Citizenship, community, and counter-terrorism

UK security discourse, 2001–2011

Malcolm N. MacDonald | University of Warwick

Duncan Hunter | University of St Mark & St John

John P. O'Regan | Institute of Education, University of London

This paper analyses a corpus of UK policy documents which sets out national security policy as an exemplar of the contemporary discourse of counter-terrorism in Europe, the USA and worldwide. A corpus of 148 documents (c. 2.8 million words) was assembled to reflect the security discourse produced by the UK government before and after the 7/7 attacks on the London Transport system. To enable a chronological comparison, the two sub-corpora were defined: one relating to a discourse of citizenship and community cohesion (2001–2006); and one relating to the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ discourse (2007–2011). Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2008) was used to investigate keywords and patterns of collocation. The results present themes emerging from a comparative analysis of the 100 strongest keywords in each sub-corpus; as well as a qualitative analysis of related patterns of the collocation, focusing in particular on features of connotation and semantic prosody.

Keywords: security, counter-terrorism, citizenship, community, cohesion, corpus, Prevent, extremism

Published online: 27 September 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.12.3.07mac

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Lischka, Juliane A.

2017. Explicit terror prevention versus vague civil liberty: how the UK broadcasting news (de)legitimatise online mass surveillance since Edward Snowden’s revelations. Information, Communication & Society 20:5 ► pp. 665 ff.

MacDonald, Malcolm N. & Duncan Hunter

2019. In The Discourse of Security, ► pp. 165 ff.

Rasmussen, Joel

2015. ‘Should each of us take over the role as watcher?’ Attitudes on Twitter towards the 2014 Norwegian terror alert. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 10:2 ► pp. 197 ff.

Salerno, Daniele

2017. The politics of response to terror: the reshaping of community and immunity in the aftermath of 7 July 2005 London bombings. Social Semiotics 27:1 ► pp. 81 ff.

Taylor, Bryan C., Hamilton Bean, Ned O’Gorman & Rebecca Rice

2017. A fearful engine of power: conceptualizing the communication–security relationship. Annals of the International Communication Association 41:2 ► pp. 111 ff.

Tiulegenov, Medet

2019. In The Palgrave Handbook of Global Approaches to Peace, ► pp. 411 ff.

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