Difficult point I've encountered (more so in context but you the inferences are available): Conventional weapons without much strain could be defined as "chemical" weapons.
Book, mostly locked behind Google Books, apparently seeks to make a case against the limitations of "deductive" (e.g. utilitarian, instrumentalist, or pragmatic) and "essential" (argued from essential characteristics or distinctions) theories in why chemical weapons are treated and regarded as they are, and so takes a constructivist/Foucauldian approach.
"The Argument" is unwalled on
Google Books version, pp. 11-13.
Book was published before Syrian War, but to extend what it seems like its core argument might be, Assad's use and Russia's defense of Assad's use of chemical weapons is in large part a symbolic assault on his adversaries both at home and abroad. This would certainly be in keeping with Russia's ongoing attempts to undermine and reorganize the international system in its favor.
EDIT: To elaborate, an assault on the international hierarchy of arbiters of chemical weapons and their 'curators', especially the United States, who gets to stockpile them while claiming its non-use as a moral high ground in forming its identity and rhetoric. Which obviously has implications beyond chemical weapons.
EDIT 2: I was
wrong, the US has nearly eliminated its CW stockpiles and Nixon (!) pioneered their disposal with first-use renunciation. Though in light of his bombing campaigns, perhaps this lends credence to the constructivist theory.
(Although that interpretation kind of circuitously reinforces the 'mixed' appreciation of CW as straightforwardly "weapons of terror" rather than of war. But then on the other^2 hand, why do we need to think of a "weapon of war" in a strictly operational and bodily-destructive way?)
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