Vectors of violence: innovative discursive conceptualizations of terror, terrorism and violence-affirming extremism in Swedish parliamentary data, 1971–2018 (20377)
This paper examines conceptual changes in the discourse on political violence in Swedish parliamentary deliberations 1971–2018. Analyzing debate transcripts from the Swedish Parliament, the study forms part of the major project SweTerror (2021–2024, see Edlund et al. 2022), that draws on an array of theoretical and methodological considerations from, among others, sociolinguistics, terrorism studies, political science and language technology.
The focus is examining altering, and innovative, ways of conceptualizing political violence along the lines of gender and party affiliation of the speakers. Prior to 1971, political violence was rarely verbalized as terrorism, more frequently as ‘terror’. The highly contested term ‘terrorism’, in turn, was more often used for signifying acts committed by states in the sense of state terrorism (Ängsal et al. 2022). Around 1970, a terminological shift occurred in so far as ‘terrorism’ increasingly became deployed with reference to political violence committed by clandestine groups, thereby perpetrating acts of symbolic value (Jackson 2011).
The aim is to analyse two semantic shifts in the Swedish discourse on terrorism: first, the shift from ‘terror’ to ‘terrorism’; second, the shift 2014–2015, when the innovative expression våldsbejakande extremism (‘violence-affirming extremism’) was introduced in the context of radical Jihadism (Wahlström 2022). Deploying language technology techniques, including word vectors (Yao et al. 2017) which can give the contextual closeness of words (semantically similar words having similar vectors), allows us to capture any change of usage. The main question is to what extent and by whom the aforementioned terms have been used to denote different, similar or related activities or stances. By comparing similar contexts we can predict the words with similar meanings, but also find what words are used in the same contexts earlier, or later on. Combining this with aggregated text metadata concerning gender and party affiliation enables a powerful drill-down into sociolinguistic variables.
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- Ängsal, Magnus P. et al. (2022): “Linguistic Framing of Political Terror: Distant and Close Readings of the Discourse on Terrorism in the Swedish Parliament 1993–2018”. In: Tomaž Erjavec/Maria Eskevich (eds.): CLARIN Annual Conference Proceedings, 10–12 October 2022. Prague: Czechia, pp. 69–72. https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2022-2118-CLARIN2022_ConferenceProceedings.pdf