Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2017

Pride marches are increasingly common in the 'global South' and can be seen as signs of progress towards greater social acceptance of sexual minorities. Such movements often appropriate and mimic semiotic symbols and discursive frames visible in Pride movements in countries in the North, such as rainbow flags and the discourse of human rights. However, there is also a degree of recontextualisation of these symbols and frames in order to deal with specific local social, political, cultural and economic contexts. Though at different 'stages' of acceptance of non-heteronormative lifestyles, India and South Africa offer fruitful sites for comparative, qualitative research. In analysing the language of print media as a way of gauging how Pride movements are discursively constructed, the paper focuses on nominational and predicational strategies ( Reisigl and Wodak 2001 ) to critically analyse actor representations in a sample of articles from national newspapers from each country.

Academic debate about the anachronism of national borders is extensive. The general population, however, has been less keen to embrace the idea of a ‘postnational’ world. This paper offers evidence from focus groups with Australians suggesting that in some quarters talking beyond the nation is occurring. However, the ideology of the nation-state remains strong, and such talk is quickly shut down using a particular rhetorical device. This is ‘the principle/practical’ dichotomy, which insists that dropping national borders is impractical for a range of reasons, despite it perhaps being a valuable idea in principle. The paper explores the ways this occurs, using detailed critical discourse analysis. Practical objections are generally framed in terms of governance rather than cultural issues. However, practical examples of existing ‘no borders’ situations are used to make the counter-argument that a postnational world is possible.

The Welsh Assembly, a devolved legislature in the UK, and its executive the Welsh Government, have a distinctly intensive commitment to equality – emphasising universality with weighty obligations on public services. This article uses the ‘discourse-historical approach’ (DHA) to critically review an eleven-year social service reform strategy (produced in 2007), and to weigh up its emphasis on fiscal efficiency and universal equality. We refer to these competing priorities as ‘speeding up’ and ‘reaching out’, respectively. Our findings show an imbalance towards the former, largely sidelining the possible value of services to those currently under-served. The article discusses this mismatch in respect of the dominant policymaking framework of ‘New Public Management’ and its emphases on productivity, efficiency, and quantifiable accountability. We also show the value of DHA in analysing ‘fights for dominance’ – in this case between competing discourses within a flagship policy document.

The present paper proposes a CADS-based analysis of European Parliament speeches, by merging (C)DA theoretical constructs (inspired by Laclau and Mouffe 1985 ) and CL tools. In this fashion, the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus of Parliamentary Speeches Archive (ECPC) is examined along synchronic and diachronic, quantitative and qualitative lines, in an inductive study that commutes from the micro-text to the macro-context.

Torture, while internationally sanctioned, is not well-defined. This paper sets out a Minimal English definition of the crime of ‘torture’ in international law. The four elements of torture are: (1) infliction of severe pain and suffering (2) acting with intent (3) for a purpose (4) by the state. The connection between intention and outcome is considered in the light of presumptions. I then briefly consider the concept of ‘lawful sanctions’ and the UN Standard Minimum Rules that apply to the treatment of prisoners to establish a baseline against which allegations of torture can be measured. Finally, I argue that current regimes of British benefit sanctions, whereby social welfare payments are stopped, may in some cases constitute torture. This argument considers the effects of sanctions and the discourses and ideologies attached to social welfare claimants.

Islamic terrorism is arguably the biggest threat that western democracies are now facing. Using Membership Categorisation Analysis as a research methodology and transcripts of the recordings of the negotiations between law enforcement agencies and Mohammed Merah, a self-professed Islamic terrorist, the purpose of this paper is to analyse how an Islamic terrorist accounts for committing terrorist attacks. Taking an ethnomethodological stance, the analyses are rooted in Merah’s own practical reasoning, made visible through his identity work and the way in which he accounts for his actions and renders them intelligible as an act of Islamic terror. Findings indicate that Merah’s identity work points to a dichotomous (us and them) version of a religious and political world order in which an imagined de-territorialised Muslim community (the ummah) is being defended against the aggression of western democracies. Defence of this imagined community justifies global terrorist attacks against the enemies of Islam.