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Arguments for exception in US security discourse
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Hunter, Duncan and MacDonald, Malcolm (2017) Arguments for exception in US security discourse. Discourse and Society, 28 (5). pp. 493-511. doi:10.1177/0957926517710978 ISSN 1460-3624.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517710978
Abstract
In his influential State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben proposes that, even in apparently liberal western democracies, the state will routinely use the contingency of national emergency to suspend civil liberties and justify expansion of military and police powers. We investigated rhetorical strategies deployed in the web pages of US security agencies, created or reformed in the aftermath of the 9/11 events, to determine whether they present argumentation conforming to Agamben’s model. To expose rhetorical content, we examined strategies operating at two levels within our corpus. Argument schemes and underlying warrants were identified through close examination of systematically selected core documents. Semantic fields establishing themes of threat and danger were also explored, using automatic corpus tools to expose patterns of lexical selection established across the whole corpus. The study recovered evidence of rhetoric broadly consistent with the logic predicted by State of Exception theory, but also presented nuanced findings whose interpretation required careful re-appraisal of core ideas within Agamben’s work.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | J Political Science > JC Political theory | ||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Applied Linguistics | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Political science., War and emergency powers., National security -- United States., Critical discourse analysis, September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Discourse and Society | ||||||||
Publisher: | Sage | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1460-3624 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 1 September 2017 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 28 | ||||||||
Number: | 5 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 493-511 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1177/0957926517710978 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 11 April 2017 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 24 August 2017 | ||||||||
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