Discursive Contestation Research Articles

Protests as “Events”: The Symbolic Struggles in 2013 Demonstrations in Turkey and Brazil

Abstract Introduction: The concept of “event” offers a valuable lens to understand the discursive contestations in and around protests. Events create ruptures that disturb the logic of continuity and open up new way of thinking and talking about the past and the future. Drawing on this concept, this article analyzes the 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil. It investigates how the causes of these protests were framed and debated in each country and how these frames shifted over time by opening up new interpretations of the past and the future. Materials and Methods: Data is generated from four Facebook pages capturing the messages posted during the first 30 days of protests in each country. In the Brazilian case, we collected the posts of: (1) Passe Livre São Paulo (301,787 likes), the group that started the wave of protests; and (2) O Gigante Acordou (155,690 likes), a collective that emerged during the protests, representing nationalist perspectives. In total, 626 posts were collected from both pages. In the Turkish case, we analyzed posts that appeared on the pages of : (1) Taksim Dayanismasi (82,479 likes), an association that played a significant role in organizing and mobilizing Gezi Park protests; and (2) Recep Tayyip Erdogan (6,957,408 likes), a pro-government and inherently anti-protest page. We coded each post inductively focusing particularly on the way they framed the causes of the protests. We then identified the number of times each frame was mentioned during the first 30 days of the protests and explored whether and how frames changed over time. Results: Our analysis reveals a significant shift in the way the causes of the protests were framed over time in both countries, yet with different implications. While in Brazil, we observe a frame transformation undermining the initial rationale of the protests, in Turkey we see a frame extension and the emergence of broader issues as the real causes of protests, such as the authoritarian nature of the regime and the restriction of democratic rights in this country. Discussion: The article offers a way of analysing protests based on a conceptual lens of event. It sheds light on the role of social media as a platform for symbolic struggles over the protests. Furthermore, the article opens up a debate about the developments of democracy in both countries.

At the Nexus between the National and the Global: The Discursive Construction of the Turkish Halal Market in the Neoliberal Age

This article analyzes a recently emerging halal market in Turkey and illuminates how discursive strategies foster the halal movement in an Islamic culture, and in a neoliberal economy. By exploring websites of the Turkish halal regulatory institutions and employing critical discourse analysis of the media materials, I demonstrate how Islamic actors (halal certification institutions and businesses) adapt, appropriate, and contest different discursive strategies to achieve legitimacy, to compete for distinction and to acquire power in a newly emerging and fiercely competitive, yet a globally defined field in a national economy. The discursive contestations of the actors shaped by the ambivalent structure of the Turkish halal market and accompanied by the deregulation principal of neoliberalism create equivocal meanings of halal-ness, symbolic consumption and education in this emergent field.

Fighting talk: Organisational discourses of the conflict over raptors and grouse moor management in Scotland

Conflict is currently one of the greatest challenges facing wildlife conservation. Whilst conflicts may first appear to concern wildlife, they are often embedded within wider debates surrounding land use, land ownership, and the governance of natural resources. Disputes over the impacts or management of a species therefore become symbols for conflicts that are fundamentally between the divergent interests and values of the people involved. NGOs representing the interests of local stakeholders can become actors within the conflict, often utilising publicly available platforms such as websites and social media in an attempt to influence over others and gain a dominant foothold in the debate.Here, we examined discourses of organisations in relation to a contentious and high-profile case of conflict in Scotland, that occurs between interests of raptor conservation and grouse moor management. News articles sourced from the websites of six organisations – identified as key voices in the debate – were subjected to discourse analysis. 36 storylines were drawn from common phrases and statements within the text. Storylines demonstrated a clear divide in the discourse; organisations differed not only in their portrayal of central issues, but also in their representation of other actors. Discourses were strategic; organisations interpreted the situation in ways that either supported their own interests and agendas, or damaged the image of opposing parties. We argue that discursive contestation at this level could be damaging to mitigation efforts – widening barriers between stakeholders and risking already fragile relationships. This in turn reduces the likelihood of consensus and impacts on successful decision-making and policy implementation. We conclude that conflict managers should be aware of the contestation between high-profile actors, and the ramifications this may have for conflict mitigation processes. An understanding of what constitutes these discourses should therefore be used as a foundation to improve dialogue and collaborative management.

Networked counterpublics and discursive contestation in the agonistic public sphere: political jamming a police force Facebook Page

ABSTRACTDrawing from agonistic public sphere perspectives, this study examines the jamming of the Hong Kong Police Force Facebook Page by users from its establishment in October 2015 to March 2016. 203 posts accounting for 96,791 comments were analyzed using a mixed-method approach. Findings showed that the early posts were heavily jammed with three types of counterpublic comments: (1) calls for justice regarding alleged police brutality during the Umbrella Movement one year prior, (2) emotional statements with impolite tone, and (3) accusations of comment deletions by the Page administrators. But, the relative intensity of the three types of counterdiscourses diminished over time. Moreover, despite the extensive use of embedded YouTube videos as counterdiscourses in the comments, there were few URL linkages to Hong Kong's dynamic counterpublic sphere. This study highlights the opportunities and constraints of Facebook's technological architecture for activists and networked counterpublics to challenge dominant discourses in situ.

Evolving Governance and Contested Water Reforms in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin

This paper explores the ways water governance adapts to changing social values and political imperatives by examining the case of water policy reforms in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin. Over more than two decades, Australia’s water reforms have explicitly aimed to promote ecological sustainability and economic efficiency, attempting to balance pro-market, micro-economic reforms with broader social and sustainability goals. Despite the formality of Australia’s intergovernmental agreements, water reforms have been expensive and heavily contested, experiencing many implementation challenges. However, water market reforms have generally been regarded as successful, enabling the reallocation of water for environmental and extractive uses, contributing to flexibility and adaptive capacity. Recognising that discursive contestation is central to policy development, the paper documents the way the reform processes have attempted to broker compromises between three competing policy paradigms—national development, economic rationalism and environmentalism. These inherent tensions resulted in prolonged contests for influence over policy directions long after formal statements of policy intent by Governments. Given that climate change is driving the need for water governance reforms, the paper looks to what lessons can be learnt about the redesigns of meta-governance arrangements, including through structured commitments to independent audits and evaluations that can provide the feedback needed for adaptive governance and policy learning.

Political Economy of International Policy on the Transfer of Environmentally Sound Technologies in Global Climate Change Regime

ABSTRACTGlobal governance on climate change has embraced the transfer of environmentally sound technologies as a crucial means of implementation to meet mitigation and adaptation. During the negotiation toward the Paris Agreement that replaced the Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the negotiation on technology development and transfer experienced contestation between developed and developing countries over policy direction and options. Under this context, why, in which policy options, and how developed and developing countries have clashed have not been fully explored yet in the issue area of climate change. This paper attempts to unpack the negotiations over technology development and transfer as a part of the Paris Agreement by three dimensions of marketisation, privatisation, and de-regulatory approach on the theoretical ground of discursive contestation between neo-liberalism and structuralism. This research, revealing the ground and the range of stretched contestant policy options, will provide a means to discern whether policies and modalities to be adopted to implement the Paris Agreement are skewed toward developed countries or developing countries.

When London Hit the Headlines: Historical Analogy and the Chinese Media Discourse on Air Pollution

AbstractThis article analyses how Chinese media make sense of smog and air pollution in China through the lens of London's past. Images of London, the fog city, have figured in the Chinese press since the 1870s, and this collective memory has made London a powerful yet malleable tool for discursive contestation on how to frame China's current air pollution problem, which constitutes part of news media's hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices. Although the classic images of London as a fog city persist to the present day, the new narrative centres on the 1952 Great Smog, which was rediscovered and mobilized by Chinese news media to build an historical analogy. In invoking this foreign past, official media use London to naturalize the smog problem in China and justify the official stance, while commercialized media emphasize the bitter lessons to be learned and call for government action.

Locating the post-national activist: migration rights, civil society and the practice of post-nationalism

ABSTRACTTheorists of post-nationalism examine the (re)configuration of national identity, membership and rights. Yet while normative scholarship has conceptualized post-nationalism as an ongoing practice of discursive contestation over the role of national group membership in liberal democratic societies, more empirical studies have tended to overlook these features to predominantly focus instead on top-down legal and political institution-building as evidence of post-nationalism. In this article I argue in favour of an empirical conceptualization of post-nationalism which more effectively captures micro-level practices of discursive contestation. Specifically I posit that post-national activists, or actors engaging in post-national practices of contestation from within the state, are a key focus of analysis for scholars of post-nationalism. I develop this claim through the analysis of data collected with individuals working on civil society campaigns for migration rights in Europe, Australia and the USA who – I demonstrate – embody many of the characteristics of the post-national activist.

Narrating success and failure: Congressional debates on the ‘Iran nuclear deal’

This article applies a method of narrative analysis to investigate the discursive contestation over the ‘Iran nuclear deal’ in the US. Specifically, it explores the struggle in the US Congress between narratives constituting the deal as a US foreign policy success or failure. The article argues that foreign policy successes and failures are socially constructed through narratives and suggests how narrative analysis as a discourse-analytical method can be employed to trace discursive contests about such constructions. Based on insights from literary studies and narratology, it shows that stories of failures and successes follow similar structures and include a number of key elements, including: a particular setting; a negative/positive characterization of individual and collective decision-makers; and an emplotment of success or failure through the attribution of credit/blame and responsibility. The article foregrounds the importance of how stories are told as an explanation for the dominance or marginality of narratives in political discourse.

Discursive contestations and pluriversal futures: A decolonial analysis of educational policies in the United Arab Emirates

Most research on global transformations in education has focused on the actions of political and economic elites. As a result, attempts to contest and subvert globally circulated policies at subnational levels have received less attention. To address this gap, this study focuses on discursive contestations around educational reforms in the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on the theoretical framework of decoloniality (Mignolo, 2011), I explore how Western interventions into educational policies are justified by dominant discourses and challenged by their opponents through public media in the United Arab Emirates. Even though alternative discourses provide constructions of education useful for charting the trajectories of pluriversal futures, the struggle between different voices resolves in favor of global “best” practices. This happens not because they are more rational or universal, but because the voices of dissent are disconnected and fragmented. The significance of this paper lies in employing decolonial lens in the analysis of globally circulated policies and in attending to the voices that become marginalized in the implementation of global reforms.

The myopic Foucauldian gaze: discourse, knowledge and the authoritarian peace

ABSTRACTThe discourse of liberal peacebuilding has often been characterized by critics as a hegemonic discourse, in which power and knowledge are co-constitutive. Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, an important strand of the literature has demonstrated how epistemic communities have produced knowledge that supports this discourse, while marginalizing other, contrary voices. A ‘local turn’ has sought to uncover what Foucault termed ‘subjugated knowledges’, peripheral voices that were seen as potentially contributing to a more emancipatory peace. This article, in contrast, argues that the explicit and implicit Foucauldian framing of discourse and knowledge is no longer adequate to conceptualize the contested nature of peace and conflict in a rapidly changing international system. In a period of significant geopolitical shifts away from a Western-centric international order, post-Foucauldian discourse theories offer a more productive analytical perspective that makes visible the multiple, competing discourses that attempt to achieve closure in defining meanings of peace and conflict. A theoretical framework that emphasizes discursive contestation rather than unitary domination allows serious consideration of alternative conceptualizations of peacemaking. In particular, theoretical frameworks that highlight contestation make visible an authoritarian, illiberal approach to managing conflict that challenges both liberal and emancipatory conceptualizations of peace and conflict, but is occluded in the current debate over post-liberal peace.

The War Novel in Africa

The War Novel in Africa

Ideas and Interests Embedded in the Making of Ontario’s Fair Access to Regulated Professions Act, 2006

This paper examines the ideas-interests nexus in the making of Ontario’s Fair Access to Regulated Professions Act, 2006, designed to level the playing field for internationally trained professionals. It conceives of the legislation as the outcome of a discursive contestation between two interest-based alignments. The access coalition led by organized immigrant professionals and settlement service providers communicated a discourse around the non-recognition of foreign credentials, questioning it on moral and economic grounds. Alternatively, regulatory bodies built their discourse around the skills and experience requirements of professions, emphasizing public protection, and, as a condition of that, professional autonomy. However, despite its weaker economic base, the access coalition carried the day with the passing of the fair access legislation because it framed its ideas more effectively and thus struck a better chord with the general and policy public.

Discourses and institutions in China’s maritime disputes

This article examines discourses around China’s maritime disputes. It adopts an English School approach to international order, making use of institutions governing relations between states which are themselves discursive in nature. The article argues that discourse is a particularly important factor in maritime disputes given the ambiguities resulting from historical and ongoing changes in conceptions of maritime space and sovereignty. Further, although these changes have led the institution of international law to play a growing role in questions of maritime sovereignty and jurisdiction, the article argues that the application of these legal frameworks is itself partly discursive and creates ambiguities which inform maritime disputes between key states in East Asia. The article then considers an example of discursive contestation by examining the use of freedom of navigation in the positions taken and practised by the United States and their role in US–China maritime dynamics. It concludes by suggesting that contested discourses around maritime disputes in East Asia are best understood as part of an ongoing and dynamic process of the renegotiation of regional and international order in East Asia.

‘We haven’t even buried the dead yet’: Ethics of discursive contestation in a crisis situation

Disasters are often described as exceptional moments that demand global solidarity. A ‘state of humanitarian exception’ emerges as citizens foreground norms of compassion and cooperation while contestatory discourse – the argumentative, blame-seeking and fault-finding forms of speech – are stigmatized as inappropriate interventions in a society seeking to recover from a distressful crisis situation. This article critically unpacks these representations of post-disaster situations empirically and normatively. By analysing the discussions in the public sphere over the first 100 days after Typhoon Haiyan battered Central Philippines, the article examines the moral force behind the ‘discourse of compassion’ and its ‘ethical boundary work’ that places the ‘discourse of contestation’ outside the scope of acceptable conduct. It proposes that the discourse of compassion’s ethical boundary work is only democratically acceptable when one takes a short view of a crisis situation. Drawing on deliberative democracy theory, the article argues for the importance of contestatory discourse in fostering inclusive discourse formation and ensuring that the state of humanitarian exception does not become the rule.

From polarisation to pluralisation: A deliberative approach to illiberal cultures

This article outlines the advantages of a deliberative democratic approach to ‘illiberal cultures’ and polarised debates in contemporary multicultural societies. In doing so, it draws on the insights of agonistic pluralism, and shows that a cross-fertilisation between certain variants of deliberative democracy and agonistic pluralism is both possible and desirable. Focusing particularly on the works of John Dryzek and William Connolly, the article highlights three normative criteria for polities to aspire to, if not fully achieve, to democratise the debates over illiberal cultural practices. These include: i) an expanded notion of inclusion underpinned by the principle of agonistic respect; ii) the presence of spaces that facilitate interaction and contestation among the multiple publics of a culturally contested issue; and iii) the generation of concrete outcomes based on discursive contestation among multiple publics. To illustrate how approximation to these criteria might look in practice, the article focuses on the example of the honour-killing debate in Britain.

The Struggle over the Meaning of Chinese Patriotism in the 21st Century

Various definitions are used in research on Chinese nationalism and patriotism, and scholars often distinguish between different types of both. While such research has provided important insights, it pays scant attention to how political actors use terms such as patriotism. This article, by contrast, focuses precisely on how patriotism is used discursively by various Chinese domestic actors in seeking to further their political agendas by promoting their preferred understandings of the term. The article argues that such discursive contestation and struggle is a key aspect of Chinese identity politics that should not be ignored.

Complementary approaches to discursive contestation on the effects of the IPR regime on technology transfer in the face of climate change

The effects of intellectual property rights (IPR) on the transfer of environmentally sound technologies (ESTs) has resulted in discursive contestation. On the one hand, the IPR regime is regarded as a catalyst to ESTs transfer. On the other hand, the IPR regime itself is argued to work as a barrier to the transfer of ESTs to developing countries. This contestation moved to another layer of discussion concerning what to do about the current IPR regime and the climate change regime that overlap on the subject matter of technology transfer. The IPR-as-a-catalyst approach prefers the IPR regime to remain as the status quo and that the climate change regime construct an enabling environment by lowering the transaction costs of technology transfer and enhancing the regulatory capacity of developing countries. On the contrary, skeptics of the role of the IPR regime in ESTs transfer prefer an active utilization of the flexible mechanisms of the IPR regime and more interventionist actions by the climate change regime for effective IPR-sharing. Regarding this bi-polar contestation, this paper analyzes why and where this discursive contestation occurs based on the economic theories of market failure. The benefits and difficulties of remedial institutional approaches to tackle market failures are explored; then, complementary institutional designs in compatibility with the IPR regime and in response to market failures are explored with exemplary cases under the climate change regime.

Transition and Marginalization: Locating Spaces for Discursive Contestation in Post-Revolution Tunisia

Transitions to democracy nourish expectations for an expansion of space for political liberalization, redistribution and recognition. From 2011 to 2013, the landscape for civil society in Tunisia widened with the establishment of several thousand associations. However, during this period vulnerable groups, including sexual minorities, perceived and experienced increased degrees of marginalization. This article analyses the potentialities and boundaries for members of homosexual communities in Tunisia as they manoeuvre through a post-revolution transition characterized by rapid expansions and contractions of the public sphere. It highlights the competing priorities within the public sphere, in particular those voices left on the periphery as a multiplicity of issues are presented for discursive contestation and argues that some groups effectively stand to become more marginalized during the transition to democracy than previously under authoritarian rule.

The personal is scientific: Women, gender, and the production of sexological knowledge in Germany and Austria, 1900-1931.

This article addresses the roles women and gender played in the production of sexological knowledge in the early 20th century, particularly in German-speaking Europe. Although existing scholarship focuses almost exclusively on the work of "founding fathers" such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld, women in fact made important contributions to the field. Based on analysis of texts written between 1900 and 1931, this article shows how women were able to successfully mobilize their gender as a privileged form of "situated knowledge," and thereby assert their authority over and superior insights into certain subject areas, namely, female sexualities and sexual difference. At the same time, however, this article also highlights the constraints upon women's gendered standpoint. It shows that women's sexological writing was not just informed by their gender but also by their class and race. Moreover, because gender threatened to cast their work as insufficiently objective and scientific, women cleaved to sexology's rules of evidence and argumentation, and adopted the field's ideological trappings in order to participate in discursive contestations over sexual truths. By interrogating gender, this article introduces much-needed nuance into existing understandings of sexology, and reframes sexology itself as a site wherein new sexual subjectivities were imagined, articulated, and debated. However, it also raises fundamental questions about women sexologists' capacity to create knowledge about women and female sexualities that was truer, more correct, and more authentic than that produced by men.