/decade), Education, Geography (states), Dynasties (560 family networks), Member Search.
Updates are logged in public/data/changelog.json and rendered on each deploy. Each entry lists the date, a short title, relevant tags, and a bullet list of the changes.