The Discursive Construction of War and Peace in the Books of Three Turkish Commanders on the "1974 Cyprus Peace Operation"
Abstrakt
The article analyses the construction of war and peace in three books, so-called ego-documents, written by soldiers who themselves fought in the Cypriot 1974 war. In order to better understand these constructions, we first develop a theoretical model on war and peace discourses, supported by Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, which has been cross-fertilized with the empirical analysis.
War discourses are seen to have five nodal points: 1/An Enemy-Self dichotomy; 2/The Army as war assemblage; 3/Destruction and death (of the Enemy); 4/Legitimations and aims of war; 5/A spatially and temporally restricted arena of intensified reality. Peace discourses have two variations: The photonegativistic articulation of peace (with these nodal points: 1/The absence of the Enemy, 2/The non-combatant or non-existent Army; 3/The absence of death and destruction, with the emphasis on life, 4/The absence of legitimations (and aims) of war; 5/Continuity of space and time, as everyday life) and the more autonomous articulation of peace (with two nodal points: 1/Social harmony, economic equity and social justice; 2/Desire for, and the desirability of, peace).
Our discourse-theoretical analysis demonstrates how these three books mostly articulate war discourses, but the books are also seen to contain two important characteristics from a democratic-humanist perspective: They still contain articulations of the peace discourses, and they demonstrate the dislocations of the war discourses.