To protect or not to protect: Analysis of the United Nation’s language in peacekeeping mandates

Peacekeepers should, as the term suggests, keep peace. Nonetheless, Blue Helmets are increas-ingly encouraged to undertake a wide variety of activities in United Nations (UN) missions. Particularly the focus on the protection of civilians (POC) has experienced an upsurge after 1999 and has been accompanied by major reforms in the organization's legislation, such as the Brahimi Report or the Capstone Doctrine. This article analyzes the impact of these POC regula-tions, together with exogenous shocks, on the United Nations’ language and contributes to on-going debates about the organization’s normative clustering of war. Relying on insight from Framing Theory, a corpus of 1,802 Security Council and General Assembly resolutions between 1990 and 2019 was analyzed through the Structural Topic Model (STM) algorithm. Two major conclusions are drawn. First, the UN relies on two rhetorical clusters (ground deployment vs. political/legal response) to operationally frame its conflict resolution efforts. Although blurred to some extent, these have evolved in an opposing fashion over time and complementary shifts in their relative prominence reflect key moments of institutional restructuring. Importantly, three temporal breakpoints (years 2001, 2005 and 2009) in terms of deviating intensity of POC language were identified. Second, evidence of an existing geographical bias materialized, as the organization appears to linguistically characterize conflicts based on their geographical location, but not engage in a "topic spill-over" across borders. These findings call the commonly narrated connection between a conflict's characteristics and the United Nations' language into question.