When Diplomats Go MAD: How the Crisis Framing of Ministries of Foreign Affairs Results in Mutually Assured Delegitimization

This study argues that scholars lack an adequate conceptualization of the strategic use of social media framing by Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) during crises. As a theoretical starting point, this article employs the concept of soft disempowerment to suggest that MFAs may use online framing to limit an adversary's range of possible actions during a crisis by depicting that adversary as violating norms and values deemed desirable by the international community. Next, the article introduces the concept of mutually assured delegitimization (MAD), which suggests that actors may call into question one another's adherence with certain norms and values during crises, which results in the mutual depletion of soft power resources. Importantly, this article proposes a novel, methodological approach for the analysis of individual tweets during crises. To illustrate its methodological and conceptual innovations, the study analyzes tweets published by the MFAs of the United States (US) and Russia during the Crimea crisis and demonstrates that both MFAs used Twitter to negatively frame each other by calling their morals into question, which resulted in MAD.