'Acting Under Chapter 7': Rhetorical Entrapment and Authorization of Force in the United Nations Security Council, 1995-2017

After more than 25 years of scholarship, the deliberative turn in international relations (IR) theory has entered a stalemate. Instead of assessing whether deliberation or bargaining has a greater power over desired outcomes, this article goes ‘back to the roots’ by analyzing in how far coercive rhetoric may bind state action. It does so by theorizing and testing two mechanisms that make language conducive to rhetorically entrap in the Security Council of the United Nations. Drawing on so far unavailable UNSC resolutions corpus data, it finds that while it is correct that human rights rhetoric increases the likelihood to authorize the use of force by 33.7%, it also highlights that mentioning the responsibility to protect (R2P) or terrorism decrease the same likelihood by more than 30%. This indicates that there are not only terms that may rhetorically entrap policymakers into action, but also that there are terms which have the reverse effect. This phenomenon I call rhetorical hollowing. The article closes with the notion that rhetorical hollowing may occur when a specific term or concept is negatively conceived of or essentially contested in world politics.