This is an excerpt from Critical Terrorism Studies: A Dictionary by Lee Jarvis and Alice Martini. Available in all good book stores, and via free download from E-International Relations

The concept of discourse has two different, but related, meanings within the social sciences. Broad conceptions of the term – associated with social theorists like Ernesto Laclau (see Critchley and Marchart 2024) – approach discourse as meaningful social structures that contain material things and our ideas about them. Education, for instance, would count as a discourse in this understanding, as would the Cold War or the war on terror. Narrower understandings of discourse – associated with the field of linguistics – tend to use the term as a synonym or near-synonym for written or spoken language or related symbolic systems. To continue our above examples, discourse here might refer to the speech of a teacher in a classroom, or the words of political leaders in the post-1945 rivalry between the US and Soviet Union.

Much critical terrorism studies work deals explicitly with the concept of discourse, often with special attention to the deconstruction of dominant or hegemonic constructions of terrorism (Holland 2016). One review article, however, found that work published in the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism tended to draw far more frequently on a narrower understanding of discourse as spoken and written language than the thicker understanding of discourse as a meaningful social structure (Herring and Stokes 2011). This may result from the desire within CTS to challenge representations of ‘terrorism’ in the language of political elites and powerful actors such as media corporations.

There are many examples of CTS work on discourse, many of which take explicit or implicit inspiration from Jackson’s (2005) unpacking of the language used within the George W. Bush administration’s war on terror. By focusing on political discourse in countries such as Morocco (Bartolucci 2010), Nigeria (Chukwuma 2022), and Turkey (Barrinha 2011), such work presents opportunity for comparative analysis with more frequently explored case studies such as the UK and the US. Research in this area often grapples with themes such as the construction of political identities – like the ‘terrorist’ – in spoken and written language, productions of current risk and future threat, and the explanation and justification of political actions such as counterterrorism campaigns and their consequences.

CTS work also, importantly,........

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