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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 16:5 (2017) ► pp.658–682

Talking security and rights

The framing of counter-terrorism legislation in the UK

| Sabanci University

This article addresses the question of how draconian counter-terrorism policies are legitimized in long-established democracies. Being the heartland of liberal rights, the UK comes to the fore as a striking case where some of the most controversial security policies have been enacted. The study undertakes a systematic frame analysis of UK parliamentary debates with the help of ATLAS.ti, which allows the analyst to trace and map out recurrent concepts, themes, and arguments as well as their overall distribution. While demonstrating the workings of securitization in the formulation of key counter-terrorism legislation, the study unearths how the security narrative in the UK context evidently relies on the language of rights in invoking legitimacy. The study suggests that far from negating the indispensable status of human rights, security narrative resorts to the latter’s moral power and mimics rights language, heralding the weight of these international norms even in hard-core security matters.

Keywords: frame analysis, securitization, human rights, counter-terrorism, United Kingdom
Article outline
  • 1.Rights, security, and the analysis of frames
  • 2.Framing counter-terrorsim in the Parliament
    • a.Framing the problem
    • b.Framing of the solution
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 May 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15043.dem
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