Discourse Analysis

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Pages: 12

Terrorism is most notorious political phenomenon to define in scholarship due to serious disagreement over its theoretical and practical manifestations. Arguably,

Terrorism is not a measureable phenomenon because it rests in emotive interpretations; one’s interpretation of terror may be another’s interpretation of struggle for liberty, same proposition might be true for social revolts against dictatorial regimes. Terrorism is not only a political but highly politicized concept today. It has political, psychological, economic, strategic, sociological, historical, ideological, and moral connotations which cannot be discarded from the definition. The phenomenon of terror has an intrinsic goal that is conditioned to ‘instill fear indirectly’

Discourse analysis helps to understand language and social meanings in a meaningful way. It helps to understand the way in which discourse constructs the legitimacy and meaning of social and political developments. Discourse includes corpus of concepts, ideas and all possible sets of social interactions through which meanings take birth in societal interaction and help make sense of any given phenomenon (Halperin and Heath
In his view, critical discourse analysis (CDA) helps to link social discourse with power i.e. language and power. CDA asserts that language is not simply a mode of communication but a mode of action. It forms acts and happenings in the real world through the power of discourse. It depends who uses it and how successfully he utilizes or manipulates it. For instance, people use language to promise, threaten, sympathize, defend, insult and demand. Language makes evidence, creates facts, construct realities through contracts, legal relationships, attitudes, and many other states of affairs.

CDA scholars theorize that discursive power or control over discourse constitutes social power and hence a cycle of hegemony and dominance by controlling the means of discourse production which keeps on reproducing the same discourse with various tags. Arguably, one can develop an argument on the lines of CDA that whoever controls public discourse, controls public minds and hence, political and social