Abstract
Legitimacy is widely invoked as a master frame in international political discourse. During episodes of contention, this frame is used by opposing sides to advance competing interpretations of the same social problems. Through an analysis of elite political discourses surrounding international intervention in the Syrian Civil War, we examine what distinguishes the effectiveness of actors' framing efforts when they use a shared frame to advance conflicting agendas. We show how features of the objects (i.e., what or who) being framed shape the resonance and stability of the framing. Moreover, we show how framing objects that can be coherently interpreted in multiple ways facilitate the cultivation of discourses that are consistent despite changing social conditions and the evolution of framers' goals. We refer to this as robust discourse and elaborate on the implications of this concept.
Highlights
Legitimacy is widely invoked as a master frame in international political discourse
This raises the question: what distinguishes the effectiveness of framing efforts when the same frames are used to advance competing agendas? We explore this question through an analysis of elite political discourses regarding international intervention in the Syrian Civil War
Analyzing five years of statements by officials from the United States and Russia, along with resolutions and public statements issued by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and the Friends of Syria (FOS) international coalition, we examine the conditions shaping the resonance and stability of U.S efforts to mobilize international consensus and Russian counterframing efforts, both using the legitimacy master frame
Summary
Legitimacy is widely invoked as a master frame in international political discourse. During episodes of contention, this frame is used by opposing sides to advance competing interpretations of the same social problems. A growing collection of scholarship has turned attention to the ways in which political officials use public discourse to frame contentious activities as being legitimate (Binder and Heupal 2014; Del Rosso 2015) In this context, legitimacy is routinely invoked as a master frame (Snow, Vliegenthart, and Ketelaars 2018) used by opposing sides during episodes of contention to identify problems, attribute responsibility, and advocate for advantageous solutions (Clark 2005; Schoon 2016). We argue that the capacity to meaningfully reinterpret the object being framed across space and time produces robust discourse, and we build on Padgett and Ansell’s (1993) influential conceptualization of robust action to elaborate the substantive and theoretical implications of robust discourse
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