The Discursive Construction of War and Peace in the Books of Three Turkish Commanders on the “1974 Cyprus Peace Operation”

• The article analyses the construction of war and peace in three books, so-called ego-documents, written by soldiers who themselves fought in the Cypriot 1974 war. In order to better understand these constructions, we first develop a theoretical model on war and peace discourses, supported by Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, which has been cross-fertilized with the empirical analysis. War discourses are seen to have five nodal points: 1/An Enemy-Self dichotomy; 2/The Army as war assemblage; 3/Destruction and death (of the Enemy); 4/Legitimations and aims of war; 5/A spatially and temporally restricted arena of intensified reality. Peace discourses have two variations: The photonegativistic articulation of peace (with these nodal points: 1/The absence of the Enemy, 2/The non-combatant or non-existent Army; 3/The absence of death and destruction, with the emphasis on life, 4/The absence of legitimations (and aims) of war; 5/Continuity of space and time, as everyday life) and the more autonomous articulation of peace (with two nodal points: 1/Social harmony, economic equity and social justice; 2/Desire for, and the desirability of, peace). Our discourse-theoretical analysis demonstrates how these three books mostly articulate war discourses, but the books are also seen to contain two important characteristics from a democratic-humanist perspective: They still contain articulations of the peace discourses, and they demonstrate the dislocations of the war discourses.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Constructionism

Discourse

War

Peace

Enemy

Cyprus

Ego-documents

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Media and Communication Studies

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)