ENEMY ADDICTION: Outsider Threats, Security Frames, and Target Audiences in Contemporary US Security Policy

对不安全的认识是暴力冲突和国际不稳定的一个主要根源。该项目调查了冷战结束后美国对安全威胁的关注，以及如何在危险和不确定性方面对冷战后景观的话语重新定义使美国陷入长期昂贵的安全实践-即使在严重的经济危机时期。它的中心是当今国际安全中两个重要和相互关联的令人困惑的问题：冷战结束后，美国迅速采取行动，从威胁的角度重新定义新的安全环境。是什么使这一切成为可能？国际社会边缘的国家和非国家行为体可以被描绘成对国际和平的主要威胁，而不会对那些将它们“诬陷”为敌人的人构成重大的军事挑战。这怎么可能呢？探索美国在后冷战时代的敌人成瘾，该项目试图通过系统、经验和方法上的严谨方式调查政策语言在促进特定威胁情景和安全政策议程的出现、推广和公众接受方面所起的作用，来解开这些谜题。安全语言如何导致安全实践？过去旨在展示安全话语对日常安全政治重要性的学术研究，一直在努力使其超越狭隘的学术受众。本项目开发了一种新颖的多学科混合方法研究设计，使话语分析超越了对语义语言中心主义的关注，将安全话语与政策制定、政治战略和安全政策后果联系起来。一方面，这有助于促进该学科的发展，通过说明如何利用多学科话语分析生成原始数据集并提供高度的经验细节来发展更良性的科学现实主义。另一方面，这有助于向政策团体、记者、学术受众和更广泛的公众展示政治代理人如何说话的重要性。除了对理解政策语言作为安全实践的关键内生来源的直接贡献外，该项目还将使对国际安全中及时和重要问题的更深入和经验强化的理解成为可能，例如：安全政策在多大程度上是对国际结构“客观”变化的反应？——“叙述”国际舞台上的具体事件如何有助于构建外部安全威胁？-政策语言对边缘化政治抵抗有影响吗？-以不同的方式谈论国际安全能否改变安全政策的做法？该项目建立在我之前的研究基础上，该研究表明，安全政策语言有助于政治代理人通过促进共识和联盟建设进程来推进具体的政策议程。本项目以美国冷战后的安全政策为实证焦点，整合了话语的三个分析阶段——特征、范围条件和效果——来展示安全话语是如何被（和为）不同的政策受众运作的，以及这有什么实际意义。通过增加对政治代理人如何、何时以及为何成功地塑造安全政策议程的修辞选择的了解，该项目可以帮助解开“敌人成瘾”的谜团，从而促进政策选择。

Perceptions of insecurity are a key source of violent conflict and international instability. This project investigates the US preoccupation with security threats after the Cold War ended, and how the discursive redefinition of the post-Cold War landscape in terms of danger and uncertainty has locked the US into perpetuating expensive security practices - even in times of severe economic crisis. It is centred on two important and interrelated puzzling issues in international security today: 1. Following the end of the Cold War, the US moved swiftly to redefine the new security environment in terms of threats. What made this possible?2. State and non-state actors at the margins of international society can be portrayed as major threats to international peace - without posing a significant military challenge to those who 'frame' them as enemies. How is this possible? Exploring America's enemy addiction in the post-Cold War era, this project seeks to unlock these puzzles through investigating in a systematic, empirically and methodologically rigorous fashion what role policy language plays in fostering the emergence, promotion, and public acceptance of specific threat scenarios and security policy agendas. How does security language lead to security practices? Past scholarship that aimed at showing the importance of security discourse for everyday security politics has struggled to make this relevant beyond a narrow academic audience. This project develops a novel multidisciplinary mixed-methods research design that moves discourse analysis beyond a concern with semantic language-centrism to link security discourse to policy formulation, political strategy, and security policy consequences. On the one hand this serves to foster the development of the discipline through illustrating how a multidisciplinary discourse analysis that generates original datasets and offers a high degree of empirical detail can be utilized to develop a more benign scientific realism. On the other hand, this serves to demonstrate to the policy community, journalists, academic audiences, and the wider public the importance of how political agents speak. In addition to its immediate contribution to understanding policy language as a key endogenous source of security practices, the project will also enable a deeper and empirically reinforced understanding of timely and important questions in international security, such as:- To what extent is security policy a reaction to 'objective' changes in the international structure?- How can 'narrating' specific events in the international arena foster the construction of external security threats?- Does policy language matter in marginalizing political resistance?- Can 'speaking' international security differently change security policy practices?The project builds upon my previous research, which showed that security policy language aids political agents to advance specific policy agendas by fostering consensus- and coalition-building processes. Using US post-Cold War security policy as an empirical focal point, this project integrates three analytical stages of discourse - characteristics, scope conditions, and effects - to show how security discourses are operationalized by (and for) different policy audiences, and what practical implications this has. By increasing knowledge of how, when, and why the rhetorical choices political agents make successfully shape security policy agendas, this project can help to unlock the puzzle of 'enemy addiction' to foster policy alternatives.