Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 11, Issue 4, 2012

The concept of a good death is central to contemporary discourses on death and dying; it is also frequently used in contexts of end-of-life decision-making. We argue that in and through the medical-revivalist discourse, which challenges the idea that curative treatment is necessary beneficial and constructs death as something familiar, a good death is discursively organised around two nodal clusters: control, autonomy and dignity, and awareness and heroism. Moreover, we also argue that — within this framework of the medical-revivalist discourse — political contestation exists over the articulation of these nodal points. Especially two social movements, the right to die movement and the palliative care movement, have been at the forefront of the political struggle over the good death. In this article, we use a discourse-theoretical approach to develop an analytical model of the construction of the good death and the present-day political struggles over these constructions. This model then allows us to identify and analyse the constructions of the good death in the North Belgian newspaper coverage on three 2008 euthanasia cases. Using discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) (Carpentier & De Cleen, 2007), our analysis shows that the articulations of the right to die variation are privileged in the newspaper coverage. There is a celebration of the extraordinariness and heroism of the dying subject who autonomously chooses on how and when to die and who preferably dies in a state of full awareness so that he can die with dignity. This privileging is often accompanied by the symbolic annihilation of many other ways of dying. Consequentially, the richness of ways of dying that characterize contemporary social realities becomes curtailed in the analysed newspaper representations.

Consociational democracy theory attributes an important role to the subgroup elites. They have to build the bridges between the subgroups and govern together in a divided and segmented society. This need for an accommodating elite has been criticized — among others — for its unrealistic expectations. A compromising attitude can hardly be expected when the subgroup leaders need to remain acceptable and legitimate among their rank and file. Post-electoral guarantees for power sharing are not enough to ensure real and functioning power sharing. In this article we focus on Belgium — a textbook example of consociational democracy — and more in particular on the difficult post-election period of 2007. We analyze newspaper interviews with both moderate and radical Belgian political leaders and illustrate how their discourse is torn between loyalty to the rank and file and the necessity of consociational power sharing. A combination of critical discourse and framing analysis shows how this representation is built up linguistically through an interplay of names used to describe oneself, the specific use of the pronouns of the first person plural and consistent metaphors.

In this paper I investigate the lack of public participation and consequent democratic deficit on the issue of the death penalty in the United Kingdom (henceforth the U.K.). I critically analyse the institutions and practices of the U.K. polity, and several parliamentary contributions to the death penalty discourses around abolition in 1964/65 and in 1994, the last debate to date on the issue in the U.K. parliament. Consequently, I argue that a range of causal tendencies operating in the polity are responsible for the lack of public participation and hence democratic deficit on this and other issues. And while I am sympathetic with present abolitionist penal policy, I nevertheless argue that these tendencies constitute dominatory practice.

This article focuses on the final report of Lord Butler’s review of British intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), specifically on its treatment of the accuracy of the use of intelligence on Iraqi WMD in a government dossier published in September 2002 ahead of the 2003 Iraq war. In the report, the demonstration of the accuracy of the “September Dossier” hinges on the insertion of tables that compare side-by-side quotations from this document and from intelligence assessments. The analysis of the textual and visual methods by which the report is written reveals how the logic of the comparative tables is missed in the Butler report: the logic of these tables requires that the comparison between quotations from the two documents should be performed at the level of their details but the Butler report performs its comparison only at a broad and general level.

In this paper I examine some of the properties of the speeches by former U.S. President George W. Bush framing the issue of terrorism as the most pressing menace humanity is facing and some of the consequences of the selective appropriation of the discourse on terrorism initially instantiated by Bush. The theoretical framework for the analysis is a multidisciplinary Critical Discourse Analysis approach relating discursive and socio-political aspects of U.S. presidential discourses on terrorism in the Bush era. Parallel to an analysis of common characteristics of political discourse, such as ‘us’ versus ‘other’ representations, the device of over/less characterisation, hyperboles and repetitions, attention is also directed towards the socio-political effects deriving from the ways in which ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ have been represented by the presidential discourse on terrorism that condition the contemporary life of individuals and groups all around the world.

The aim of this study is to analyse cultural and social referential importance of the stereotypes of communists/communism in the anti-communist propaganda texts circulated in Turkey during the Cold War. The article displays the symbolism underlying anti-communist discourse by re-reading the propaganda material as texts that introduce the reader to ultimate anti-communist fantasies. The analyzed texts were mainly produced by one of the leading participants of anti-communist struggle, namely the Association for Fighting Communism in Turkey (AFCT) (Türkiye Komünizmle Mücadele Derneği, TKMD, 1963–1977), and its members. The article shows that the analyzed anti-communist propaganda creates mystification as a strategy and builds a narration in which temporal, spatial, and personal references are obscure. The article also shows that anti-communist propaganda operates on traditional dichotomies nature/culture, emotion/reason, and body/mind and that the images of communists/communism are constructed by appealing to a variety of animal species connoting “danger”; the unsocial connoting of the “absence of rules” and animality; and the woman of desire recalling the “immoral” in the popular imagination. It is argued that the texts are all interdiscursive thus allowing for the sexist, Islamist and nationalist arguments to be used as supportive subtopics while defending the anti-communist cause. The analysis also establishes intertextual relationship with the Nazi anti-Jewish and anti-communist discourse.

In this paper, I construct a linguistic framework for understanding contrasting conceptions of political contest. That framework is illustrated by applying it to the particular case of Luo of Kenya in the wider context of the country’s conflictual ethno-politics.The article, which rests on a conception of political contest as a structure of competition in which individuals and ethnic communities compete for political supremacy (over others, or at the expense of others), analyses selected instances of recent texts from online blogs, music and recorded public meetings. The article shows that, just like many other language communities, Luo key concepts and understandings emanate from its social and cultural institutions. Also, as those activities serve as source domains for other areas of social existence, including politics, the article argues that the conceptual metaphors deriving from frames such as POLITICAL CONTEST IS HUNTING/WAR/ WRESTLING/A FOOTBALL MATCH or POLITICAL CONTEST IS WOOING A WIFE are still common among the Luo today, even though some issues like hunting and war are no longer matters of everyday life. As the article argues, understanding the Luo Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) of political contest may be very useful in peace and conflict studies.