The Ideological Model of War: Discursive Mediations of the Self and the Enemy

Nico Carpentier

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The Ideological Model of War: Discursive Mediations of the Self and the Enemy

In: Creating Destruction

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Nico Carpentier

Nico Carpentier
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 13–38

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401200387_003

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When a nation goes to war, powerful mechanisms come into play, in order to turn an adversary into the enemy. Where the existence of an adversary is considered legitimate and the right to defend their - distinct - ideas is not questioned, an enemy is excluded from the political community and has to be destroyed. In this chapter Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is put to work to build a model that describes the role that ideology plays in mediating and constructing the identities of the Enemy, the Self and of violence itself. The theoretical starting point of this chapter is that these identities are structured by a set of discourses, articulating the identities of all parties involved. These discourses on the Enemy are based on a series of binary oppositions, such as good/evil, just/unjust, guilty/innocent, rational/irrational and civilised/uncivilised, which can be defined as floating signifiers. As floating signifiers, these dichotomies have no fixed meaning, but they are (re)articulated before, during and after the conflict. Moreover, the construction of the Enemy is accompanied by the construction of the identity of the Self, clearly in an antagonistic relationship to the Enemy’s identity. In this fashion the Enemy’s identity becomes a constitutive outside, supporting the identity construction of the Self. The construction of the ideological model of war is based on a series of genealogies of the constructions of the Enemy and the Self in the Vietnam War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Kosovo/a War, and the 2003 Iraqi War. These genealogies will illustrate the pervasiveness, rigidity and stability of the ideological model of war, despite the ever-changing context.

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Creating Destruction

Constructing Images of Violence and Genocide

Series: At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, Volume: 75

E-Book ISBN:: 9789401200387

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2011

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The Ideological Model of War: Discursive Mediations of the Self and the Enemy

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Creating Destruction

Constructing Images of Violence and Genocide

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