"No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police" : A diachronic comparative study and analysis of the power relations revealed in French media discourses

On May 26th, 2020, the world was shocked after learning that George Floyd had died at the hands of the police while being wrongfully arrested. Protests took place worldwide, demanding justice for Floyd as well as the end of the systematic racism present institutionally in police forces. In Europe, people started raising their voices, denouncing that this phenomenon was no stranger to the Old Continent. Indeed, the last few years have witnessed the media coverage of multiple cases of police violence based on ethnic grounds. The media play a key role as the source of information for the population, they decide what is going to be on the headline, catching people’s eye. France has especially attracted attention with its racial profiling practices that go against the 2001 European Code of Police Ethics acting as recommended guidelines for the Member States. Therefore, this study aims to analyse media discourses depicting three specific cases of police violence: the Adama Traoré Case, the Theo Luhaka Case, and the Michel Zecler Case. Following the model of Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, the point of this thesis is to find whether the power relations regulating the world can be identified within these discourses. By analysing the articles and finding similarities in how they portray the events then an idea of the institutional and societal power relations in France