Introduction

Language is political, social, and cultural: discourse analysis is the rigorous study of writing, speech, and other communicative events in order to understand these political, social, and cultural dynamics. While discourse analysis can be traced to philology and philosophy, law, linguistics, and literature, as a method it primarily made its way into critical inquiry in international relations (IR) through the works of Foucault and Derrida, particularly the methods of genealogy and deconstruction. Within these approaches, discourse is a social practice that constitutes the social world, and is also constituted by other social practices.