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“Weasel Words” in Legal and Diplomatic Discourse: Vague Nouns and Phrases in UN Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War

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Abstract

This study aims at investigating vagueness in Security Council Resolutions by focussing on a selection of nouns and phrases used as the main casus belli for the Second Gulf War. Analysing a corpus of Security Council Resolutions relating to the conflict, the study leads a qualitative and quantitative analysis drawing upon Mellinkoff’s (The language of the law. Little, Brown & Company, Boston, 1963) theories on “weasel words”, which are “words and expressions with a very flexible meaning, strictly dependent on context and interpretation”. Special attention is devoted to the historical/political consequences of such vague and indeterminate expressions. The findings indicate that excessive vagueness might have led to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of the Resolutions, triggering the Iraqi conflict instead of a diplomatic solution. The analysis of the “weasel words” used in the Resolutions suggests the double-faced strength of such expressions: though they can guaranteed a wide degree of applicability of the Resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation and elusiveness, with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as a political strategy.

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  1. Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘Federico II’, Via Rodinò 22, 80138, Naples, Italy

    Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo

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Scotto di Carlo, G. “Weasel Words” in Legal and Diplomatic Discourse: Vague Nouns and Phrases in UN Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War. Int J Semiot Law 28, 559–576 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-015-9406-0

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