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Suffering Without Perpetrators: The Humanitarian Passive in AI-Generated Conflict Discourse

Authors: Startari, Agustin V.;

Suffering Without Perpetrators: The Humanitarian Passive in AI-Generated Conflict Discourse

Abstract

<p>This article introduces the humanitarian passive as a machine-mediated syntactic pattern through which civilian suffering is made visible while responsibility is made grammatically optional. In AI-generated conflict discourse, victims, destruction, displacement, sanctions, shortages, and humanitarian catastrophe can remain fully describable, while perpetrators, institutional agents, military actors, sanctioning powers, platform authorities, and decision chains are reduced, displaced, or omitted. The result is not the erasure of suffering, but the weakening of the grammatical pathways through which suffering remains attributable to responsible actors. The paper defines this weakening as responsibility loss: the measurable decline of syntactic traceability between civilian harm and the agents, institutions, states, military systems, or geopolitical alliances that produce it. Responsibility loss does not require proving intention, censorship, conspiracy, or ideological coordination. It can be examined as a formal effect of summary compression, platform moderation, safety constraints, geopolitical framing, and machine-generated neutrality. Palestine functions as the central test case because it exposes the conflict between visibility and attribution with unusual intensity. AI systems may recognize humanitarian suffering, civilian death, displacement, infrastructure collapse, bombardment, and crisis conditions while simultaneously avoiding or diluting the grammatical assignment of agency. Iran extends the model to sanctioned suffering, where civilian harm may be described through the neutral grammar of shortages, economic hardship, restricted access, escalation, regional instability, and security concern, while the actors and systems imposing sanctions, financial restrictions, diplomatic pressure, or military threat become syntactically less visible. The article therefore treats Palestine and Iran not as identical cases, but as distinct sites of asymmetric visibility. In Palestine, responsibility loss appears through the grammar of direct violence, occupation, bombardment, displacement, and humanitarian catastrophe. In Iran, it appears through the grammar of sanctions, isolation, overcompliance, diplomatic pressure, securitization, and indirect civilian harm. Together, these cases show how dominant-power discourse can preserve the visibility of suffering while weakening the grammatical conditions under which responsibility can be named.&nbsp;</p>

Keywords

Classification--Books--Linguistics, Artificial intelligence, Areal linguistics, Humanitarian intervention, Applied linguistics--Data processing, Causative (Linguistics), Humanitarian assistance, American--Political aspects, Machine-to-machine communications, Humanitarian assistance, Dutch, Linguistics/ethics, Linguistics/history, asymmetric visibility, Applied linguistics--Research, Cohesion (Linguistics), Humanitarian assistance, American--History, Machine learning, Archaisms (Linguistics), Categorization (Linguistics), Linguistics/trends, Anaphora (Linguistics), Linguistics/standards, humanitarian passive, AI-generated conflict discourse, Linguistics/economics, Linguistics/methods, Humanitarian assistance, Linguistics, Linguistics/classification, Analogy (Linguistics), Classifiers (Linguistics)--Data processing, Linguistics/education, Humanitarian intervention--Religious aspects, Classifiers (Linguistics), Humanitarianism--Religious aspects--Mennonites, Humanitarian assistance--Political aspects, responsibility loss, Humanitarian assistance, Finnish, Applied linguistics--Statistical methods, Cartesian linguistics, FOS: Languages and literature, Linguistics/instrumentation, Humanitarianism--Religious aspects, Humanitarian intervention--Political aspects

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
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