Presenter(s): Eleanor Estreich − English, Economics
Faculty Mentor(s): David Frank
Oral Session 1C
Research Area: Humanities – Rhetorical Analysis
Speaking from Beirut in February 2018, the United Nations’ regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, Panos Moumtzis, said that “’Humanitarian diplomacy is failing…We are not able to reach the conscience or the ears of politicians, of decision makers, of people in power’” (NYTimes). Moumtzis also “wondered what level of violence it would take to shock the world into action” (NYTimes). The prevalence of mass atrocities should demand our attention, yet moving decision makers to pay attention or act on mass atrocities remains a significant problem. This problem is magnified by the sheer number of victims in modern wars, and pervasive psychological barriers that often prevent decision makers from being able to comprehend the meaning of distant human lives underlying statistical description. Given these issues, this thesis formulates a response to a broad request by Charles J. Brown, a practitioner in Washington D.C., to study messaging strategies in reports about atrocities. Reports are a widely used communicative practice for the US government and other institutions, so this thesis considers reports that present data and information about atrocities to decision makers, rather than a broad journalistic readership. In order to reach the conscience of those in power, and strive to elicit better decision-making processes about atrocities, rhetorical analysis is used to identify more effective ways of selecting and presenting input data about atrocities for decision makers. Building from the research of Paul Slovic, who identifies the role of dual-process theories of thinking in our psychological responses to atrocities, this analysis also focuses on how the psychological underpinnings of reports should guide writing recommendations. The first chapter uses qualitative rhetorical analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of three reports issued about Rwanda and Bosnia. The second chapter interrogates US discourse around al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, which was comprised of argumentation for and against military intervention. The purpose of the second chapter is to identify how the larger discourse might direct argument invention in the report-writing process. Preliminary findings suggest that reports fail to capture the attention of decision makers when they use inconsistent scaling mechanisms for representing statistical deaths, and that risk is usually framed in terms of intervention (rather than nonintervention), to the detriment of the decision-making processes that follow.
*Nytimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/world/middleeast/syria-bombing-damascus-united-nations. html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article