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As a practice of meaning making in society, discourse points to important dimensions of social and historical change. This chapter discusses examples of discourse research on social transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. It shows how methods from linguistic, semiotic, and cultural theory can be used to account for a changing social order (e.g., how change is narrated in Russia during the perestroika period or how Eastern Germans are represented in Western media discourse after the reunification). Against a background in Discourse Studies, we put special emphasis on macrosociological views of discursive change, which one can find, for instance, in Foucault’s power/knowledge approach, Laclau/Mouffian hegemony analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis. The chapter concludes by pointing out the strengths as well as the limits of discourse research, which is based on the idea that language not only represents social realities but, through representation, also contributes to creating them.

Chapter One outlines the analytical techniques that were used to explore the EU’s ‘fight against terrorism’ discourse. The chapter contends that language and identity are significant in that they help to construct the ‘fight against terrorism’ discourse, which it is argued makes the practice of EU counter-terrorism policy possible. The chapter considers three theoretical concepts that underpin this investigation into EU counter-terrorism policy: discourse, representation and securitisation. The chapter outlines the methodological approach used to conduct this analysis of the ‘fight against terrorism’: a three-step process of discourse analysis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the analysis was itself completed and why various texts were selected for analysis.

The TRUST framework represents a radical challenge both to existing notions of untruthfulness and to the relevance of this topic to language research. This conclusion to the book All Bullshit and Lies? returns to the three central propositions of the TRUST framework concerning the scope, ethical import, and discursive analysis of untruthfulness, and teases out some of their implications, limitations, and possible future directions. It then takes up the challenge of the relevance of this topic to language research and considers the possibility of an interdisciplinary Ethical Discourse Analysis. Finally, the potential impact of the framework is discussed in terms of the fight-back against epistemic partisanship, the judgment of knowledge on purely partisan grounds. It focuses particularly on applications to education, fostering a greater awareness of the economy of truthfulness, the training of journalists, fact-checkers, and advocates, and the regulation of political advertising and social media.

The second part of the discussion of humor in conversation focuses on the functions of humor in conversation and thus has more of a discourse analysis (DA) focus. The work of major DA scholars in humor is examined. Conversational humor is examined in several settings, including conversations among friends, medical encounters, and the workplace. Work in corpus-based DA is also discussed. Several issues in DA of humor are addressed, including how do speakers negotiate the humorous intention, how they identify humor, how humor turns may be sustained (last several turns) and finally cases in which humor fails.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of media discourse in Latvia, with a specific focus on the country’s Russian-language press. Firstly this section explores the means by which the media have attempted to construct a sub-national group of Russian-speakers in Latvia, and to what extent they have managed to imbue this imagined community with certain characteristics and traits. Secondly, a comprehensive critical discourse analysis of the Russian-language dailies Chas and Vesti Segodnia is conducted. Specific attention is paid to how journalistic elites respond to the various ‘Latvian’ discourses of statehood and nationalism which have been identified in earlier chapters. It is demonstrated that Russian-speaking discourses are not simply ‘anti-Latvian’. Instead the analysis also reveals the emergence of a more positive Russian-speaking identity which is increasingly premised upon the acceptance of various Latvian narratives and discourses.

The chapter examines observations of interactions as a means to understanding people’s experiences of health care. Focusing on non-participant observations of naturally occurring interactions, it considers how patients’ experiences in medical consultations may be understood through observations of the ‘work’ carried out in consultations. It outlines different approaches to data analysis, and the strengths and limitations of observational research. Different approaches to data collection are considered along with associated rationales and implications for analysis. It assesses how findings from observational research can contribute to improving patients’ experiences and inform and critique public policy. It concludes by examining the ways in which links between observational research and other research approaches can be made with the aim of improving understandings of people’s experiences of health care.

The introduction outlines the overall argument of the book that narratives in international politics cannot be freely changed or manipulated by narrators, but that narratives have to conform or at least connect to previously existing ones. The acceptance of narratives is contingent on the intertextuality of the narratives being told and those embedded amongst the audience. The introduction briefly embeds narrative analysis in a wider field of discursive approaches in IR, and then elaborates on the role of the media and cultural artefacts in the articulation of stories in international politics. Finally, the introduction outlines the structure of what is to follow in the remaining empirical chapters on German narratives of pirates in Somalia, British narratives of rebels in Libya and US narratives of private military and security companies in Iraq.

This is the first of four chapters that conduct a discourse analysis of the conceptual framework within which UNHCR has made sense of, contextualized and presented the problems it faces and the policies it employs. This chapter dissects UNHCR’s official discourse over the three decades from its inception in 1951 to 1980. It shows a discourse in continual evolution, but which adheres to strict interpretations of a non-political, neutral and non-operational ethos. This discourse effectively constricted UNHCR’s actions and ensured that the agency remained small, anonymous and relatively uncontroversial in this period. It is a very different discourse from the expansive security discourse adopted by the refugee agency after the end of the Cold War.

The introduction challenges the widely held view in Western scholarship that the supposed “militarization” of the Cuban Revolution is key to understanding its longevity. While the pervasiveness of the armed forces in revolutionary Cuba is hard to refute, this chapter argues that it is the Revolution’s guerrilla origins, rather than its “militarism,” that partly explains its survival and the political authority of its leaders. Specifically, it is the promotion of a guerrilla ethos in the Revolution’s official, hegemonic discourse that, through the creation of a new political culture since 1959, has afforded historic legitimacy to the ex-guerrilla fighters in power. This chapter explains how the author, through discourse analysis, draws on the works of Michel Foucault and Norman Fairclough to examine a range of texts that span the Revolution’s six decades in power. This analysis reveals a consistent endorsement of the values and attributes associated with the guerrilla fighter, a phenomenon introduced here as guerrillerismo.

In addition to providing a summary, the conclusion offers thoughts on how to take the study forward. In particular, there is some tentative analysis of texts which makes use of discourse analysis. The conclusion also discusses the use of autobiography and oral history as means to capture memories of teaching and learning history. Finally, the conclusion returns to the contemporary politics of history teaching and assesses these debates within the context of discussion on citizenship and national identity.

This chapter covers the 2000s and documents UNHCR’s retreat from a security discourse. This retreat is not complete: security retains a place in the agency’s discourse, but only in discrete areas of concern, especially staff and refugee safety in an operative post-9/11 environment characterized by shrinking ‘humanitarian space’. The concept of security no longer provided an overarching discursive logic for UNHCR and was seldom used in sweeping statements regarding the nature of displacement challenges or the refugee agency’s own raison d’être. Instead, UNHCR reoriented its discourse towards the concept of protection, aiming to be the UN’s protection agency, not just for refugees but for a range of vulnerable populations. Towards the end of the 2000s, the retreat from the language of security became a conscious discursive campaign to take security considerations out of displacement and humanitarian politics.

This chapter offers an account of how “figures” are discursively produced and socially fabricated through practices that sit between distinct but overlapping domains of power/knowledge. Through an extended reading of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his 1975 lecture course, Abnormal, this chapter takes up the figures of the “delinquent” and the “convicted offender”–paradigmatic figures of the rehabilitative ideal in penology–demonstrating how they are fabricated to manage the tensions and contradictions between discursive spheres of justice and the penitentiary apparatus. This reading is extended to consider the figure of the felon, who, though the practice of disenfranchisement, should be understood as a similar fabrication, managing the tensions that emerge in the unacknowledged overlap between discourses of punishment and citizenship.

Chapter one outlines in detail a method of narrative analysis which is to be employed in the following three empirical chapters on pirates, rebels and PMSCs. It begins by reflecting on the concept of narrative in Literary Studies and Narratology and outlines some of the key elements which distinguish a narrative from other forms of representation. This includes the notion of a setting in which the story unfolds, the characterization of actors in the story and the idea of temporal and most importantly causal emplotment which elaborates on how events, settings, and characters are connected to each other. The chapter then imbeds the narrative elements of setting, characterization and emplotment into key constructivist theoretical foundations including the social construction of reality (setting), the constitution of identity (characterization) and the co-constitution of agents and structure (emplotment). The final part of the chapter turns to the genre of romance and, from the existing literature on romanticism, indicates some of the narrative elements of a typically romantic story, including an exotic and emotional setting, a brave, heroic yet human character and an adventure emploted as a struggle for an ideal in an asymmetrical conflict against a more powerful and unjust order.

UNHCR’s official discourse changed swiftly and substantially in the early 1990s. The refugee agency began to describe itself as a global security actor, a part of the UN’s international security mechanism whose activities would help resolve the political and security problems created by refugee movements. Instead of avoiding international politics, UNHCR advocated a proactive and ‘holistic’ international ‘comprehensive security’ approach to deal with the root causes of displacement, even when that meant UNHCR itself taking charge of humanitarian operations in the midst of war, providing ‘preventive protection’ to war affected populations as well as refugees. This chapter documents UNHCR’s adoption and adaption of a security discourse. This discourse gained strength in the optimistic ‘New World Order’ period after the first Gulf War; became redefined as ‘human security’ after several humanitarian disasters in the mid-1990s; before faltering towards the end of the decade.