‘War on terrorism’ as a discursive battleground: Serbian recontextualization of G.W. Bush's discourse

Abstract

In different parts of the world the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been localized and negotiated by mainstream media and in other public discourses in rather diverse ways. This article explores how young Serbian intellectuals recontextualized G.W. Bush's ‘war on terrorism’ discourse in order to legitimize, retroactively, Serbian violence against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s. We go beyond Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, defined as representation of social events, and extend it to the notion of relocation of a discourse from its original context/practice to its appropriation within another context/practice. Our analysis shows that the informants recycle and appropriate the discourse of ‘the war on terrorism’ by using an analogy. They equate the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon with the former Yugoslav wars and they position and represent former Yugoslav Muslims as terrorists. Our informants continue to use the same principle of exclusion, celebrated by the US administration, extending the group of the ‘good’ (‘we’) to cover all ‘Western/European/Christians’, including the Serbs. The ‘evil’ (‘other’) group is represented as the ‘they’ group, encompassing all the ‘non-Western/non-European/non-Christian/Muslims’. Informants also appropriate the discourse by extending the meaning of the word ‘terrorism’ to all the violent acts carried out by Muslims regardless of the specificities of different politicalhistorical contexts.

Language and Civilian Deaths: Denying Responsibility for Casualties in the Gaza Conflict 2014

“…Hamas is again referred to as a “terrorist organization” and contrasted with Israel, presented as allied with “every democracy fighting terrorism.” This suggests there would be international consensus around Israel's responses and specifies the essential character of Israel as democracy and Hamas as terrorism (see Billig, ; Hodges, ; Leudar et al, ; Oddo, for similar practices in U.S. and U.K. leaders' speeches). Branding an opponent “terrorist,” as was done constantly by the spokespeople here, implies their grievance is illegitimate and can be ignored and that blame lies solely with them (Jackson, Jarvis, Gunning, & Smyth, ; see Erjavec & Volčič, for a Serbian example). Indeed, Hamas's condition for a ceasefire, the lifting of the blockade, was either ignored or minimized by all speakers.…”

Branding Post-War Sarajevo

“…Because journalists operate as agents of memory, whose interpretation of collective war memory is often based on individual ethnic belonging (Erjavec and Volcic 2007), we attempt to address the following research question: how do Sarajevo journalists remember the city's recent violent conflict? And as branding post-conflict relies heavily on building a narrative discourse in global media to construct the meaning of a destination image (Avraham 2009), we pose a second research question: how does war memory become commodified and branded for tourism?…”

‘It is not the heroes who need this, but the nation’ – the latent power of military decorations in Israel, 1948–2005

“…Recontextualization can be understood as the relocation of a discourse from its original context/practice and its appropriation by another context/practice, or as the incorporation of elements from one social practice/context to another (Erjavec and Volcic 2007). Recontextualization is used by those who employ it to legitimize and justify a specific ideology (Fairclough 1989(Fairclough , 1995(Fairclough , 2000(Fairclough , 2003.…”