Trajectories of Conflict: The Dynamics of Argumentation in the UN Security Council

冲突本质上是动态的。立场发生了变化，背景发生了变化，派系和忠诚重新调整，即使其他一切似乎都处于停滞状态，表达冲突的语言也发生了变化--在框架、细微差别和情感上。我们的目标是理解这种动力，并在规模上检验这种理解。我们将发展新的、综合的理论，然后应用该理论来理解冲突在语言上的表现方式，以及它是如何演变的，不仅是在其基本位置方面，而且在其表现方面。我们避免特定领域或主题的冲突，而是将我们的研究放在最高级别和最重要的冲突的最重要场所：联合国安理会。我们的目标不是把重点放在安全理事会的一个问题、一个区域或一个时期上，而是处理它在发生重大冲突时的全部活动：一个将近一百万字的数据集。在25年几乎每天的会议中，我们的技术将使地缘政治分析家和普通公众深入了解安理会冲突是如何出现和演变的，将对地方话语特征(如含糊性和情绪性)的分析与结构特征(如提出理由和推理模式)结合起来，最后考虑如何确定冲突中的立场。在所有这些方面都存在着相互作用的动态，我们的冲突轨迹理论旨在了解这些动态，以便首次能够非常详细和非常大规模地同时绘制冲突语言的地图。这是大数据技术首次推动对冲突语言的研究。尽管我们将运用这样的计算技术，但我们的重点是提供基础理论、分析技术和数据集资源，这些资源随后可以支撑未来的计算研究，甚至是应用创新，为政治学、国际关系学者以及外交和地缘政治分析领域的专业人士以及最终为普通公众提供价值。

Conflict is inherently dynamic. Positions morph, contexts change, factions and allegiances realign, and even when everything else appears to be in stasis, there is change in the language used to express conflict - in the framings and nuances and emotions. Our aim is to understand this dynamism and to test that understanding at scale.We will develop novel, integrative theory and then apply that theory both to understand ways in which conflict is presented linguistically and also how it evolves, not just in terms of its underlying positions but also in its presentation. We eschew domain- or theme-specific conflict, and instead site our study within the foremost venue for conflict of the highest level and greatest import: the UN Security Council. Rather than focus on a single issue or region or period of the Security Council, our goal is to work with the entirety of its activity in which significant conflict is presented: a dataset of almost one million words. Across the 25 years of almost daily meetings, our techniques will offer insight both to geopolitical analysts and to the general public into how conflicts at the Council emerge and evolve, combining analysis of local discourse features such as vagueness and emotionality with structural features such as justification-giving and patterns of reasoning, and finally considering how positions in conflict are framed. Across all of these aspects there are interacting dynamics, which our theory of conflict trajectories aims to understand so that it will become possible for the first time to map the language of conflict simultaneously in great detail and at very large scale.This is the first time that the techniques of big data have driven the study of the language of conflict. Though we will bring such computational techniques to bear, our focus is on delivering the foundational theory, the analytical techniques and the dataset resources that can subsequently underpin future computational research and indeed into applied innovation delivering value for scholars of political science, international relations and as well as for professionals working in diplomacy and geopolitical analysis and ultimately the general public.