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

冲突具有内在的动态性。立场发生变化，背景发生变化，派别和冲突重新调整，即使其他一切似乎都处于停滞状态，用于表达冲突的语言也会发生变化-在框架、细微差别和情感中。我们的目标是理解这种动态，并在规模上测试这种理解。我们将开发新的，综合的理论，然后应用该理论来理解冲突的语言呈现方式，以及它如何演变，不仅在其潜在的位置，而且在其呈现方式。我们避开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：联合国安全理事会。我们的目标不是集中于安全理事会的一个问题或一个区域或一个时期，而是处理其涉及重大冲突的全部活动：一个近100万字的数据集。在25年的几乎每天的会议中，我们的技术将为地缘政治分析师和公众提供洞察力，了解理事会的冲突如何出现和演变，结合对当地话语特征的分析，如情绪化和情绪化与结构特征，如辩护和推理模式，并最终考虑冲突中的立场是如何形成的。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理解这些动态，以便第一次能够同时非常详细和非常大规模地绘制冲突语言。这是大数据技术第一次推动了对冲突语言的研究。虽然我们将带来这样的计算技术承担，我们的重点是提供基础理论，分析技术和数据集资源，随后可以支持未来的计算研究，并实际应用于创新，为政治学，国际关系的学者提供价值，以及为外交和地缘政治分析工作的专业人士，最终为公众。

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.