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This book is about the public language of the 'war on terrorism' and the way in which language has been deployed to justify and normalise a global campaign of counter-terrorism. It explains how the war on terrorism has been reproduced and amplified by key social actors and how it has become the dominant political narrative in America today, enjoying widespread bipartisan and popular support. The book also explains why the language of politics is so important and the main methodological approach for analysing the language of counter-terrorism, namely, critical discourse analysis. Then, it provides the comparison drawn between the September 11, 2001 attacks and World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor. One of the most noticeable aspects of the language surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001 is its constant reference to tragedy, grievance and the exceptional suffering of the American people. The book focuses on the way in which language was deployed to construct the main identities of the protagonists. It demonstrates how terrorism is rhetorically constructed as posing a catastrophic threat to the American 'way of life', to freedom, liberty and democracy and even to civilisation itself. The book analyses how the administration's counter-terrorism campaign has been rhetorically constructed as an essentially 'good' and 'just war', similar to America's role in World War II. Finally, the book concludes that responsible citizens have a moral duty to oppose and resist the official language of counter-terrorism.
normality may be traced as a generic feature of punk discourse; an essential ingredient rather than a national flavour, even if it may be ‘cooked’ in slightly different ways. The examples happen to be German not because the concern with normality is specific to German punk, but because the author happens to be a Germanist and therefore more competent in this area than in others. The chapter is based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), ‘a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, subsuming a variety of approaches’ with ‘a shared interest in the semiotic
explain how the discourse of counter-terrorism constructs the practice of counter-terrorism. The analysis of discourse The method I have employed to examine the language of the ‘war on terrorism’ is known broadly as critical discourse analysis. This approach is at once both a technique for analysing specific texts or speech acts, and a way of
, examining its discursive importance in reproducing racism. It has particular resonance, given that the majority of black people live in concentrated urban centres, and therefore how they are represented to the broader to society through the media has major consequences. I develop a critical discourse analysis of Top Boy to understand how the iconic ghetto is reproduced throughout the show. My study involved watching and re-watching the series to pull out the discursive themes. From this analysis the basis of the iconic ghetto portrayed throughout the show became apparent
widen the range of methods used to counter terrorism both domestically and internationally. Based mainly on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the chapter examines the Council’s discourses and practices in relation to extremism. The study focused on the body’s stream of meetings entitled ‘threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts’ in a timeframe that goes from 1998 to 2018. It encompassed and examined all the material produced in relation to this matter – for example, debates, Resolutions, Presidential Statements, etc. Driven by the
, 1992). In this chapter, we demonstrate how one particular type of discursive policy analysis, poststructuralist policy analysis, when articulated with elements of critical discourse analysis and rhetorical political analysis, can contribute important tools and concepts for the conduct of critical policy studies. Our approach goes beyond a minimal and cognitive conception of discourse, in which discourse is reduced to simply another variable that can be subjected to empirical testing, and which often gives rise to what we might term ‘discourse-lite’ forms of
cultural diversity in European societies and shedding light on ‘critical boundary issues’ across the various modalities of acceptance and non-acceptance. In this research we analysed public debates (newspapers, blogs, TV and radio recordings, parliamentary proceedings and policy documents), carried out fifteen interviews, and held two discussion groups with a variety of social actors (academics and practitioners) in the field of education and migration. The data were analysed using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach (Wodak, 2001; Wodak and Meyer, 2009) to highlight
chapter I will particularly draw on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which studies language as a social practice that shapes and is shaped by social reality (Fairclough, 1995 ). CDA is concerned with the exercise of power and social inequalities through language; it addresses social and power relations in their semiotic forms (Fairclough et al., 2011 ). Power in this sense refers to the social differential
techniques that can be applied in the use of discourse analysis. Even critical discourse analysis, the leading paradigm in analysing discursive texts from a theoretical basis in line with the hermeneutical/Foucauldian approach outlined in the first half of this chapter, is far from homogenous.3 Given its theoretical foundations, critical discourse analysis is ‘faced with the twofold task of revealing the relationship between linguistic means, forms and structures and concrete linguistic practice, and making transparent the reciprocal relationship between discursive action
speak about former paramilitary groups, often the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) and its heirs – the so-called criminal bands, or BACRIMs – as the real terrorists. This is due to the subjective nature of terrorism. More than being an objective reality, what society understands as terrorism is constructed through discourse. In the line of the critical discourse analysis approach to the subject, terrorism is here understood not as an objective, freestanding, self-evident phenomenon, but as a discursive construction that, although loaded with assumptions