‘War on terrorism’ as a discursive battleground: Serbian recontextualization of G.W. Bush's discourse

Abstract

In different parts of the world the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been localized and negotiated by mainstream media and in other public discourses in rather diverse ways. This article explores how young Serbian intellectuals recontextualized G.W. Bush's ‘war on terrorism’ discourse in order to legitimize, retroactively, Serbian violence against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s. We go beyond Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, defined as representation of social events, and extend it to the notion of relocation of a discourse from its original context/practice to its appropriation within another context/practice. Our analysis shows that the informants recycle and appropriate the discourse of ‘the war on terrorism’ by using an analogy. They equate the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon with the former Yugoslav wars and they position and represent former Yugoslav Muslims as terrorists. Our informants continue to use the same principle of exclusion, celebrated by the US administration, extending the group of the ‘good’ (‘we’) to cover all ‘Western/European/Christians’, including the Serbs. The ‘evil’ (‘other’) group is represented as the ‘they’ group, encompassing all the ‘non-Western/non-European/non-Christian/Muslims’. Informants also appropriate the discourse by extending the meaning of the word ‘terrorism’ to all the violent acts carried out by Muslims regardless of the specificities of different politicalhistorical contexts.