Democracy and Radicalisation

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Democracy and Radicalisation

• Keywords for our times?

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Raymond Williams 1976

• Keywords

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Zeitgeist

• Meanings reflecting the times
• The Last Enemy (BBC2 Sundays)
• Ive been away four years and everything has
  changed.

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Background to my research

• The borders between langue and parole (or system
  and use).
• Is this a real distinction?
• How can we operate without a system?
• How can a system both be stable and change over
  time?
• Do we need the system to understand new forms and
  structures?

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Emergent meaning

• Previous studies
• 1. The meaning of water during the 1995
  Yorkshire water shortage.
• 2. The nature of the apology according to news
  coverage of Tonys Blairs apology for the Iraq
  war.
• 3. The creation of opposites in context.

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This project keywords

• Words which seem to acquire positive or negative
  connotation in particular political climates and
  become absolute and assumed good or bad.
• e.g. choice
• radicalisation
• democracy
• extremism

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Theoretical assumptions

• That texts can have meaning to some extent
• That such meaning may be ideological, either
  reflecting the dominant ideologies of society or
  reflecting a minority view that is being
  fostered
• That readers are to a greater or lesser extent
  potentially influenced by this ideology.

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Pilot Study

• Newspaper articles from ten year period 1998
  2007
• All articles from 5 newspapers Daily Mail, The
  Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The Times.
• Focussing on choice, democracy, radicalisation
  and extremism
• Quantitative do they increase in frequency?

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Raw data
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Normalised by number of articles
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Qualitative study

• Methodology
• Extract all occurrences of words with context
  (concordances)
• Examine all occurrences for their semantic
  prosody (regular collocation)
• Examine all occurrences for their grammatical
  properties
• Examine all occurrences for their semantic
  properties

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Semantic prosody (Louw)

• Not part of the denotation of a word, but like
  other connotations, associated with the word by
  frequency of co-occurrence.
• E.g. radicalisation of Muslim youth

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Grammatical properties

• Many possibilities here, including
• Determiners and adjectives
• e.g. social democracy, a democracy
• Grammatical role (Actor, Goal etc)
• e.g. democracy is
• the US will bring democracy to

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Semantic properties

• e.g. is the verbal origin of radicalisation
  evident in the context ?
• Is democracy presented as a single, unified
  concept?
• Are they measurable?
• What metaphors are used?
• Are opposites (or synonyms) being constructed?

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Democracy and radicalisation - results

• Based on a comparison of only part of the
  available data from June of 1998 and June of
  2007.
• To see whether there is any discernible
  difference between the two years
• To assess the contextual meaning of these words
  at these two times

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Radicalisation

• Nominalisation
• Process presented as noun
• e.g. transform (v) ? transformation
• No Actor/Goal
• e.g. She transformed the room
• It was a transformation

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Radicalisation 2

• Nominalisation
• Process presented as noun
• e.g. radicalise (v) ? radicalisation
• No Actor/Goal
• e.g. Poverty radicalised the young Muslim
• Muslim radicalisation (is increasing)

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Radicalisation 2007

• Goals mainly young, mainly Muslim
• Actors mainly absent
• Determiners mainly definite articles (the)

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Radicalisation 2007 contd.

• the radicalisation of Arab youth
• the radicalisation of young men and women
• in more extremism, radicalisation of Muslim
  students
• the radicalisation of Palestinian society.
• to the radicalisation of the anti-G8 scene.
• the radicalisation of parts of the Muslim
  community.
• the radicalisation of the British people
• the radicalisation of Russia's Muslims
• The radicalisation of students by Islamist groups
  on campus

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Radicalisation 2007 - possessives, self-evident
meaning and equivalence

• His radicalisation
• his brother's long process of radicalisation.
• modern Islam's radicalisation
• a sign of radicalisation
• in danger of radicalisation.
• the "fight against radicalisation and extremism".

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Apposition

• The failure to engage and address the needs of
  modern Islam could result in more extremism,
  radicalisation of Muslim students, as well as a
  growing mistrust between Muslims and secular
  society, the director of the Markfield Institute
  of Higher Education claims

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Radicalisation (1998)

• Some indefinite articles (a/an)
• More Actors evident (i.e. the causes of
  radicalisation)
• No possessives
• Emphasis on process rather than product
• Not unequivocally negative connotation

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Radicalisation (1998)

• Over the past two weeks, thanks to the Decane
  offensive and the refugee crisis, there has been
  a radicalisation of Kosovo society at almost all
  levels.
• The strongest stimulus to the radicalisation of
  the Macedonian Albanians will be a constant
  pressure-cooker of revolt and suppression in
  Kosovo.
• The deep aftershocks resulted in a new
  radicalisation of the nationalist community,
  which in turn led to a record Sinn Fein vote in
  the 1997 general election
• The three victims were buried yesterday in their
  home village, Dura, in a sea of green flags,
  showing allegiance to the radical Islamic
  movement Hamas - a vivid gauge of the steady
  radicalisation of the West Bank in the year since
  the collapse of the peace process.

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Radicalisation (1998 contd.)

• The politicisation of the cartoon? The
  radicalisation of American mainstream movies? A
  lovely idea if it were true, but it isn't.
• The VW Lupo a radicalisation of the SEAT Arosa
  which comes with the customary Volkswagen
  trimmings
• "The English have always considered themselves as
  subjects, subordinate to the Establishment,
  rather than citizens. What happened this decade
  changed all that. It is still continuing, with
  the re-radicalisation of students, a formerly
  active body which had been dormant for 30 years."

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Types of democracy 1998

• the Tories' conversion to 'Scottish democracy'.
• in most enlightened democracies.
• a modern democracy with a market economy.
• a property owning democracy
• in a liberal democracy
• popular democracy

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Types of democracy 2007

• We have transformed ourselves () into an
  inventive and fairly rich social democracy.
• the Polish gay community learned to hide under
  communist rule and is continuing to hide in the
  new democracy.
• Gordon Brown wants to encourage a "home-owning
  democracy".
• Our leaders might be keen to impose Western
  democracy on oil-rich nations in the Middle East,
• to create a "world-class democracy
• Finding out what goes on in open democracies?

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Metaphors democracy as organism

• Local democracy is dying on its feet (1998)
• Other cancers in our democracy threaten more
  obviously (1998)
• There can be few issues more central to the
  health of a democracy. (1998)
• Equally, we believe our democracy would be
  healthier if churchmen spoke out more often on
  issues of principle and morality. (2007)
• one of the world's youngest democracies is being
  ravaged by widespread gang violence (2007)

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Collocates of democracy

• peace and democracy and that violence is
  genuinely being given up for good. (1998)
• principles of non-violence and democracy (1998)
• human rights and democracy. (1998)
• the principles of freedom, democracy and justice
  around the globe. (2007)

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The quality of democracy(1998)

• leaving our democracy less stable and a weak
  government inevitable
• a need for more democracy,
• Pakistan's democracy is a corrupt shambles
• Compare
• India is a democracy.

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Democracy as a unified concept

• He said "Whoever voted to get rid of democracy?
• we still have the nerve to sell ourselves as a
  democracy to the world.
• Mr Blair challenged African leaders to embrace
  democracy in return for increased investment.
• On the contrary, democracy demands that
  minorities must receive protection,

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The opposites of democracy 1998

• De-regulation applies to money, but not to you.
  As business and capital shrug off the remaining
  constraints of the post-war years, so the
  individual is confined to an ever-narrowing
  corridor of acceptable behaviour, at work, home,
  even in bed. In contrast to previous conformist
  social systems - like Scandinavian social
  democracy - there is no trade-off between
  shrinking personal liberty and economic security.
  The constraints on the person exist beside a
  financial system which believes that it is
  neither possible nor desirable to offer economic
  security and that those who fail to be
  competitive must be downsized

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The opposites of democracy 2007

• When did democracy end and racism start?
• proof that democracy and Islam can co-exist and a
  future member of the European Union

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References

• Jeffries, L. (2003) 'Not a drop to drink
  emerging meanings in local newspaper reporting of
  the 1995 water crisis in Yorkshire ', Text 23(4)
  513-38.
• Jeffries, L. (2007a) Textual Construction of the
  Female Body A Critical Discourse Approach .
  Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan.
• Jeffries, L. (2007b) Journalistic constructions
  of Blairs apology for the intelligence leading
  to the Iraq war in Sally Johnson and Astrid
  Ensslin (eds) Language in the Media
  Representations, Identities, Ideologies London
  Continuum.
• Louw, B. 1993 Irony in the Text or Insincerity
  in the Writer? The Diagnostic Potential of
  Semantic Prosodies, in M. Baker, G. Francis and
  E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds) Text and Technology. In
  Honour of John Sinclair, John Benjamins,
  Amsterdam
• Williams, R. (1976) Keywords Harmondsworth
  Penguin.