Discourse analysis

Social reality : produced and made concrete through discourses

"The EU and the Syria crisis -

A comparative analysis of the european response in Turkey, Lebanon and in Europe"

Reminders

Discourses must be located in a social/historical context

Research : To what extent is the European response (declaratory VS operational policy dimensions) to the Syria crisis euro-centered ?

“The things that make up the social world – including our very identities – appear out of discourse” (Phillips & Hardy, 2002, 2)

• Meta-methodology: positivist epistemology & post-positivist ontology (Battistella, 2006)

Migration crisis: 3 cases study (MDSD)

• Lebanon: 1,2 m. syrian refugees (~25% of the population + 30% non registered, hardened host state policy + Palestinians)

• Turkey: 2,6 m. syrian refugees (~3,5% of the population, 75 times larger country)

• Europe: 897,645 syrian refugees (Dec. 2015), (~1,77% of the population)

LACLAU & MOUFFE: "Hegemonic articulation"

Discourse :

“Interrelated set of texts, and the practices of their production, dissemination, and reception, that brings an object into being”

(Parker, 1992)

Importance of the context

• Supposition: theoretical field dominated by a category of articulation

• Discursive structure as articulatory practice that constitutes and organizes social relations

-> Articulation seeks to define meaning within a discursive field in order to uncover a discourse domination

• Refusal of essentialism - Precarious character of identity

• Social context: Securitization as a "crisis"// securing the conditions of existence

• Deconstruct the Critical conjecture: "situations perceived as crises, consequently to the failure of a policy, but provoked as well by external events"

(MARCUSSEN, « Constructing Europe? The Evolution of Nation-State Identities », 2001, 103)

Different approaches on DA, along two axes (text-context, constructivist-critical)

• Methods of data collection:

In-depth interview, participant observation

• Data material:

interview transcripts, policy papers

• Methods of analysis:

Critical discourse analysis (//Genealogy), process-tracing (//"meaning-tracing": meaning-making processes)

Different views on context

FOUCAULT:

Gramscian concept of hegemony

• The historical bloc represents the basis of a stable society.
• The hegemony of the dominant class saves its position in linking institutions, social relations and ideas.
• The dominant class needs to connect to different political actors

--> They need to do compromises with other actors to establish alliances with them to maintain power.

Discursive structure is not a merely "cognitive" or "contemplative" entity; it is an articulatory practice which constitutes and organizes social relations" (LACLAU)

Aim :

-Deconstructing the societal , institutional and political environment giving sense to to policies

- Decrypting in their operationalization :

1- the tensions between

- Short and long term interests

- Values and realpolitik

2- crystallization of the security prism

Archaeology

Genealogy

Dialectics of the politicization and media coverage in a context of rising nationalism and right-wing trends

-> Broader web of beliefs

"Rhetorical trap"

Archaeology

Genealogy

Identity issues at stake:

Contingent, relational and changing (...but!)

• "strict analysis of discourse"

• Discourses are formed or structured by the existing rules inherent to a certain social context

• To understand discourse, it must be put in a certain context, in a certain time and place, with a certain ideology

• Focus not on meaning and values, but on 'domination'

• 'Each society has its own 'regime of truth' according to which we distinguish the true from the false

• auto-perception of the EU
• intersubjective perceptions

// Role theory and Structuration theory - interaction between significations, norms, values and powers in the construction of relations"

-> Internalized perceptions and subconscious constraints

• Back to the complexity of dialogues between Europe and Arab-Muslim societies

// Societies"constituted around a fundamental asymmetry existing between a growing proliferation of differences -a surplus of the "social"- and the difficulties encountered by any discourse attempting to fix those differences as moments of a stable articulatory structure" (LACLAU, 82)

Genealogy

• 'Genealogy as an overview': looks beyond ideology
• Mistrust identities in history; they are only masks"
• What conditions, limits, institutionalizes discourse?
• Focus on power, and 'discursive regimes'
• "The universals of our humanity are revealed as the result of the contingent emergence of imposed interpretations"

Discourse analysis