This work examines violence in the age of the terror wars with an eye toward the technologies of governance that create, facilitate, and circulate that violence. In performing a rhetorical cartography that explores the rise of the US armed drone program as well as moments of resistive violence that occurred during the Arab Spring directed at generating a counter-hegemony by Muslim populations, the author argues that the problem of the global terror wars is best addressed by a rhetorical understanding of the ways that governments, as well as individual subjects, turn to violence as a response to, or product of, the post September 11th terror society. When political examinations of terrorism are facilitated through understandings of discourse, clearer maps emerge of how violence functions to offer mechanisms by which governing bodies, and their subjects, evaluate the success or failure of the “War on Terror.” This book will be of interest to public policymakers and informed general readers as well as students and scholars in the fields of rhetoric, political theory, critical geography, US foreign relations/policy, war and peace studies, and cultural studies.

Presidential Power, Rhetoric, and the Terror Wars: The Sovereign Presidency argues that the War on Terror provided an opportunity to fundamentally change the presidency. Alexander Hiland analyzes the documents used to exercise presidential powers, including executive orders, signing statements, and presidential policy directives. Treating these documents as genres of speech-act that are ideologically motivated, Hiland provides a rhetorical criticism that illuminates the values and political convictions at play in these documents. This book reveals how both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama wielded the personal power of the office to dramatically expand the power of the executive branch. During the War on Terror, the presidency shifted from an imperial form that avoided checks and balances, to a sovereign presidency where the executive branch had the ability to decide whether those checks and balances existed. As a result, Hiland argues that this shift to the sovereign presidency enabled the violation of human rights, myriad policy mistakes, and the degradation of democracy within the United States.

Drawing on psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives, this book examines discourses mediating the global War on Terror, including governmental speeches, legal documents, print and broadcast journalism, and military memoirs. The book argues that these discourses motivate, and are motivated by, a myth of imminent harm that purportedly justifies a series of "preemptive" measures such as war, torture, and targeted killing, as well as an array of intrusive domestic security procedures such as profiling and mass surveillance. Dominant themes include selective compassion in the mainstream media, the language of war and the sacrificial sublime, asymmetrical warfare and the nostalgia for total war, weaponized drones and just war theory, and the role of American exceptionalism in normalizing endless war. Scholars and students alike will take interest in this original contribution to the fields of cultural studies, psychoanalysis, media studies, rhetoric, critical international relations, and international humanitarian law and ethics.

This handbook represents the first comprehensive disciplinary investigation into the relationship between rhetoric and power as it is expressed in different aspects of society. Providing conceptual and empirical foundations for the study of the relationship between different forms of rhetorical expression and diverse structures, practices, habits, and networks of power, The Routledge Handbook of Rhetoric and Power is divided into six parts: Theoretical Foundations Propaganda, Politics, and the State Resistance and Social Movements Culture, Society, and Identity Discourses of Technique and Organization Prospects for the Future The guiding principle of this handbook is that power represents a capacity for coordinated action grounded in specific historical, technological, political, and economic conditions. It suggests that rhetoric is an art that adapts to these conditions and finds ways to transform, create, or undermine these capacities in other people through self-conscious persuasion. Featuring contributions from key scholars, this accessibly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of rhetoric, writing studies, communication studies, political communication, and social justice.

Guns have never been as prevalent in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns either highlight the gun as just a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended; eventually, whatever progress these debates foster in the public conversation tend to halt altogether once the old cliché, "guns don't kill people; people kill people" is trotted out. These gun control and gun violence discussions take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects. What happens if we reset the conversation and admit that guns, and not the people behind them, kill people? The Lives of Guns offers a new and compelling way of thinking about the role of the gun in our social and political lives. In gathering ideas from law, science studies, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as an object with agency. In approaching guns from a technological perspective, down to the very science of how they are created and how they fire, The Lives of Guns takes up a number of questions, such as: How does the presence of these objects shape civic ideology? What does it mean to develop and care for gun and gun accessories technology? What do guns mean to those who build them versus those who fight for-and against-them? What could happen when drone technology meets gun technology? In bringing together fresh perspectives from leading lawyers, political scientists, and historians, The Lives of Guns promises to move the gun debate forward by opening up new ways of thinking about these issues and broadening the scope of these perennial debates.

Providing a study of US policy towards Afghanistan from the Soviet intervention of 1979 to the exit of US/International Security Assistance Forces combat troops at the end of 2014, this book examines how the United States’ construction of its interests has shaped its long-term involvement with that country. Recognising that there is a particular focus on the United States’ representation and justification of its Afghan policy, this work demonstrates how the intertwining of language and social practices provided policymakers’ with a shared meaning on selling policy. In this way, Washington justified its practices – including covert operations, diplomacy, counterterrorism and war – as essential in ensuring that ‘good’ prevailed over ‘evil’. Teitler’s argument contrasts with the existing literature, which predominantly argues the United States has been motivated by self-interest in its dealings with Afghanistan. Teitler deploys a constructivist approach to elucidate US–Afghan relations in this critical historical juncture. Through its particular use of constructivism, the work aims to contribute more broadly to international relations and US foreign policy scholarship. This book will be of interest to academics and students in various fields, including US foreign and security policy, international relations theory, the Greater Middle East, Afghanistan, American exceptionalism, constructivism and discourse analysis.

Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric’s Change features selected essays, multimedia texts, and audio pieces from the 2016 Rhetoric Society of America biennial conference, which spotlighted the theme “Rhetoric and Change.” The pieces are broadly focused around eight different lines of thought: Aural Rhetorics; Rhetoric and Science; Embodiment; Digital Rhetorics; Languages and Publics; Apologia, Revolution, Reflection; and Intersectionality, Interdisciplinarity, and the Future of Feminist Rhetoric. Simultaneously familiar yet new, the value of this collection can be found in the range of its modes and voices.

This edited volume presents selected works from the 20th Biennial Alta Argumentation Conference, sponsored by the National Communication Association and the American Forensics Association and held in 2017. The conference brought together scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America to engage in intensive conversations about how argument functions in our increasingly networked society. The essays discuss four aspects of networked argument. Some examine arguments occurring in online networks, seeking to both understand and respond more effectively to the acute changes underway in the information age. Others focus on offline networks to identify historical and contemporary resources available to advocates in the modern day. Still others discuss the value-added of including argumentation scholars on interdisciplinary research teams analyzing a diverse range of subjects, including science, education, health, law, economics, history, security, and media. Finally, the remainder network argumentation theories explore how the interactions between and among existing theories offer fruitful ground for new insights for the field of argumentation studies. The wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches employed in Networking Argument make this volume a unique compilation of perspectives for understanding urgent and sustaining issues facing our society.

In this edited volume, authors seek to document and analyze how state and non-state actors leverage digital rhetoric as a twenty-first-century weapon of war. Rhet Ops offer readers a chance to focus on the human dimension of rhetorical practice within mobile technologies and social networks: to reflect not only on the durable question of what it means to conduct oneself ethically as a speaker or writer, but also what it means to learn the art of rhetoric as a means to engage adversaries in war and conflict.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science provides a state-of-the-art volume on the language of scientific processes and communications. This book offers comprehensive coverage of socio-cultural approaches to science, as well as analysing new theoretical developments and incorporating discussions about future directions within the field. Featuring original contributions from an international range of renowned scholars, as well as academics at the forefront of innovative research, this handbook: identifies common objects of inquiry across the areas of rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication studies, science and technology studies, and public understanding of science; covers the four key themes of power, pedagogy, public engagement, and materiality in relation to the study of scientific language and its development; uses qualitative and quantitative approaches to demonstrate how humanities and social science scholars can go about studying science; details the meaning and purpose of socio-cultural approaches to science, including the impact of new media technologies; analyses the history of the field and how it positions itself in relation to other areas of study. Ushering the study of language and science toward a more interdisciplinary, diverse, communal and ecological future, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in this area.