Making Words Matter: The Asian Tsunami, Darfur, and “Reflexive Discourse” in International Politics

Prominent communicative approaches to humanitarian crisis assume that international action is constrained by definitional disagreement. Yet interpretive agreement is not always enough to stimulate states into acting. Reflexive discourse is an alternative form of communicative action, and it occurs when international actors (state, nonstate, or suprastate) generate insecurity in powerful states, and stimulate these states into actions that they might initially be reluctant to pursue. By calling out the discrepancy between a targeted state’s actions and its biographical narrative, reflexive discourse challenges a targeted state’s self‐identity and thus illuminates the interest such a state has in confronting certain crises. I use the American response to the recent Asian Tsunami, reviewing how then U.N. Undersecretary‐General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland inadvertently used reflexive discourse by suggesting that Western nations were being “stingy” with their initial aid offers. This (in part) prompted the United States, albeit with much indignation, to increase by twenty times its aid to the affected areas. I then posit how a reflexive discourse strategy might have been used to persuade the United States into acting to confront the genocide in Darfur.