Description
This article works to ascertain the nature and extent of the relationship between human rights discourse, and Britain’s rhetorical relationship with Russia and Ukraine. Furthermore, this research contributes to literature on identity, nationalism, power, discourse, and their impacts on foreign policy and human rights rhetoric in contemporary Britain.
This paper will utilise as its data source Parliamentary debates from Hansard that occurred between the 2014 Annexation of Crimea and the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine, looking specifically at debated with ‘Russia’ and/or ‘Ukraine’ in the title. This time horizon covers a period of upheaval in British domestic politics, as well as its foreign policy. These debates will be analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis and will apply Van Dijk’s Ideological Square (Van Dijk, 2009, p. 194) as its analytical framework. This framework will be used to categorise Parliamentary discourse based on how it constructs ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ based on the maximisation and minimisation of certain traits. The paper will also construct a theoretical framework of what constitutes a ‘positive human rights actor’, based on the literature review.
The key finding of this paper is that being a positive human rights actor is not necessarily the path towards being portrayed by Parliament within Britain’s ‘in-group’. It appears to be the other way round: when the rhetorical portrayal of Ukraine is more positive and ‘in-grouped’, its presentation as a human rights actor improves. Similarly, equivocation on Russia’s human rights record increases as the political necessity to portray as a negative actor decreases. This has significant impact for the discussion of British Parliamentary foreign policy rhetoric. It would indicate that international political utility plays such a significant role in foreign policy discourse that it can, at times, supersede ideology or values.
