- 學位論文
From Homo Sacer to Docile Body: the US Norm-Building in the War on Terror
From Homo Sacer to Docile Body: the US Norm-Building in the War on Terror
並列摘要
Abstract This paper presents an extension of previous poststructuralists researches in International Relations (IR) on the subject of war on terror. In the context of the state of exception and logic of sovereign that IR poststructuralists deploy to construct an alternative view of post-9/11 world order, the research rests the assumption upon re-examining the justifying discourses and tracking the mechanism of normalizations, with Foucault’s ‘epistemology’ of power/knowledge. The purpose of this research aims at examining how the Bush Administration manipulates the ‘truth ‘ rhetorically through the construction of bellum justum from the aspect of the relations between ‘truth’ and discourse. It targets on ‘how’ the Superpower shifting the invasion of Iraq into a crusade of ultimate truth and chanting universalism against ‘the evil’ enemy to generate a ‘global’ war on terror. The research began with examining how the 2003 invasion of Iraq took shape in retrospect from the historical background of the US rogue state policy as the sole superpower embraced the victory of Cold War. Chapter two explored the illegitimacy of Iraq war from macro level through Agamben’s exceptionalism to reconsider the circumstances where Saddam’s Iraq situated in the era of American Primacy. Chapter three aggregated the theoretical background concerning the way knowledge/power and regime of truth exercised in mapping individuals’ ways of thinking through discourse formation. It was from such aspect that this research reconfigured the epistemology to rethink how power exercised in normalizing a ‘rogue’ state and how liberalism functioned as the regime of truth in justifying the invasion of Iraq. To rethink the justification of war on terror, chapter four scrutinizing President George W. Bush’s State of Union Address 2002 through Critical Discourse Analysis. On the basis of the results of this research, it was conceivable that the American led military intervention to disarm Iraq was, in fact, the amalgamation of rationalizing the conduct of regime change in foreign land, maximizing state power on the pretext of state security within the context of counterterrorism to normalize the preventive force. Overthrowing the Saddam Hussein’s regime was the first step to achieve the goal in erecting a docile government in the Middle East. Since regime change would neither be triggered if the existing one ruled by legitimacy nor received advocacy among other liberal allies strong enough to justify the actions, the Axis of Evil popped up to the foreign policy lexicon restoring the ‘rogue states’ categories and intensifying the threat as imminently as military intervention was a necessity. Keywords: Poststructuralism, Agamben, Foucault, zones of indistinction, critical discourses analysis, sovereign exception, war on terror, rogue state, regime change