WEALTH | An example of this can be found in the security versus liberty debate. The importance of the recognition of this discourse is not to attempt to present these political actors – the terrorists – in a better light, but to recognise how the consistent and universal portrayal of them as evil and irrational made certain reactions and foreign policy actions more amenable and immediately cut off other methods of responding to these terrorist attacks. The pervasion of this discourse also served to conflate the motivations and acts of these terrorists with the construction of a wider Muslim and Arab society. amount, in any currency, is appreciated. For poststructuralists, language is one of the most crucial elements for the creation and perpetuation of a dominant discourse. Interspersed with this, the widespread international outcry to the attacks simultaneously worked to further emphasise the immorality and inhumanity of these actors. The strength of dominant discourses lies in their ability to shut out other options or opinions to the extent that thinking outside the realms set by the discourse is seen as irrational. Poststructuralism and media representations of terrorists. The importance of poststructuralism is to highlight existing regimes of truth and show that conventional ways of thinking and analysis in international relations are unable to point out how certain other possibilities are excluded by these discourses from the very start. Butler argues that thousands of people are lost to conflict in countries such as Palestine and Afghanistan, often at the hands of Western powers, and yet these people are not mourned or memorialised or even heard of within Western reports of war. In newspaper reports -- specifically, in the week after the attacks -- the terrorists were presented as evil and irrational, their stated political motivations were effaced and instead terrorists were repeatedly spoken of as crazed and apolitical. Poststructuralists always call into question how certain accepted 'facts' and 'beliefs' actually work to reinforce the dominance and power of particular actors within international relations. HEALTH | Panel Chair . The increased use of special forces and drone strikes allowed Obama to continue to exert influence over the region without overtly declaring war – while also distancing his administration from the military intervention that defined that of his predecessor. Poststructuralists argue that 'knowledge' comes to be accepted as such due to the power and prominence of certain actors in society known as 'elites', who then impose it upon others. As the United States was drawn further into destructive and protracted conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the public opinion that had supported intervention began to wane. EUROPE | All Rights Reserved | Site by Rootsy. The official discourse across an event, although powerful, never fully accounts for the reading of the entire situation. The media is a prime example of a site where discourses within regimes of truth are (re)produced and can be identified. Any ENVIRONMENT | Post-Structuralism in International Relations Theory. Introducing Postcolonialism in International Relations Theory, Introducing Constructivism in International Relations Theory, Introducing Realism in International Relations Theory, Introducing the English School in International Relations Theory, Introducing Feminism in International Relations Theory. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism are two different literary movements. Your donations allow us to invest in new open access titles and pay our The importance of the recognition of this discourse is not to attempt to present these political actors -- the terrorists -- in a better light, but to recognise how the consistent and universal portrayal of them as evil and irrational made certain reactions and foreign policy actions more amenable and immediately cut off other methods of responding to these terrorist attacks. Elites take on a range of forms and occupy many different roles in contemporary society. Post-Structuralism in IR Not a theory of international politics, but more of an approach, an ethos, or a 'critical attitude' Interested in representation, power, knowledge, and the politics of identity - ⦠Through language, certain actors, concepts and events are placed in hierarchical pairs, named binary oppositions, whereby one element of the set is favoured over the other in order to create or perpetuate meaning. The impact of poststructuralism within IR theory comes from its ability to not only identify and uncover power relations that dictate political events but also make space for alternative discourses to emerge that can also affect the course of events. and via a free PDF download. Aishling Mc Morrow is a Lecturer in International Relations at Queen's University Belfast, UK. Post-structuralism wants us to take think critically about how we construct the world. AFRICA | If we look to the work of one of the leading scholars of poststructuralism, Michel Foucault, then the concepts of elites, discourses and the power of language and binary oppositions all tie together to create what he labels a 'regime of truth'. The power relation that is embedded within this relationship (for example, good versus evil or developed versus undeveloped) serves to reinforce the preferred meaning within the discursive construct. Panel Number 46. As the defining global terrorist attack of the twenty-first century, the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States can be used to convey how dominant discourses, instigated by governmental elites, were perpetuated and reinforced by the media. Jenny Edkins (2006) uses the example of famines to show that when elite actors refer to famine as a natural disaster, they are removing the event from its political context. Thus, the official discourse regarding terrorism and intervention was changing and this shift can be identified by a shift to more clandestine forms of intervention in the Middle East from 2009 onwards -- watermarked by the presidency of Barack Obama. Email Alerts | From this we must recognise that elite and everyday discourses co-exist and, although one assumes a dominant position, there are still many other competing discourses at play that shape international relations and have the potential to contribute to under- standings commonly seen as 'knowledge' and 'truth'. Many thanks! A regime of truth, then, is constituted by the dominant discourse, elite actors and the language that is used to create and sustain meaning and truth that serves the interest of the favoured actors. As such, if we want to observe how people have come to conceive and frame both terrorism and terrorists, the poststructuralist can analyse media accounts in order to analyse the discursive construction of these political actors and associated terrorist events. Find out more about this, and many other, International Relations theories with a range of multimedia resources compiled by E-IR. 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