‘The facts cannot be denied’: legitimacy, war and the use of chemical weapons in Syria

ABSTRACT

The enduring war in Syria is the most recent case that has triggered fierce debates within the international community, including at the UN Security Council, about how to respond to massive human rights violations in conflicts. In August 2013, one outrageous incident – the use of chemical weapons in the Ghouta area – (initially) seemed to push some liberal democracies towards military intervention in Syria. Although the videos showing the death of civilians spread worldwide via YouTube, the political impact of these images was mixed. Reflecting on the relation between the circulation and display of video images of suffering and their impact on US politics, we address two related questions in this article: first, how did the US administration react to the terrifying videos of people dying in Syria, people who had presumably been attacked by chemical weapons? Second, how was this incident framed in political discourse in the United States? The aim of this article is to understand the ambivalent and contingent effects of media images on decision-making processes regarding the use of force by liberal democracies in response to massive violations of human rights and international law. We argue that the publication of the videos in question initiated a policy change on the part of the US administration, although it did not result in a military response to massive human rights violations.

KEYWORDS:

• Syria
• video images
• human rights violations
• democratic wars

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Marie Colvin was one of the most prominent war correspondents. She was killed on assignment in Homs (Syria) in February 2012.

2. However, Syria has signed the Geneva Convention and thus is prohibited from using poisonous gas against other states; the extent to which this part of the convention also applies to civil wars is disputed (Hurd 2013). For the taboo of using chemical weapons, see Price and Tannenwald (1996).

3. The CWC is considered a successful international regime, and the OPCW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 not only for its work in Syria but for its continued work towards the reduction of chemical weapons in the world. However, reports on renewed usage of chemical weapons in Syria since 2013 indicate that the actual prevalence of this norm varies.

4. We are aware that this would require a thorough mixed methods approach that combined analyses of verbal statements with visual representations; this goes beyond the scope of this article. For the study of visuals, see Hansen (2011), Andersen, Vuori and Mutlu (2015) and Bleiker (2015).

5. This is not to say that democratic peace researchers have not analyzed material taken from newspapers, but – as far as we can tell – they have not systematically considered the role of media networks nor have they investigated visual representations in pre-war discourses.

6. For an overview of the estimates of people killed, see: Wikipedia (2013).

7. See the progress reports issued by OPCW (2017).

8. For a systematic study of how different types of argumentative frames have been used by democratic governments to legitimate military interventions since 1990, see Geis, Müller, and Schörnig (2013a).

9. The bill was predicted to have a 55% chance of being enacted or passed. For the resolution text, see: GovTrack (2013).