ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the theoretical tools that will permit to deconstruct the United Nations Security Council’s fight against international terrorism. It describes a reflection on language, discourses, and the discursive production of the Self and the Other. Language gives meaning to social reality through discourses. Discourses create a “space of objects”, by making specific things matter in different ways. A discourse is constructed through many narratives that protect its legitimacy by presenting it as the unique, ahistorical, and only plausible way of interpreting the object. Discourses construct the social world and the actors within it, and their interpretation and understanding of reality. Actors have different levels of power within a discourse, depending on the discourse and on the specific social, historical, and political context. Identity is not pre-given and pre-discursively defined, but it is liquid and dependent on social relations. Politics is the realm of dealing with conflict, and therefore the creation of identity is a mere political act.
