Frames of (In)Civility and Legitimizing Violence

What is the role of civility in state legitimation of violence? Civility represents a democratic virtue, yet the state employs civility discourse to reinforce unequal class, race, and other power hierarchies. We know little about how governments employ civility frames in internal deliberations to (de)legitimate certain actors and actions, particularly the use of violence in conflict. In this project, we examine the British Government’s use of civility frames during the early years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1969-1974). We hypothesize that British officials attach frames of (in)civility to conflict-related incidents and actors and that these frames shape how officials determined whose violence was (im)permissible and/or legal. We qualitatively analyze a sample of recently declassified archive pages from the UK Prime Ministers’ correspondence files during this conflict era. We identify civility and incivility frames and analyze whether and how they are used by the state to legitimate or make permissible the use of violence by conflict actors. We also apply our civility coding framework to the full sample of correspondence files (n=8,430 documents) via natural language processing and machine learning methods to cross-validate our qualitative results.

Funded by: University of Oklahoma Award #1543484733 ($184,949): “Liberal Democracy, Civic Virtue, and Public Life: Understanding and Countering the Illiberal Threat," Principle Investigators Matteo Bonotti and Steven Zech, with co-Investigators Peter Lentini, Aurelia Bardon, Emily K. Gade, and Joshua Eastin, 2019-2021.

Working papers:

Frames of (In)Civility and Legitimizing Violence by Jess Jones, Sarah Dreier, Emily K. Gade, Steve Zech, Matteo Bonotti and Josh Eastin.