Description
Scholars of conflict processes argue that the experience of violence and responses to it are largely shaped by how the nature of violence is understood. This paper investigates the framing of violence experienced by Ukrainians following Russia’s invasion in 2022, with a specific focus on the genocide frame. The deployment of this frame has had a domestic function, making sense of the brutality of violence to Ukrainians, and an external function, projecting its egregious nature transnationally whilst eliciting support for the defence of Ukraine. Testing the stability of this frame, both in terms of its normative meaning and the intensity of attention, we analyse 1,389,552 tweets containing #genocide/#Genocide posted on Twitter/X between 22 September 2021 and 31 December 2024. Within this multilingual corpus, we identify and focus on high-salience episodes, such as the violence in Bucha, which we study comparatively within the case and across cases including other high-salience episodes. We show how visibility rises and fades, and when framing shifts occur as events unfold. This study contributes to our understanding of how genocide as a label and a contested term anchors public conversation, how attention waxes and wanes across news cycles, and how framing evolves without assuming a single, stable meaning. More broadly, this political communication perspective enhances the study of contention centred on invoking genocide in international relations (in relation to stigmatisation of transgressor states), politics (in relation to transitional justice, genocide denial and memorialisation, including in the digital domain), and international law (in relation to determining the qualification of criminal liability).
