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 6 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.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.