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Robert Butler (ed.), Political discourse analysis. Legitimisation strategies in crisis and conflict

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024, 222 p. ISBN: 978-1-3995-2318-9. $120
Samuel VERNET
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Robert Butler (ed.), Political discourse analysis. Legitimisation strategies in crisis and conflict. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024, 222 p. ISBN: 978-1-3995-2318-9. $120

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1As I write these lines, in the first month of the second Trump presidency, the US President has publicly proposed to transform Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East by expelling its two million Palestinian inhabitants—giving Netanyahu’s government the liberty to carry out what UN experts denounce as a genocide1—; he has left Ukraine to face Russian imperialism; he has projected the taking over of Greenland, Panama and Canada. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute is sparking controversy, and a recent study of X tweets conducted by RTBF, Franceinfo, and France 24 concludes that his social media is “amplifying far-right narratives” in Europe2. Robert Butler’s book, published by Edinburgh University Press, analyses discursive strategies of legitimising and delegitimising processes in politics in times of crisis, and could not be more timely.

2I would like to begin this review by indicating to readers what they will find in this volume. It offers a perspective rooted in discourse analysis, which is complementary to approaches in political science. It is divided into three parts: the first examines the place and role of legitimisation strategies in institutional contexts, the second extends this reflection to the new media, and the third focuses on the place of metaphors and figurative language. The volume comprises nine chapters, spanning a wide variety of fields: from the construction of the national myth in Xi Jinping’s China to the smoothing strategies deployed by UN diplomats, via the 2020 US presidential campaign, the Brexit campaign and the uses of the term “populism” in Spain and France. At the very least, it can be said that the book offers a wide range of topics to those interested in reflecting on (de)legitimisation in political discourse in times of crisis. Such diversity is certainly an asset for the volume, but some readers may be disconcerted by it, as the central question raised by the book is sometimes blurred in the collection of very independent articles it presents—although that is often the case in this type of collective work.

3However, the book is less diverse as regards the scientific approaches proposed. Most of the contributions are in the field of corpus linguistics, often using software to process large corpora. Sketch Engine is the most popular, but Textometry, MonoConc and AntConc are also used. While this type of software is well-suited to processing a large amount of data, most contributions attempt to focus on a qualitative level, while a few claim to adopt a cognitive approach—a point to which I will return later. We must acknowledge some contributions, more isolated, that focus on the circulation of a discourse, or explore the non-verbal dimensions of discourse. Ultimately, on such important issues—and ones that are of such interest to discourse analysis—it is regrettable to find no theoretical contribution, which could have been a forum for critical reflection on both the subject and the means of approaching it.

The illusion of objectivity

4Indeed, it seems to me that the critical dimension is generally absent from the book. Admittedly, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)—and Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) in general—are regularly mentioned, and the names of Fairclough, Van Dijk and Wodak are repeatedly cited. But the critical perspective is limited to the “unveiling” dimension of these approaches, i.e. to the position where the researcher shines the spotlight on the strategies of manipulation in language and on the representations scattered between the lines and, in so doing, provides a supposedly hidden truth. That is to say, precisely the aspect of these theories that have been criticized (Widdowson; Jones). This lack of critical perspective is felt keenly when concepts such as populism, which have been hotly debated (see for instance Chollet), are used without sufficient distance.

5This type of reading of these epistemological currents is perfectly suited to the use made of computerized linguistics in several of the contributions. For example, it is claimed that software for processing large corpora provides “a high degree of objectivity” (43). Admittedly, it does offer a tempting playground when handcrafted analysis struggles to reach a higher level of generality as soon as there is too much data. However, it can sometimes seem as though these tools are like video games whose potentialities are being tested, giving rise to various tables and graphs that are not always clear, or statistical tests confirming the significance of a specific result, thus certifying—in a fairly positivist posture—the production of a truth. At the end of certain chapters, it is not always clear what they tell us about strategies for constructing legitimacy, legitimisation and delegitimisation in political discourse in times of crisis.

6In the same vein, several contributions claim to be associated with both "cognitive linguistics” (ch. 6, 7, 8) and CDA. The problem with such a marriage is that it often comes down to dressing up an interpretative approach with big, authoritative words about the effects of this or that linguistic or semantic element—forgetting, in doing so, that our discourse analysis tools alone do not have access to the black box of our brains. Sometimes authors take the trouble to cover up speculation with poll data, sometimes not. This is particularly glaring in certain chapters on metaphor which claim to draw conclusions about the cognitive effects/impacts of a metaphor, or “to point out the mind-controlling nature of discourse” (147) without providing data about the reception of these discourses.

7As a lay reader, I regret the absence of a distanced gaze at the tools themselves and what they allow the researcher to say. Because no in-depth reflection is offered on what constitutes a discourse, an ideology, or a regime of truth in politics (see in particular Foucault), or on the sources and mechanisms of authority and legitimacy in language (see in particular Bourdieu).

Performing reality

8The criticism above allows me to open a discussion. Robert Butler’s choice of CDS, according to the orientation described above, is consistent with the volume and with the tool-based approach of the corpora. The core of the discussion thus concerns the presupposition—which is always implicit—of this approach, i.e. that speakers are deemed to be fully aware of the ideological significance of their words and the effects they are supposed to have, and that we can therefore approach language productions in a utilitarian way, in terms of “truth” and “manipulation,” “intentions” and “effects,” which amounts to decoupling social facts from discourse and considering reality as essentially a-discursive.

9Yet ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) and ethnography of communication (Gumperz & Hymes) have shown that it is fruitful to analyse the meaning that speakers assign to objects and social facts. Consequently, the notion of “truth” in politics (and therefore of “post-truth” [2]) can itself be questioned, as its relationship to processes of (de)legitimisation is not obvious. In his introduction, Butler rightly refers to discourses of a “fictionalized” nature (2) but presents them as “new forms of political discourse” (1). Political discourse is embedded in narratives, meaning that social facts are integrated into a narrative framework that indeed borrows in part from fiction—this narrative process is very directly linked to the issue of legitimacy raised by the book. But isn’t this an intrinsic characteristic of political discourse? And so, if by “fictionalised nature” Robert Butler means narratives based essentially on fallacies and lies, is this really new? Wasn’t the 2003 invasion of Iraq legitimised by a story about weapons of mass destruction? In the 19th century, wasn’t the military invasion and economic plundering of a large part of the world by Europeans justified by a fine story of emancipatory colonisation and the enlightenment of civilisation?

10More generally, what kind of discourse is not shaped by ideological interests and the protection/attack of the interlocutors’ faces? Why should politics escape this logic, unless it is in the name of a moral necessity that is often alien to it (at least, in the case studies presented in this book)? Amid all these questions, it is ultimately the performativity of these discursive strategies of (de)legitimisation that seems to require urgent investigation. And a study that did this, applying critical approaches to discourse at the intersection between the processes of political legitimisation and the three constitutive elements of the “state of crisis,” as claimed by Robert Butler following Huang (10-11), namely threat, uncertainty and urgency, would be both original and essential, opening up the prospect of a whole range of discourse analysis to come.

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Bibliographie

BOURDIEU, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. 1982. Translated from the French by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Polity Press, 1991.

CHOLLET, Antoine. L’anti-populisme ou la nouvelle haine de la démocratie. Textuel, 2023.

FOUCAULT, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated from the French by A.M. Sheridan, Pantheon, 1972.

GARFINKEL, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Polity Press, 1984.

GUMPERZ, John J. & Dell HYMES. “The ethnography of communication.” Special publication, American Anthropologist vol. 66, no. 6, part 2. American Anthropological Association, 1964.

JONES, Peter E. “Why there is no such thing as ‘critical discourse analysis’.” Language & Communication, vol. 27, no. 4, 2007, p. 337-368.

WIDDOWSON, Henry G. “Reply to Fairclough: Discourse and interpretation: Conjectures and refutations.” Language and Literature, vol. 5, no. 1, 1996, p. 57-69.

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Notes

1 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/05/end-unfolding-genocide-or-watch-it-end-life-gaza-un-experts-say-states-face

2 https://www.brusselstimes.com/1560281/media-decrypt-how-elon-musk-uses-x-to-promote-far-right-ideology

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Samuel VERNET, « Robert Butler (ed.), Political discourse analysis. Legitimisation strategies in crisis and conflict »e-Rea [En ligne], 22.2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2025, consulté le 20 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/19652 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/144qb

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Auteur

Samuel VERNET

Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, LPL UMR 7309, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France
samuel.vernet@univ-amu.fr

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