Defining Key Concepts in UK Parliamentary Responses to the Syrian Crisis
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This volume investigates the strategic use and negotiation of keywords at the time of the first (2013) and second (2015) UK parliamentary votes to take action in response to the Syrian crisis. More specifically, the book reveals how the terms of the two parliamentary debates changed as a response to changes in the material situation in Syria and in the media coverage of these events.
The main data comprises the Prime Minister’s and Leaders of the Opposition’s speeches during the two parliamentary debates. Three levels of context are addressed: material/historical events, the press coverage, and the institutional and situational level (speeches in Parliament). The historical context around the two votes is provided as the first step in contextualizing the research. The book then follows Baker et al.’s (2008) method by using corpus linguistics to analyse the press coverage of events around the two votes in order to provide more detailed context than the first step. From that perspective, it looks at how press coverage of the Syrian situation represents central topics and themes around the possibility of British intervention before analysing the parliamentary speeches. This step employs van Dijk’s idea of “shared knowledge” (2003, 2005, 2008b) to highlight how the media emphasises specific ideas as shared understanding in the British community. In this way, the analysis of media coverage captures the interrelations between (changes in) the broad representation of intervention in the press and the construal of intervention by the political leaders in terms of the way these meanings are used strategically within different stages of the speeches and the different functions. The book analyses media coverage as a proxy for the shared understandings in the British community.
In looking at specifc speeches the book builds on Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) approach to analyse how intervention is strategically drawn on and continually redefined as both an input and output of this process. With regard to the context, Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) look at the press coverage of events to evaluate the validity of arguments. However, this issue can be solved by applying Scales theory of Blommeart (2015). A scalar analysis will be applied to the findings of the specific argumentation structure in order to look at how speakers strategically rescale ideas that are used by the newspapers to articulate concepts around the meaning of intervention. The last step in the analysis of the speeches involves relating these small units of analyses to the general movement of discourse by using concepts from Discourse Theory (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The book considers how the speakers construct their arguments and develop competing concepts and ideas for social imaginaries and values in using the logic of equivalence and difference as an attempt to gain a majority in the vote.
Published: Feb 1, 2026