Description
Discourse is an integral component in determining the political. Its capacity to limit and enable what actions are politically possible make it a fundamental aspect of international relations. The role of discourses in influencing the conditions of political possibility of military interventions has attracted a considerable amount of academic attention to date. But, the majority of these attentions have been narrow in their focus, isolating and analyzing a single site of discursive production. This paper would connect to, and build upon, the body of research dedicated to the study of discourse and political possibility through an investigation of the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. Using the 2003 US invasion of Iraq as a case study this paper will demonstrate the representational processes which impact the construction of a dominant discourse, subsequently influencing the production of policy. In doing so it sets out to demonstrate the variety of meaningful sites of production for our political realities while also demonstrating positions of privilege and power and how these shifts between sites over the duration of a conflict. To account for the manner in which these sites interact with one another a model is produced which provides a conceptualization of the processes and mechanisms at play which contribute to the construction of a dominant discourse, its sustenance, contestation, and eventual decline. A discursive helix is proposed as a model to interpret the processes and mechanisms at play in the construction of a dominant discourse between the political elite, media, and popular culture. By brining to light the how multiple sites of production interact with one another to produce a dominant discourse, subsequently influencing the conditions of possibility, this paper sets out to more fully demonstrate the consequence of these interactions for the justifiability and acceptance of military interventions.
