The Importance of Language

Language, I have come to discover, is very powerful. It is the mechanism by which we communicate, it is the means by which we convey emotion; it is a weapon with which we can hurt each other, and it can be nuanced for action or inaction. Ah ha, she’s finished her first French class. Indeed, the interesting thing when I arrived in Rwanda was that with my pathetic French capabilities, what immediately became clear is not what I know, but rather what I don’t know. A glaringly obvious weakness despite my strengths. My recent (re)engagement with language reminded me of a paper I had read and critiqued during my Masters degree. This is going to get a little technical, but bear with me, I won’t drone on for hours.

The article essentially attempted to bridge the disjuncture between international and domestic law relating to war and armed conflict that emerges when the two (domestic vs. international) jurisdictions are not clearly defined. By nature of the UN Charter, UN member states are to “refrain in their international relations from their threat or use of force regarding the territorial integrity or political independence of any state’. In lay terms, they’re not supposed to arbitrarily declare war on one another. Something about a UN objective to maintain peace and security. I don’t know.

To mitigate the distinction between war and peace, a third, rather ambiguous category of ‘armed conflict’ emerged rendering the concepts of war and peace no longer mutually exclusive. The effect of this new category, essentially nothing more than a twist of language, is that it removes the necessity for Parliaments (we’re talking democratic states here) to formally declare war and allows instead for the implicit and immediate engagement in armed conflict; it thus blurs the lines between traditional warfare and removes the democratic process of making a conscious and clear decision to engage in war. The assumption of the article I critiqued was that the emergence of the new category of “armed conflict” was inherently negative. With further consideration, I don’t necessarily agree-with particular reference to the United Nations, if the state of armed conflict had not emerged, an already inherently cumbersome political process within the Security Council would likely become intractable if each member state were to need authorization from their respective governing bodies to respond and clearly classify crisis situations. Thus the category of armed conflict serves a very significant purpose.

The argument, however, should be made (and wasn’t) that with the changing dynamics of warfare and armed conflict, the category of armed conflict has even more extreme consequences for intrastate war (war within one country) and complex humanitarian crisis. The real concern is that so often semiotics governs responses by the international community. Failure to use “war”, but instead “armed conflict” may be consequentially equivalent to the failure to use “genocide” but rather “conflict”. The implications for the country I’m currently hanging out in are obvious. (If I've lost you on IR dork banter, the international community tends to be very unwilling to respond to much unless you utter the word 'genocide', in which case theoretically there is an international obligation to do something to stop it. See Rwanda, Sudan).

I was confronted with another language quagmire during my Masters program when an individual whom I hold in the utmost regard presented her PhD thesis, speaking to UN Resolution 1325 which addressed women and children in armed conflict. Essentially, it has become evident in the UN system that women and children were uniquely affected by conflict (ie. women are often targets of systemic rape; children are recruited, drugged, and made to become child soldiers), but this had yet to become formally addressed within the UN system. Resolution 1325 was created essentially to address this gap. The feminist argument, however, is that the language used in Resolution 1325 essentially removes agency from women by linking them to child; the language utilized by some particularly disgruntled feminist theorists have gone so far as to refer to ‘woman-and-child’ as one word. My question, then, was what specifically this particular scholar would recommend as a starting ground for addressing the gap that would avoid creating this tension. Her answer was that that wasn’t what she did. I remain unsatisfied by that answer. Another close friend and I have had precisely this conversation since over the utility of academically exploring a topic simply because you can. I’m of the school of thought that academics should lead somewhere. He is not. A discussion for another time, perhaps. My point remains: though I can understand this particular scholar’s critique of Resolution 1325, you still need language as a starting point to begin the discussion on this and other such issues.

The logical conclusion, then, is that language matters. It matters in academia, it matters in politics, and I suppose that means it matters in life. My sweet mummy often talks about the importance of “right speech”-explained in negative terms, it means avoiding four types of harmful speech: lies, divisive speech; harsh speech; and idle chatter. In positive terms, it means speaking in ways that are trustworthy, harmonious, comforting, and worth taking to heart. I think she may be on to something. And she's generally lecturing me after I've let something shocking spew from my mouth. I also think that sadly, I have a long way to go if right speech is my ultimate objective. Is good to have goals?…