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

对不安全的看法是暴力冲突和国际不稳定的一个关键来源。这个项目调查了冷战结束后美国对安全威胁的关注，以及冷战后危险和不确定性方面的话语重新定义如何将美国锁定在代价高昂的安全做法上-即使在严重的经济危机时期也是如此。它围绕当今国际安全中两个相互关联的重要令人困惑的问题展开：1.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。是什么使这成为可能？2.处于国际社会边缘的国家和非国家行为者可以被描绘成对国际和平的主要威胁--而不会对那些把他们‘陷害’为敌人的人构成重大的军事挑战。这怎麽可能？这个项目探索后冷战时代美国的敌人瘾，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、促进和公众接受方面所起的作用，从而解开这些谜题。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的重要性的学术研究，一直难以使这一问题超越狭隘的学术受众。该项目开发了一种新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，这有助于通过说明如何利用生成原始数据集并提供高度经验细节的多学科话语分析来发展更良性的科学现实主义，从而促进该学科的发展。另一方面，这有助于向政策界、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，该项目还将使人们能够对国际安全中及时和重要的问题有更深层次和经验主义的加强的理解，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促进外部安全威胁的构建？-政策语言在边缘化政治阻力方面起作用吗？-“说话”国际安全能否以不同的方式改变安全政策实践？该项目建立在我之前的研究基础上，这表明，安全政策语言通过促进建立共识和联盟进程，帮助政治代理人推进具体的政策议程。这个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，以展示安全话语是如何由不同的政策受众(以及为不同的政策受众)运作的，以及这具有什么实际影响。通过增加关于政治代理人如何、何时以及为什么成功地塑造安全政策议程的修辞选择的知识，该项目可以帮助解开“敌人成瘾”的谜团，以促进政策选择。

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.