The theme that dare not speak its name: Geopolitik, geopolitics and German foreign policy since unification

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the emergence of a new security imaginary in the foreign policy discourse in Germany during the 1990s and to determine whether it constitutes a return of Geopolitik in German foreign policy making. Does the re- appearance of geopolitical terms and expressions in the official and the academic discourses in post-unification Germany indicate such a shift? The essay will argue that the claims about a return of Geopolitik cannot be sustained. To the extent that the rhetoric of German government officials changes during the 1990s, this does not produce a coherent geopolitical security imaginary that stands diametrically opposed to the definition of political and institutional spaces of the Bonner Republik.

Drug control, human rights, and the right to the highest attainable standard of health: a reply to Saul Takahashi

A recent article in this journal challenged claims that a human rights framework should be applied to drug control. This article questions the author’s assertions and reframes them in the context of socio-legal drug scholarship, aiming to build on the discourse concerning human rights and drug use. It is submitted that a rights-based approach is a necessary, indeed obligatory, ethical and legal framework through which to address drug use and that international human rights law provides the proper scope for determining where interferences with individual human rights might be justified on certain, limited grounds.

Nuclear Mentalities? Strategies and Beliefs in Britain, France and the FRG

This is volume II of my two-volume study of the nuclear strategies/strategy preferences of Britain, France and West Germany in the Cold War. It shows that the great variable is the mentalities, culture, and particular interpretations of particular historical experiences of these three countries. These mental frameworks are reconstructed, in the tradition of the French Annales/Mentalite schools (that in turn is rooted in anthropology) by looking at a very large nunber of public texts in the context of the public discourse about nuclear strategy in each country.

‘Historical ‘lessons’ and discourse on defence in France, Germany, 1945-1990’,

This article demonstrates how experiences of the same historical events (especially wars), but experienced from different angles, have led France and Germany to draw diametrically opposed lessons from them, which play key roles in the articulation of their defence postures and strategies.

‘The Making of the Book’: Roy Fisher, the Circle Press and the poetics of book art

Between 1972 and 2001, the English late-modernist poet Roy Fisher provided the text for nine separate artist's books produced by Ron King at the Circle Press. Taken together, as Andrew Lambirth has written, the Fisher-King collaborations represent a sustained investigation of the various ways in which text and image can be integrated, breaking the mould of the codex or folio edition, and turning the book into a sculptural object. From the three-dimensional pop-up designs of Bluebeard's Castle (1973), each representing a part of the edifice (the portcullis, the armoury and so on), to ‘alphabet books’ such as The Half-Year Letters (1983), held in an ingenious french-folded concertina which can be stretched to over a metre long or compacted to a pocketbook, the project of these art books is to complicate their own bibliographic codes, and rethink what a book can be. Their folds and reduplications give a material form to the processes by which meanings are produced: from the discovery, in Top Down, Bottom Up (1990), of how to draw on both sides of the page at the same time, to the developments of The Left-Handed Punch (1987) and Anansi Company (1992), where the book becomes first a four-dimensional theatre space, in which a new version of Punch and Judy is played out by twelve articulated puppets, and then a location for characters that are self-contained and removable, in the form of thirteen hand-made wire and card rod-puppets. Finally, in Tabernacle (2001), a seven-drawer black wooden cabinet that stands foursquare like a sculpture (and sells to galleries and collectors for over three thousand pounds), the conception of the book and the material history of print are fully undone and reconstituted. This paper analyses how the King-Fisher art books work out their radically material poetics of the book; how their emphasis on collaboration, between artist and poet, image and text, and also book and reader – the construction of meaning becoming a co-implicated process – continuously challenges hierarchies and fixities in our conception of authorship; and how they re-think the status of poetic text and the construction of the book as material object.

Patterns of discourse semantics: A corpus-assisted study of financial crisis in British newspaper discourse in 2009

Corpus-assisted analyses of public discourse often focus on the lexical level. This article argues in favour of corpus-assisted analyses of discourse, but also in favour of conceptualising salient lexical items in public discourse in a more determined way. It draws partly on non-Anglophone academic traditions in order to promote a conceptualisation of discourse keywords, thereby highlighting how their meaning is determined by their use in discourse contexts. It also argues in favour of emphasising the cognitive and epistemic dimensions of discourse-determined semantic structures. These points will be exemplified by means of a corpus-assisted, as well as a frame-based analysis of the discourse keyword financial crisis in British newspaper articles from 2009. Collocations of financial crisis are assigned to a generic matrix frame for ‘event’ which contains slots that specify possible statements about events. By looking at which slots are more, respectively less filled with collocates of financial crisis, we will trace semantic presence as well as absence, and thereby highlight the pragmatic dimensions of lexical semantics in public discourse. The article also advocates the suitability of discourse keyword analyses for systematic contrastive analyses of public/political discourse and for lexicographical projects that could serve to extend the insights drawn from corpus-guided approaches to discourse analysis.

Private climate change reporting: an emerging discourse of risk and opportunity?

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the nature of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, which takes place in one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and their investee companies. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives from 20 UK investment institutions to derive data which was then coded and analysed, in order to derive a picture of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, using an interpretive methodological approach, in addition to explorative analysis using NVivo software. Findings – The authors find that private climate change reporting is dominated by a discourse of risk and risk management. This emerging risk discourse derives from institutional investors' belief that climate change represents a material risk, that it is the most salient sustainability issue, and that their clients require them to manage climate change-related risk within their portfolio investment. It is found that institutional investors are using the private reporting process to compensate for the acknowledged inadequacies of public climate change reporting. Contrary to evidence indicating corporate capture of public sustainability reporting, these findings suggest that the emerging private climate change reporting discourse is being captured by the institutional investment community. There is also evidence of an emerging discourse of opportunity in private climate change reporting as the institutional investors are increasingly aware of a range of ways in which climate change presents material opportunities for their investee companies to exploit. Lastly, the authors find an absence of any ethical discourse, such that private climate change reporting reinforces rather than challenges the “business case” status quo. Originality/value – Although there is a wealth of sustainability reporting research, there is no academic research on private climate change reporting. This paper attempts to fill this gap by providing rich interview evidence regarding the nature of the emerging private climate change reporting discourse.

Clitic-doubled left dislocation and focus fronting in L2 Spanish: a case of successful acquisition at the syntax-discourse interface

This experimental study tests the Interface Hypothesis by looking into processes at the syntax– discourse interface, teasing apart acquisition of syntactic, semantic and discourse knowledge. Adopting López’s (2009) pragmatic features [±a(naphor)] and [±c(ontrast)], which in combination account for the constructions of dislocation and fronting, we tested clitic left dislocation and fronted focus in the comprehension of English native speakers learning Spanish. Furthermore, we tested knowledge of an additional semantic property: the relationship between the discourse anaphor and the antecedent in clitic left dislocation (CLLD). This relationship is free: it can be subset, superset, part/whole. Syntactic knowledge of clitics was a condition for inclusion in the main test. Our findings indicate that all learners are sensitive to the semantic constraints. While the near-native speakers display native-like discourse knowledge, the advanced speakers demonstrated some discourse knowledge, and intermediate learners did not display any discourse knowledge. The findings support as well as challenge the Interface Hypothesis.

Gradient competence at the syntax-discourse interface

In this article, we present additional support of Duffield's (2003, 2005) distinction between Underlying Competence and Surface Competence. Duffield argues that a more fine-grained distinction between levels of competence and performance is warranted and necessary. While underlying competence is categorical, surface competence is more probabilistic and gradient, being sensitive to lexical and constructional contingencies, including the contextual appropriateness of a given construction. We examine a subset of results from a study comparing native and learner competence of properties at the syntax-discourse interface. Specifically, we look at the acceptability of Clitic Right Dislocation in native and L2 Spanish, in discourse-appropriate context. We argue that Duffield's distinction is a possible explanation of our results.

Diverging from the dominant discourse- some implications of conflicting subject understandings in the education of teachers

This paper addresses beginning teachers thinking about the nature and purposes of their subject and the impact of this on their practice. Individual qualitative interviews were undertaken with 11 history teachers at the beginning of their teaching careers. Data was analysed using writing as the method of analysis and revealed that teachers whose thinking was at odds with dominant discourses, for example in the form of a national curriculum, encountered difficulties embracing pedagogies and aspects of the curriculum that do not accord with their own deep-seated beliefs, demonstrating a need for the initial training and professional development of teachers to forefront consideration of subject understandings.