Islamic militancy in Bangladeshi newspaper editorials: A discourse analysis

Abstract

The representation of a religio-political identity by the 'civil society' of a country is a complex act intersecting multiple spheres such as the sociocultural, economic, and particularly partisan understanding of religion, politics, and culture dividing the society (and media houses) who inflect, invent, and articulate novel identity for the people of the republic. This study is about how the discursive field of 'Islamic militancy' is constructed in Bangladeshi news (print) media. The researchers analyzed 21 texts of editorials published in the month of December 2005 in six Bangladeshi newspapers (in Bangla and English). The analysis has been done following a hermeneutic interpretivist perspective, widely practised in discourse analytical studies. With the rise of militant Islam the faceless militants get their pictures published, and their names appear in national dailies Ϫ either through complete or vague identification of doers. The analysis shows that most of the editors produced a secular democratic response to the actions perpetrated by the militants. However, their attempt to occupy the contents of the empty signifier of Islam is heavily inflected by their religious predilections; hence, the fight perhaps is never going to be in favor of the secular-democratic politics that the editors aim to support.

Deciphering Islamic theocracy and tourism: Conceptualization, context, and complexities

“…Such an approach is regarded as extremely valuable in researching organizations and governance structures because within an interpretivist view tourism organizations should be understood “as objectifications of an intersubjective, social process of constructing realities” (Yanow & Ybema, : 46). Given the role of Islam as a form of meaning making which, as this paper also suggests, has implications for the construction of tourism governance, organizations, and associated policies, it is therefore not surprising that the approach has been utilized in a number of studies of political discourse and theocracy (Charney, ; Elie, ; Holliday, ; Khan & Govindasamy, ; Moks, ; Zirakzadeh, ), including in a tourism context (Hamza, ). Although it has been suggested that interpretivism's focus on subject meaning makes it impossible to generalize (see Charney, , with respect to this debate in the context of human rights), we support William's (2000) observation that the approach is able to make “moderatum generalizations,” that is where aspects of a situation can be seen to be instances of a broader recognizable set of features.…”

Representation of 212 rallies in the Jakarta Post articles: A hybridity of CDA and SFL analysis

“…Moreover, previous CDA studies have employed the analytical tools drawn from SFG. Those studies were conducted by Li (2010) by using transitivity and lexical cohesion, by Montes et al (2014) by employing referring expressions including anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric references, theme, and rheme, and lexical density, and by Khan and Govindasamy (2011) by analysing various grammatical resources including articles, proper nouns, pronouns, possessives, demonstratives, etc. Accordingly, CDA has an allegiance to SFG that provides costly analytical tools for the former.…”