Arguments for exception in US security discourse

Hunter, Duncan; MacDonald, Malcolm N

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.

Citation

Hunter, D., & MacDonald, M. N. (2017). Arguments for exception in US security discourse. Discourse and Society, 28(5), 493-511. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517710978

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 10, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Jun 9, 2017
• Publication Date: 2017-09
• Deposit Date: Nov 24, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 9, 2017
• Journal: Discourse & society
• Print ISSN: 0957-9265
• Electronic ISSN: 1460-3624
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 28
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 493-511
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517710978
• Keywords: Security; Critical discourse analysis; Argument schemes; Topoi; Corpus analysis; Discourse; 9/11; Agamben
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/445594
• Publisher URL: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0957926517710978
• Additional Information: Authors' accepted manuscript of article published in: Discourse & society, 2017. v.28, issue 5.