THE USE OF DIGITAL DIPLOMACY AS A TOOL FOR SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE: TWITTER ANALYSIS OF RUSSIAN-TURKISH RELATIONS

Symbols are primarily used by diplomatic actors to better project the core ideas behind certain political initiatives. Testimony analyses symbolic violence relative to the international image of diplomatic actors. Author defines symbolic violence as a practice, manifested in deliberate action of a given diplomatic actor to damage his adversary's reputation, status and dignity through a certain set of actions, such as linguistic violence (e.g. insult, intimidation etc.), disobeying diplomatic tact and so forth. For the purpose of framing analysis practice and framing studies have been used in the methodology part of the given paper. To achieve this author examined 140 character tweets. The given research aims to examine whether it's possible to establish correlation between digital diplomacy activities and symbolic violence (in the example of Russian and Turkish framing of each other before and following the downing of Russian pilot of Su-24), and to what extent the potential of social media can be harnessed by governments to shape public opinion and influence diplomatic actors' international reputation.The results of research reflect that such forms of violence may be relatively common in times of crisis. Both Russia and Turkey attempted to narrate each other's behavior through framing one another on SNS. In that sense, it can be viewed as an act of imposing violence as it aims to limit opponent's ability to carry out the latter's foreign political prerogatives. Moreover, as twitter analysis of Russian and Turkish framing of one another showed, governments harness the potential of images and words for the needs of using them as the tools of symbolic violence through utilizing them in their narration.