War is peace: the US security discursive practices after the Cold War

Author(s)

Bárbara Vasconcellos de Carvalho Motta

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Marília. 2018-10-31.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências. Marília
• Defense date: 2018-08-31
• Advisor: Samuel Alves Soares

Abstract

As a general framework, the overall objective of this thesis is to further develop the interconnection between identity and political outcomes. More than focus on how articulations of identity are performed by specific agents, this thesis is interested in advance the argument that identity ‘does’ something and, therefore, has through discursive practices what I called a causality-in-constitution capacity. First, I propose a model to evaluate how identities’ dispositions can be deployed in political contexts, more specifically in US foreign policy decision-making processes. In this sense, through the evaluation of the empirical cases of US narratives to legitimate the interventions in Kosovo (1998/1999), the Gulf War (1999/1991), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), despite the general intention of this thesis to develop a bigger picture of the US foreign policy debate after the Cold War, it also aims at evaluating the representational force of identity as a source of national order and propose a gradient, from moments from less to more ontological insecurity, through which one can visualize identity’s anchor points capacity to ground identity and put it back in place. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/14071-0 - War is peace: the United States' securitization praxis in the Post-Cold War
• Grantee: Bárbara Vasconcellos de Carvalho Motta
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate