Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2011

This article discusses the relevance of discourse analytical approaches for a specific field of social inquiry in international political studies: the creation and transformation of international norms. It starts from the assumption that contemporary discourse scholarship in the discipline of International Relations is a vibrant yet still under-explored area of social constructivist research. The field is still characterized by a rather sharp rift between postmodern notions of discourse on the one hand, and more pragmatic, positivist studies on communicative rationality on the other. By exploring the transformation of powerful global discourses on childhood and children’s rights during the negotiations leading to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the article will argue that for a fuller understanding of such norm-changing events a two-dimensional perspective on discourse is essential which combines elements from both branches of IR discourse research. In discussing this case, the article will show that the concept of discourse can both serve to identify historical meaning-patterns and social conventions (in this case attached to the child and the phase of childhood) and, at the same time, highlight the real-time communicative processes and communicative strategies among a distinct set of policy-makers in the course of which such meaning conventions are transformed. Following the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the approach stresses the value of incorporating the ‘social environment’ into discourse analysis, since it allows identifying specific sets of socially shared semantics within the institutional setting as well as to account for specific interpersonal dynamics and exclusionary practices that expand and transform these semantics.

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, also known as the “Wall Street Bailout,” authorized the allocation of $700B US to address the financial crisis of 2008. The “bailout” did not pass easily; members of the United States Congress reported feedback from angry constituents urging them to vote against it, and the measure failed its first vote in the House of Representatives. This essay focuses on metaphors used in public discourse to describe the “bailout” in the ten days between its introduction to Congress and its failure in the House. Advocates of the economic stimulus plan relied on metaphors that evacuated human agency, portraying the plan as an emergency measure necessitated by crises such as illness, natural disasters, and mechanical failures. Opponents to the plan extended and modified the administration’s metaphors to communicate a critique of the transfer of federal funds to private entities for the good of the public.

Religion and politics have a complicated relationship in the Arab world. Interdiscursivity within political speeches between religious and political discourses is a manifestation of this complexity. This article argues that this sort of interdiscursivity imposes hard restrictions on the responses of Muslim addressees. Muslims’ responses to Islamic sacred texts are inherently restricted because disagreement with divine texts amounts to heresy. Accordingly, their responses to political speeches that present themselves as semi-religious texts are highly restricted as well. I will analyze a speech by the late Egyptian president Sadat to show how potential and actual responses could be controlled by creating intertextual links with the Qur’an and adopting the genre of Islamic religious sermons. I combine analytical tools from critical discourse analysis and what I refer to as “addressee rhetoric” to investigate the relationship between interdiscursivity and addressee response.

From 1999–2008, New Zealand’s Labour-led coalition Government fashioned a specific discourse of globalisation and the nation. Within a representation of globalisation as a realm of hostile competition, New Zealanders were increasingly addressed as contributors to an urgently necessary and meaningfully shared national response. While there was nothing particularly unusual about this discourse, the history and structure of New Zealand society meant that its political and ethical implications could be seen particularly clearly in this setting. This article analyses three key features of the government’s discourse — its future-focussed orientation, its heavy use of imperative terms and its careful use of the first person plural — and shows how they led logically to a reductive address and positioning of individuals and sub-state groups. Drawing on elements of CDA and critical political theory, it explores how the discursive construction of a shared (national) purpose served an anti-political function by marginalising divergent perspectives, including the historically-based claims of the indigenous Maori.

This paper attempts to show how social and political crises are constructed, represented/mediated in the Nigerian print media news headlines. Nigeria’s leading newsmagazines and newspapers namely The News, Newswatch, Tell, The Guardian and The Punch are selected for the study. From a corpus of thirty-two news headlines being the publications of the above news media between 2000 and 2006, fifteen headlines and their overlines covering the years that marked the end of military rule and the consolidation of democratic government in Nigeria are purposively selected and analyzed within the framework of the systemic model and critical linguistics. The study shows that socio-political crises have been frequent in Nigeria and that the much anticipated recovery associated with democracy has so far eluded the country. In fact the country has witnessed more social crises, national disasters and ethnic violence in the seven years of civil government than at other times. The study also shows that news headlines — an integral part of media discourse, is an instrument for molding social actions, attitudes and perceptions and are also used as an ideological tool for social criticism. Some of the headlines however, exaggerated the crises and indeed misinformed the general public about the identities and activities of certain people as well as the state of security in Nigeria.

This article discusses the relationship between the social and medical models of disability and between the academic and NGO communities in that field. Interviews with professionals from Norwegian disability NGOs show that while they share some of the political goals of the social model, they have a somewhat narrow understanding of the model’s critical potential. A false dichotomy has emerged in NGO discourse: The medical model, which originated as a negative construct within the social model, is reinterpreted as a legitimate conceptual alternative. This hinders dialogue between academe and the NGO community, and hampers the critical potential of the NGOs. In order to eliminate the dichotomy, it is necessary to develop the social model more extensively in discourse contexts outside the academic field.