Asian Research Thesis Index

Abstract

Since September 11, 2001 the world has drastically changed as a result of catastrophic happenings in New York and Washington, DC, and the response of the Bush administration. Global security politics we witness today is largely constructed in the 9/11 ‘context’ and socially and discursively mediated ‘conduct’. The social and discursive ‘interpretation’ and ‘construction’ of 9/11 events in ‘legal and moral language’ triggered the US right of self-defense to wage war on global non-state actor al-Qaeda, its ‘evil’ leadership and sympathizer, Taliban regime, in Afghanistan. Following the US invasion of Afghanistan, then President Bush issued his ‘doctrine’ to fight against all ‘evil’ and ‘rogue’ regimes. In his subsequent speeches, he declared Saddam’s regime as the biggest threat to the US, due to its shared hatred with al-Qaeda against US values and way of life. This dissertation, by employing various theoretical currents of post-positivist tradition like identity theory, securitization theory and discourse theory, helps to make sense of the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. After conducting a discourse analysis of Bush’s war on Iraq narrative and The New York Times editorials, the present study seeks to substantiate that war is a social and discursive phenomenon; an outcome of socially prevalent and publically acceptable hegemonic narrative. The present research maintains that foreign policies are social and discursive performances grounded in language of identity, security and morality rather than objective or given political realities. Finally, it is agued that hegemonic foreign policy discourses are socially constructed which entail naturalized power relations therefore, they can and should be denaturalized by alterative consturctions.

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