Counter-securitization: Discourses of Resistance and Decoloniality from Africa

The proposed study is a book length project on the ideologies that underpin discourses of resistance to the militarisation of relations between African countries and Western imperialists. The aim of the proposed study is two-fold. First, it aims to develop the theory of counter-securitisation as a discursive ideology of resistance to militarization of international relations. Second, it grounds the theory of counter-securitisation in the analysis of discursive strategies used in post-Cold War decolonial discourses in Africa. Data will consist of: (1) newspaper discourses on Ghana-US relations; (2) social media discourse on anti-French revolution in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger; and (3) speeches by selected Pan-African leaders of the post-Cold War era, notably Nelson Mandela, al Ghaddafi and Robert Mugabe. The data will be analysed by combining manual coding with corpus software. The systems of TRANSITIVITY and APPRAISAL in systemic functional linguistics will be used as analytical frameworks. The study will shed light on the ideological use of language for resistance against systemic control and provides a novel theoretical framework – namely, counter-securitisation – for further critical research on anti-imperialist discourses. Also, the findings can lead to further interdisciplinary debates across linguistics, international relations, and political science.