Rhetoric of civil conflict management: United Nations Security Council debates over the Syrian civil war

Abstract

This paper introduces a spatial model of civil conflict management rhetoric to explore how the emerging norm of responsibility to protect shapes major power rhetorical responses to civil war. Using framing theory, we argue that responsibility to protect functions like a prescriptive norm, such that representing a conflict as one of (1) human rights violations (problem definition), implies rhetorical support for (2) coercive outside intervention (solution identification). These dimensions reflect the problem-solution form of a prescriptive norm. Using dictionary scaling with a dynamic model, we analyze the positions of UN Security Council members in debates over the Syrian Civil War separately for each dimension. We find that the permanent members who emphasized human rights violations also used intervention rhetoric (UK, France, and the US), and those who did not used non-intervention rhetoric (Russia and China). We conclude that, while not a fully consolidated norm, responsibility to protect appears to have structured major power rhetorical responses to the Syrian Civil War.