Wednesday 23 April 2014

Book Review: Patricia Dunmire - Projecting the Future through Political Discourse: The Case of the Bush Doctrine



Quite a while ago I wrote a review of Patricia Dunmire's 2011 book Projecting the future through political discourse: the case of the Bush Doctrine for Discourse & Society. It was published in January this year, which I managed to miss entirely until the other day. Anyway, the review is here (behind a paywall I'm afraid).

Capsule version: Dunmire has written a critical discourse analysis of the security speeches and texts of the Bush (II) administration, with a particular view to the way that political and security discourses construct an account of the future which is used to legitimate action in the present. Its a good book, and worth a read for security studies types, both critical and otherwise. It was particularly interesting for me because I'd been looking at some of the features of security and surveillance language, and the continual need-to-know-in-order-to-prevent (I think I need a better term for that) that seems to support the adoption of surveillance technologies in many contexts.