'Discourses of war and peace' Adam Hodges (ed.) (2013) New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 304. ISBN 978-0-19-993727-1 (hbk)

Abstract

Discourses of war and peace Adam Hodges (ed.) (2013) New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 304. ISBN 978-0-19-993727-1 (hbk)Discourses of war and peace is a book predicated on the fundamental observation that 'Humans never engage in war without the mediating force of discourse' (p. 3). To this end, frames and narratives function to generate meaning and relationships and are widely used in this book to study the language of war and peace. In the context of this book, narratives are not seen as merely representing reality, but constructing the social reality by skipping the process of interpreting facts and directly seeking to depict the world as is (p. 50; Bruner, 1991). Hodges brings together a number of empirical studies from scholars working with ethnographic, sociolinguistic, communicative, and critical methods studying the legitimisation of war, peace, and their associated discursive practices. The legitimation and language of war have been popular and well-studied topics within discourse scholarship. Articles and books are published on these subjects on a regular basis (e.g. van Leeuwen, 2007; Hodges and Nilep, 2007; Reyes, 2011; Lukin, 2013) covering a breadth of literature too wide to account for in a single review. Drawing on the work of R. Brian Ferguson (2008) on the culture of war, among others, the author develops the premise of this book to view war as a cultural practice expressed in language as well as action: 'War is not wired into human brains, but rather exists as a culturally contingent phenomenon' (p. 4). The discourses of war explored in this book are mostly based on the Anglo- American discourse of the post-Cold War era, particularly language used to articulate the War on Terror.The book is divided into 4 parts, each section focusing on a different aspect of war and peace. Part 1 is occupied with legitimising military action by discursive means and contains the Critical Discourse Analysis-oriented studies. The chapters in this section study the language of American and English political leaders and policy makers in creating narratives and possible realities where war is seen as a necessary and justified action to ensure peace and safety, promoting the notion of perpetual peace (Kant, 1991). The explicit Western bias in this section is arguably the result of the events of 9/11 and the War on Terror, as observed by Dunmire (2009). In Chapter 5 of this section, Aditi Bhatia discusses the notion of possible worlds from Fairclough's (2003) perspective in her analysis of the British Weapons of Mass Destruction Dossier. Based on the work of scholars like Stalnaker (1999), possible worlds as a concept would have been useful to apply indepth in making apparent the nature of war in social reality, particularly in parts 1 and 2 of this volume.Part 2 deals with the question of how the use and presence of military force is framed in practice. In this part, Frame Analysis (Goffman, 1974) and elements of Speech Act Theory (Searle, 1969) are employed in investigating how the deployment and presence of military forces, foreign and domestic, are experienced and interpreted by different audiences and discourse communities. The studies presented in Chapters 6 and 7 of part 2 deal with Canadian peacekeeping operations in Somalia and American military bases in Okinawa, respectively. Frame analysis takes on a prominent role in parts 1 and 2 but many chapters could have benefited from a more strongly conceptualized framework as employed by Janis L. Goldie in Chapter 6. For example, the contributions of Kuypers (2009) on rhetorical criticism within frame analysis are particularly useful in studying this type of language.Part 3 consists of chapters by Chandler Hallman and Becky Schulthies investigating how people respond to armed conflicts. The chapter by Hallman compares the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Palestine and the ways in which the situation of Irish and Palestinian civilians is commensurated. …