The effect of the UN's R2P discourse on the patterns of violence in civil wars. Field: R2P, political violence, civil war.

For my MPhil research project, which I will hopefully be able to extend during a DPhil, I intend to study the effect of the language used by the international community when discussing humanitarian intervention on the pattern of political violence during civil wars. The concept of the 'Responsibility to Protect' (R2P) and its third 'pillar' which sanctions the use of coercive force by the international community for the purpose of protecting civilian populations has met with wide controversy among United Nations member states. Disagreement on the principle and operationalization of the third pillar is reflected in the international community's mixed responses to the recent conflicts in Libya and Syria. I intend this research project to illuminate the effect, if any, of the international community's use of terms such as 'genocide', 'mass atrocity', and 'humanitarian crisis' on the actions of violent conflict actors. My idea is inspired by, amongst others, the argument made by Scott Straus in Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa. He analyses the central importance to genocidal violence of what he calls 'founding narratives', which he intriguingly says are "akin to...a cognitive map that guides decision making". From a domestic to an international perspective, Rogers Brubaker and David D. Laitin in a 1998 article in the 'Annual Review of Sociology' argue for recognizing the role of the international community's language of ethnic nationalism in increasing the incidence of ethnic conflicts. Once one grants that discourse can influence the pattern of political violence, I suggest that an important question appears about the effect of the language of humanitarian intervention and R2P on contemporaneous conflicts. I expect to use both quantitative and qualitative research methods. After preliminary research and singling out the thesis question, I would decide on the number of countries, conflicts and period of time to focus on. I would then identify key speeches of international leaders and UN ambassadors, as well as communications of the conflict actors. Using my knowledge of political philosophy and security studies, I would be able to code key events and speeches into a coherent database. I would then use the quantitative skills developed by undergraduate courses in statistics and advanced by the 'Research Design and
Approaches to Research' component of the MPhil to find correlations in the data and interpret them into a useful result.