Identities in Conflict: Making Sense of Voices from inside the War on Terror

This paper sets out to investigate the instantiation of specific cultural and ideological meanings as reproduced, resisted or challenged in the textual realizations and discur-sive constructions of the parties involved in recent armed conflicts, with specific reference to the War on Terror and to such participants as the ‘Western soldiers/Coalition’, the ‘dictator’, the ‘terrorist’, the ‘insurgent’. The springboard for the present analysis, which draws upon the author’s pre-vious research in the field (Vasta 1999; Vasta 2004a; Vasta 2004b), is a concern with sociopragmatic failures stemming from lack of cross-cultural awareness. The under-lying working assumption is that power asymmetries and conflicting ideological positions − often sustained to enact social control − are rooted in, as well as rein-forced and ‘legitimized’ by, such cultural scripts and related discourse processes as “othering” (Hall 1997), stereotyping, the “ideological complex” (Hodge/Kress 1993) and the Intertextual Thematic Formations (Lemke 1988) typically found in war dis-course. The analysis, conducted within the framework of systemic functional grammar and critical discourse studies, focuses on the “languaging” activites (Cortese 2001) and identity work performed mainly in and through three functionally related authentic texts: G.W. Bush’s announcement of the start of Operation Enduring Free-dom, his speech upon the capture of Saddam Hussein, and B. Obama’s announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death