In 2020, Azerbaijan attacked the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region that was under control of Karabakh Armenians. This war lasted for little under two months and resulted in an Azerbaijani victory. While there was no day to day reporting of the conflict, the articles written from it sparked interesting and intense conversations in social media.

This study aimed to inspect the social media war rhetoric found on these discussions. The methodical approach for achieving this goal was to do an argumentation analysis, more precisely a Toulminian argumentation analysis. The research data consisted of 48 comments – 24 of which supported Armenia and 24 of which supported Azerbaijan – taken from a comment section of a Facebook post by The Economist.

The main argument by both sides was that the other side is more guilty to the war than their own side. The differences between the two opposing factions were the commitments that they made in their arguments. Azerbaijanis mainly leaned on international law, justice, and Armenian war crimes, while Armenians claimed to defend their land by arguing for their heritage in the region, and also accusing Azerbaijanis of war crimes and even genocide.

The main difference between the more traditional war rhetoric of political and military leaders, which has been the focus of past studies on war rhetoric, and the results of social media rhetoric from my study, was the audience targeted. Traditional war rhetoric has mainly been targeted for the people of one’s own side, with the intention to galvanise support. The rhetoric in this research data was targeted more towards the international audience to gain their support or sympathy. Otherwise, there were no major differences, with a bit more radical sentences being a minor difference.