ABSTRACT

The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict presents a range of linguistic approaches as a means for examining the nature of communication related to conflict. Divided into four sections, the Handbook critically examines text, interaction, languages and applications of linguistics in situations of conflict. Spanning 30 chapters by a variety of international scholars, this Handbook:

  •  includes real-life case studies of conflict and covers conflicts from a wide range of geographical locations at every scale of involvement (from the personal to the international), of every timespan (from the fleeting to the decades-long) and of varying levels of intensity (from the barely articulated to the overtly hostile)
  • sets out the textual and interactional ways in which conflict is engendered and in which people and groups of people can be set against each other 
  • considers what linguistic research has brought, and can bring, to the universal aim of minimising the negative effects of outbreaks of conflict wherever and whenever they occur.

The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict is an essential reference book for students and researchers of language and communication, linguistics, peace studies, international relations and conflict studies.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

The origins of The Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict

part Section I|1 pages

Text in conflict

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

Textual choice and communication in conflict

chapter 2|16 pages

Discursive (re)construction of the prelude to the 2003 Iraq War in op/ed press

Dialectics of argument and rhetoric

chapter 3|20 pages

Stark choices and brutal simplicity

The blunt instrument of constructed oppositions in news editorials

chapter 4|19 pages

Projecting your “opponent’s” views

Linguistic negation and the potential for conflict

chapter 5|20 pages

Ideological positioning in conflict

The United States and Egypt’s domestic political trajectory

chapter 6|25 pages

Homosexuality in Latvian and Polish parliamentary debates 1994–2013

A historical approach to conflict in political discourse

chapter 7|17 pages

Conflict and categorisation

A corpus and discourse study of naming participants in forced migration

chapter 8|18 pages

Hate speech

Conceptualisations, interpretations and reactions

part Section II|1 pages

Interaction in conflict

chapter 9|9 pages

Introduction

Conflict as it happens

chapter 12|31 pages

Conflict interaction

Insights from conversation analysis

chapter 13|25 pages

Conflict in political discourse

Conflict as congenital to political discourse

chapter 15|22 pages

Leadership in conflict

Disagreement and conflict in a start-up team

part Section III|1 pages

Languages in conflict

chapter 17|8 pages

Introduction

Conflict with the fabric of language

chapter 18|22 pages

Ethnicity, conflict and language choice

An example from northern Ghana

chapter 20|19 pages

Linguistic landscape as an arena of conflict

Language removal, exclusion, and ethnic identity construction in Lithuania (Vilnius)

chapter 21|18 pages

“You are shamed for speaking it or for not speaking it good enough”

The paradoxical status of Spanish in the US Latino community

chapter 22|16 pages

Hate crimes

Language, vulnerability and conflict

part Section IV|1 pages

Linguistics in conflict

chapter 24|3 pages

Introduction

The potential for Linguistics to change conflict in the “real” world

chapter 26|19 pages

Threatening contexts

An examination of threatening language from linguistic, legal and law enforcement perspectives

chapter 27|21 pages

Talk in mediation

Metaphors in acrimonious talk

chapter 29|17 pages

On agency, witnessing and surviving

Interpreters in situations of violent conflict

chapter 30|18 pages

The Irish language in Belfast

The role of a language in post-conflict resolution

chapter |6 pages

Afterword

Connecting linguistics and conflict research