Deadline: June 30, 2019

The editors are in talks with John Benjamins Publishing Company (Amsterdam) and plan to publish the edited volume in the Benjamins’ Discourse Approaches to Politics, Culture and Society series (edited by Jo Angouri and Andreas Musolff). This book series is peer-reviewed and indexed in Scopus.

Discourse Analysis and Conflict Studies

Interest in the broad subject of conflict studies by linguists and language scholars has increased over the years with the growing incidents of conflicts, wars and political violence around the world. There have also been increasing and interesting studies that applied linguistic and discourse approaches to the study of violent protests, activism and political struggles. These studies have given significant insights to the role of language use or discourse in conflict initiation and conflict resolution. From these burgeoning studies, it is clear that there is a strong connection between how what is said or written and how conflict may develop and escalate.

Discourse theorists generally believe that oral or written discourse produced by different people vary with recognizable patterns, depending on their social domains of life (see, for example, Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). The work of a discourse analyst is to analyze these patterns and identify their significance and consequences. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) for example, shows how language works in sociocultural and political contexts, focusing on power relations and ideological perspectives reflected in discourse texts, and their wider implications for the society.

Hence, a critical discourse study of subtle texts such as news reports (or “fake news”), editorials, propaganda, social media publications, etc. in the form of writing, visual or multimodal/video streaming will be very important in contemporary times.

This collection of essays will aim to show the synergy between discourse analysis and conflict studies by showing how topics in conflicts studies and conflict resolution may be researched using methods and approaches in discourse analysis (e.g. CDA, multi-modal discourse analysis, conversation analysis, pragmatics, argumentation, rhetoric etc.)

This study will attempt to cover all conflict-related topics within the fields of political science, international relations, sociology, media studies, applied linguistics etc., which will include:

• Terrorism and extremism
• Conflict and war
• Political crisis
• Ethnic violence/sectarian crisis
• Activism and violent protest
• Hate speech and verbal war (in the media and the Internet etc.)
• Conflict resolution techniques
• Discourse and peace processes
• Etc.

Contributors are invited to submit chapter proposals (about 200 words) not later than 30th June 2019. Kindly send Abstracts or questions as email attachment to Innocent Chiluwa: innocent.chiluwa@covenantuniversity.edu.ng