The discourses of terrorism § Aditi Bhatia Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Received 17 December 2005; received in revised form 13 September 2007; accepted 25 May 2008 Abstract Complex, socio-political constructs such as terrorism can be difficult to define objectively. Gatekeepers of the international community, consistent with their individual agendas, frame what the media and public understand by such terms, using illusive and metaphorical representations of a diverse range of socio-political situations. Based on a critical analysis of a corpus of political and media discourses, the paper proposes to account for such discursive practices and interpretations in public domains, of which the discourses of terrorism are a prime example. # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Metaphor; Critical Discourse Analysis; Categorization; Terrorism; Bush administration The multidimensionality of political discourse has attracted a great deal of attention from discourse analysts. The role of evasion in political talk (Harris, 1991), the relationship between politics, the government, and the media (Schaffner, 1997; Van Dijk, 1998; Fairclough, 1998, 2000), political language in general (Chilton, 1985; Geis, 1987; Holly, 1989; Lakoff, 1990; Biletzki, 1997) have all been popular areas of investigation. Within the context of political language, the discourse of terrorism has also been given considerable attention. The relationship between discourse, power and ideology (Hudson, 1978; Brekle, 1989; Wodak, 1989); political discourse, metaphors and myth (Moss, 1985; Wilson, 1990; Charteris-Black, 2005), discourse on the war on terror and the construct of terrorism (Weinberg and Davis, 1989; Collins, 2002; Elshtain, 2003) have all been the focus of some attention. This paper, using a combination of models, will document the changing perceptions of terrorism by the Bush administration based on a corpus of official governmental documents and political speeches and statements made to the press dating from 2001 to 2004. 1. Methodological framework This paper will employ elements from a combination of models in order to carry out the analysis of the primary data. These models include Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989), the discourse historical approach (Layder, 1993; Wodak, 2002), membership categorization analysis (Sacks, 1992; Jayyusi, 1984; Hester and Eglin, 1997), and discourse as metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005). This primary data is further supported by an analysis of secondary data consisting of commentaries and views expressed in a variety of media sources from around the world by reporters, political analysts, and academics, drawn from the same time period. The www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 279–289 § This paper forms part of a much larger doctoral study of the discourse of terrorism as illusion to be submitted to Macquarie University, Australia. E-mail address: enbhatia@yahoo.com. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.05.016