Butler argues that thousands of people are lost to conflict in countries such as Palestine and Afghanistan, often at the hands of Western powers, and yet these people are not mourned or memorialised or even heard of within Western reports of war. For this reason, poststructuralists encourage researchers to be sceptical of universal narratives that attempt to offer an objective worldview, as these assumptions are heavily influenced by pre-existing assumptions of what is true – and usually underlined by the views of those in power. The power relation that is embedded within this relationship (for example, good versus evil or developed versus undeveloped) serves to reinforce the preferred meaning within the discursive construct. Most importantly, poststructuralism allows you to become care- fully attuned to -- and interrogate -- the many ways that power is exercised. Any Hence, this binary opposition enabled Bush to claim that the United States was opposite to all that this trio represented and would be justified in taking various actions during a global campaign against states that were judged to sponsor, or harbour, terrorists. To underscore this link to death and destruction, the media narrative also consistently linked both the acts and actors of 9/11 to images and metaphors of pestilence and disease. C. Fynsk, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001. UNITED STATES | E-IR is an independent non-profit publisher run by an all volunteer team. The ‘linguistic turn’ is presented in this essay from the basis of modern philosophies of language (particularly the contributions of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin) and in relation to contemporary adaptations of these philosophical critiques of representation in post-structuralism. TECH | A regime of truth, then, is constituted by the dominant discourse, elite actors and the language that is used to create and sustain meaning and truth that serves the interest of the favoured actors. For poststructuralists, language is one of the most crucial elements for the creation and perpetuation of a dominant discourse. This chapter examines the use of discourse analysis in the study of foreign policy. Overviews. Structuralism is an intellectual tendency that seeks to understand and explain social reality in terms of social structures. These ideas and concepts have been used to produce new knowledge about world politics. Structuralists emphasize… How did the positing of an unbridgeable chasm between the civilised society and the primeval terrorist, within this regime of truth, favour elite agendas? Many thanks! Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to While some may support the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) that followed these attacks, the poststructuralist contribution deconstructs how this militaristic and aggressive response to 9/11 was legitimised by the discursive construction of the terrorists, the emotions that were manipulated and the divide between 'us' and 'them' that was fashioned. Along with these fatalities, as the media began to report on the abuses that were carried out, the regime of truth that had been centred on the foreign policy directives of the Bush presidency started to falter. USA | Privacy, Click Here: International Relations Theory (E-IR Foundations). A quick primer on difference between structuralism and post-structuralism. The words we speak, the phrases we use, according to Post-structuralism, are never totally objective. 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