Discourses of counter-Islamic-threat mobilization in post 9/11 documentaries

Abstract

This article critically studies documentaries focusing on the “Islamic terrorist threat”, produced in the US and in Western Europe. The particular films relate to the discourses of the growing far right political movements in liberal democracies. The article analyzes the communicational tactics deployed by the filmmakers for counter-terrorist mobilization of “Westerners”. The films’ producers objectify the terrorist threat as exceptional and ontological, in order to reconfigure the identity of the “West”. The analysis focuses on representations of the West’s threatening Other through the reflexive use of critical discourse analysis and post structuralist, discourse theory. Counter-threat strategies, varying from warfare to biopolitical control, are articulated as social demands and as individualized tasks of inclusion to the ideological space of the West and the sovereign space of western nation states. The critical study of the particular documentaries aims at highlighting the regressive and character of the passionate discourses of far right media, in relation to the political crisis that liberal democracies across the world are facing.