In this master’s thesis, adopting the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we examine discursive representations of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq in the Slovenian media landscape. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a dominant Western discourse emerged that constructed the Islamic world as a dangerous “Other”, whose existence was perceived as a threat to global peace and democracy. One month after the attacks, the United States launched a military invasion of Afghanistan, soon followed by plans for a new war: the U.S. administration insisted that the West must carry out a preventive attack on Iraq, claiming that the country posed a global threat due to its alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction”. In March 2003, the so-called coalition of the willing, without authorization from the United Nations Security Council, invaded Iraq and overthrew Hussein’s regime in less than a month; an event portrayed by American media as a triumphant liberation of the Iraqi people. It was only in December 2003, after Iraq had been completely devastated and the country was facing a humanitarian catastrophe, that it became clear that no prohibited weapons had existed in Iraq and that the U.S. had legitimized the invasion through deliberate construction of threat in the global public sphere. In contemporary warfare, mass media increasingly assume the role of a propaganda apparatus that constructs and reproduces particular representations of reality. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this thesis analyzes representations of the conflict in Slovenian media in the period preceding the war, at the onset of the invasion of Iraq, and during the capture of the capital, Baghdad. Our analysis focuses on linguistic strategies, discursive representations and the ideological-political dimension of media discourse. Examining linguistic and discursive strategies within media structures reveals the ideological foundations and the reproduction of existing power relations in dominant media discourse.
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