Terror in political discourse: from the Cold War to the Unipolar World

Given the critical role of “terror” and the perception of it in today’s unipolar world, and given the difficulties in identifying and defining it in a historical context (beyond the fact that it involves violence or the threat of violence), this chapter makes a linguistic analysis of the way the lexeme terror has been used in the discourse of US Presidents since 1960, and, by way of brief comparison, in the House of Commons in the months immediately preceding and following the invasion of Iraq. The first section traces a brief history of the word, while the second will present a corpus assisted discourse analysis of instances of terror using two specialized corpora of political language. It uses various various electronic resources, such as the OED online, the British National Corpora, and two specially designed corpora of contemporary political discourse. It places particular attention on shifts in meaning that occurred after the Cold War