المستخلص: |
On 24 of February 2022 Russia authorised ‘a special military operation’ against Ukraine for regional security purposes. The manner in which the Russian government decided to intervene militarily in Ukraine prompted this investigation of Putin’s discursive narratives produced to justify his decision to intervene in Ukraine. Responding to thick-constructivist and poststructuralist scholars’ call for a turn to discourse, this paper conceptualises language as a form of power. In other words, it concentrates on the constitutive role played by language in international political affairs. By examining how President Putin constructed his justifications, the aim is to explore how its language functioned as an enabling device to construct a ‘legal argument’ for the invasion. Hence, the research paper argues that the Russian government policy of “the pre-emptive use of force/ self-defence” is used a key narrative re-employed to justify its military intervention.
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