The database covers over 200 different international organizations. Selection has been based on top lists of global prominent international organizations in different categories and precedent within existing scholarship on international organizations. Regionally-focused organizations are generally excluded, although some IOs in the sample inevitably focus on some world regions more than others. The data is longitudinal in nature, as it contains the leaders of international organizations over the last 25 years. The database comprises over 1000 leaders total at present, and because the data are structured as organization-year observations across a 25-year time span, there are a total of 4728 total observations in the data.  

The types of organizations included in the data includes multilateral organizations, transnational governance organizations of various kinds, and a variety of different global civil society organizations as well. The expansive sample of international organizations thus includes organizations that are composed completely of representatives with public authority, those with only private sector representation, and those that are hybrid in nature. The data is organized to allow future researchers, be they scholars, practitioners, or policy makers, to study a wide range of research questions on global affairs.
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A variety of simple demographic information is captured for each individual IO leader. For each individual, aside from their name, we coded a variety of information based on publicly available information in their online profiles. This included nationality, gender, and data on educational backgrounds of individuals, focusing on post-secondary institutions, including specific degrees and specific institutions of study. For all data coded we collected the web-linked sources to the underlying information, and we gathered headshots of each individual for additional demographic coding in the future.

For questions about the dataset please contact us at:  submissions@securityincontext.org.