Delimiting the field of discourses

This part carefully delineates the objects of my analysis to show that a poststructuralist discourse analysis can be systematic and methodologically coherent with its aims and presuppositions. I will first specify the actors and the time frame that delimit this study. Secondly, I will clarify which type of data is used for the empirical analysis. Finally, I finish with some comments on the difficulties faced to access the data and a discussion on the validity of discourse analysis.

54 _{Jackson’s (2010, 35-36) convincingly supports this argument by stating that ‘mind-world monism is} not more “idealist” (…) than mind-world dualism is “realist” (in the sense of privileging the world); it is not the privileging of one or the other side of a mind-world dichotomy that makes a position monistic, but the rejection of the very distinction in the first place.’

i The actors of the regionalisation process

Ideally, following my conceptualisation of regions as the product of the discourses and practices of actors from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the region, I should have analysed the identity/policy link constituting the practices of all the relevant actors of the regionalisation processes in West Africa and South America. These include all South American and West African states, the regional institutions and all the ‘external’ actors intervening or having an influence in the two regions. However, discourse analysis is very time consuming and requires an in-depth analysis and knowledge of the context; extensively studying all these actors was therefore not possible in the time frame of this doctoral thesis. My choice was to follow Hansen’s advice (2006, 75-77) and pick the most influential ‘selves’. A choice consistent with the region-building approach which emphasises the role of power in the construction of regions; as well as with Waever’s (2002, 39) work on regional integration who stresses that the major powers are at the core of this construction inasmuch nothing can be done without their participation.

Hence, my main objects of study are the regional organisations and the regional powers in each region. In the case of South America, there are two regional ‘selves’: Mercosur and Unasur which are the two main regional organisations with a political and security dimension.55 _{The regional power is Brazil and the main ‘external actors’} are the EU, the OAS and the US. I first analyse the official discourses of these regional ‘selves’ to clarify how they frame the regionalisation of foreign and security policies and enable a range of possible practices. Then I trace how the Brazilian discourse constitutes this regional official discourse; how it delimits the field of possibilities of the regionalisation process. However, when a discrepancy appears

55 _{There are many other regional organisations in South America such as the Amazon Cooperation} Treaty Organization or the Andean Community, which are either not working or do not have any political and security dimension.

between the Brazilian discourse and the regional discourse I look at contesting positions from other member states and at the discourse of the relevant ‘external’ actors. To examine the struggle between the different actors to impose their own project of regionalisation, I analyse the intertextual links between the discourses of the various actors and the official regional discourse. While multiple selves are analysed, only the official regional discourse and the Brazilian discourse are studied in-depth through a large amount of texts and interviews. The ‘external’ actors’ discourses are also relatively extensively analysed depending on their relevance in the process. However, the analysis of other member states is much less systematic following the argument that Brazil sets the limits of the form and extent of the regionalisation process.

The analysis is similar in the case of West Africa where the regional power is Nigeria and the regional organisation studied is ECOWAS. Another regional organisation also has some importance in the region, the West Africa Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), but it does not include a political and security dimension. The discourses and practices of the EU in West Africa will also be thoroughly examined, as the role of the EU is crucial to understand the regionalisation process in this region.

Besides these actors, I also take into account, in both regions, the influence of the IR literature: how are their main concepts assimilated in the discourses of the relevant ‘selves’ and how does it frame their practices? As was mentioned, the Security Community and Regional Security Complex literatures are particularly influential.

At the end, my choices of ‘selves’ were not so much driven by a theoretical concern than by an empirical one. My first question was: which representations mainly constitute the regional official discourse(s) and practices? Where do they

come from? My empirical research and fieldwork enabled me to answer these questions and then define the relevant ‘selves’ to be analysed.

The discourses of these different actors are analysed in a time frame which allows for the analysis of the evolution of the regionalisation process. Logically, this research starts at the inception of this process in both regions up until today. In South America it began in the 1990s after the creation of Mercosur (1991) – Unasur was created much later in 2008. The 1990s were important years as there were several regional political interventions in the framework of Mercosur to handle breaches of democracy in Paraguay (1996, 1999). In West Africa the 1990s also correspond to the beginning of the process with the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group’s (ECOMOG) interventions in the civil wars in Liberia (1990) and Sierra Leone (1997). From this period, the regionalisation of foreign and security policies became a political issue debated in the diplomatic corps, the ministries of defence and within the governments of these organisations’ member states.

ii The choice of the data

Hansen (2006) gives useful methodological guidelines to make sure that the choice and the analysis of the data are not arbitrary but justified and structured. One of her central pieces of advice concerns the choice of an intertextual model which depends on the object of study and the set of research questions. This research draws on her first model based on official foreign policy discourse and centred both on political leaders with official authority to sanction the foreign policy pursued and on those with central roles in executing the foreign policy (Hansen 2006, 60-64).56 _These

56 _{The other two models examine: the likely transformation of the official discourse (model 2); the} cultural representations (model 3A); and the marginal discourses (model 3B). They do so by looking at texts beyond official discourse coming from the medias, popular culture, NGOs, civil society, etc. (Hansen 2006, 60-64). Conversely, in the first model that I chose for this research the texts beyond

actors are here leading politicians and senior officials of the governments, diplomatic corps, and ministries of defence of the states; as well as senior civil servants and military officers from the regional organisations. This model identifies texts produced by these actors, as well as the texts that have an intertextual influence on their discourse. According to Hansen (2006, 60-64), the aim is to investigate the constructions of identity within the official discourse, analyse the way in which intertextual links stabilise the discourse, and to examine how official discourses encounter criticisms: ‘Analytically, the basic discourses of a debate structure the political and substantial positions and divisions, whereas intertextual models identify the locations of different discourses in relation to official discourse and other sites of opinion and debate’ (Hansen 2006, 66). The first intertextual model is well adapted to the issue I am analysing in this research: the constitution, stabilisation and contestation of the dominant official discourse on the regionalisation of foreign and security policies.

Intertextual links work through explicit references or quotes. They can also be implicit through a reference not quoted but used, a catchphrase or a concept referring to a body of earlier texts (Hansen 2006, 56-59). These intertextual links are key in order to analyse how various actors constitute the process of regionalisation. For instance, the Brazilian Minister of Defence constantly refers to South America as a ‘security community’ – a conceptual intertextual link with the SC literature. In the same way, ECOWAS policy documents constantly refer to concepts located at the core of the EU’s security discourse such as ‘comprehensive conflict prevention’, which shows the central role of the EU in the West African regionalisation process. An intertextual reading of foreign policy texts is thus useful to understand how the official discourse are analysed only to the extent that an intertextual link can be traced to the official discourse.

official discourse has been constituted and to show that their so-called ‘objectivity’ is actually socially and politically constructed.

The corpus of texts analysed comes from a large array of sources. The greater part stems from the time of study and are primary documents produced by the actors defined in Hansen’s first intertextual model. The documents include legal texts, speeches, political declarations, interviews, articles, books, etc. They can be single- authored or produced in dialogue with political opponents or journalists (Hansen 2006, 60-64). Some secondary material is also used, in particular conceptual histories with the aim to trace the genealogy of the representations and their degree of sedimentation (Hansen 2006, 82-83) – even though poststructuralism gives epistemological and methodological priority to the study of primary texts (Hansen 2006, 82-84).

The corpus of texts has two circles: a narrower circle including key texts frequently quoted and functioning as nodal points within the intertextual web of debates (Hansen 2006, 82-83). They are coined ‘canonical texts’ or ‘monuments’ by Neumann (2008, 67): ‘some texts will show up at crossroads or anchor points, such as the government treatises outlining policy’. According to Neumann (2008, 67), once the discourse analyst has identified these texts and read them, he can then read the central texts that they refer to (an intertextual reading) and is soon able to identify the main representations. These particular texts are subjected to the more thorough analysis of their articulations and construction of identities.

The second wider circle includes a much larger amount of texts providing the basis for a more quantitative identification of the ‘basic discourses’ (Hansen 2006, 52-54). The criteria for selection of this general material according to Hansen are:

2. Widely read and attended to texts;

3. A formal authority to define a political position. Table 1 shows the criteria used for text selection:

Material Temporal location

Time of study Historical material

General material 3 criteria:

1/Clear articulation

2/Widely read and

attended to

3/Formal authority

• Conceptual histories

Key texts • Primary reading of

broader set of sources

• Digital search engine

• Conceptual histories

• Quoted in

contemporary debates

• Re-published

Table 1: ‘Textual selection matrix’ (source: Hansen 2006, 74).

However, because not all texts score high on all these criteria, the general material is adapted in a complementary way to fulfil all the criteria (Hansen 2006, 84-87):

Type of text Criteria

Clear articulation Widely read and

attended to

Formal authority

Presidential addresses

Yes Yes Yes

Speeches of high

ranked national

officials

Yes Yes Variable

Speeches of high

ranked regional

organisations officials

Communiqués of the heads of states and government of

the regional

organisations

Yes Yes Yes

Legislation and

official documents from the regional organisations

Variable Variable Yes

Legislation and

official documents from the member states

Variable Yes Yes

Official press releases Yes Variable No Fieldwork interviews Yes No No

Table 2: ‘Criteria of selection and common types of general material’ (source: adapted from Hansen 2006, 77).

Table 2 introduces the main types of primary documents analysed in this research. Unlike Hansen, however, I have included, among others, my fieldwork interviews. IR discourse analysts are usually very careful with interviewing. Hansen (2006, 84-87) warns that while it is possible to include one’s own interviews, the researcher should be conscious of their particular textual form as resulting from an interaction and a dialogue rather than from a monologue. Neumann (2008, 73) also adds that a discourse analyst should give priority to written texts and sees interviews as complementary or substitutionary. The second part of this chapter will further

elaborate on the preparation and the conduct of the interviews but I will already provide some insights on the relation between interviews and poststructuralist discourse analysis. First, the responses of the officials interviewed are structured by the same representations and structures of meaning than the other primary documents analysed.57 _{Second, an interviewer should be aware of his position as a researcher} guiding the interviews. The responses are driven by the questions and the interaction. As an interviewer I am always careful to have very unstructured questions in order not to impose the concepts driving my research and let the person speak with her/his own words and concepts. While keeping this issue in mind and making sure that the interviews are analysed within a large corpus of primary material, interviews can be very valuable to grasp the contesting discourses. This is particularly the case when the dominant discourse is almost hegemonic. Interviews can enable the researcher to understand which are the contesting discourses circulating within relatively closed institutions such as the diplomatic corps or the defence ministry where contesting discourses always exist to some extent but are not publicly diffused. It is also useful in some developing countries where the governments and ministries do not publicly produce many official documents and/or where they are not accessible to the public or to researchers.

Finally, the last question to address concerns when to decide to stop reading texts. Neumann’s (2008, 69-70) answer is that one should read as many texts as possible until having defined the key texts and having a satisfying account of the different positions structuring the political debate. My analysis was thus adjusted until I managed to subsume all the texts under one of the main positions or ‘basic discourses’.

57 _{As Waever (2002, 26-27) puts it, the concern is about ‘the codes and norms used by actors to relate} to each other which are not the individual properties of people.’

iii Difficulties of a poststructuralist discourse analysis and the question of validity

The first difficulty of a discourse analysis concerns the ability to access the data. When analysing the discourses of actors situated within rather secretive institutions such as the ministries of foreign affairs and the ministries of defence it can be difficult to obtain certain documents. Dunn (2008, 88) acknowledges that this is often the case in developing countries where the access to documents and archives can be made difficult due to suspicion towards foreign researchers, as well as to mismanagement. In West Africa, for instance, almost no documents are publicly diffused. One of the solutions to this problem of access was, as noted, to conduct interviews. At the end, adding together the documents found on the official websites, some documents sent by officials and the interviews, enabled the collection of enough primary documents to undertake a robust discourse analysis.

Secondly, discourse analysis requires language skills, historical and cultural knowledge to be able to understand and examine the production of meanings in particular social and political settings. According to Neumann (2008, 64), ‘The point is that a researcher needs a basic level of cultural competence to recognize the shared understandings that create a common frame of reference, which makes it possible for people to act in relation to one another’; and ‘The challenge is not to get naturalized – not to “become” part of the universe studied – but to denaturalize.’ Acquiring a good knowledge of the codes, norms and conventions of the political discourse is thus crucial to the analysis. I have a good knowledge of all the languages of the political discourses: English, French and Portuguese in West Africa; Spanish and Portuguese in South America. Moreover, I enhanced my historical and cultural knowledge of both regions with a field research period of four months in Brazil and one month in

Nigeria. This fieldwork was crucial to gather additional insights into the political culture of Brazil and Nigeria.

In addition to the difficulty of accessing the documents, the claims I make in this research are limited by the fact that I could not analyse the discourse of all the member states of the regional organisation. An analysis of the interaction between the different states of each region with the aim to examine how the dominant discourse on regionalisation is constituted through their struggle would have been an added value to this project. However, this would have been too time consuming and expensive; the solution, as explained earlier, was to analyse in-depth the discourses of the most important national ‘selves’ (Brazil and Nigeria) and of the regional organisations. I took for granted that Nigeria and Brazil are the states with the most influence that set the form and the limits of the process; particularly in the area of foreign and security policy which is the most sovereignty sensitive. There is enough consensus on their key role among political, academic and press circles, inside and outside of the regions, to be able to take this role as a point of departure for this analysis, and which was confirmed during the empirical research.

Finally, the lack of external validity and reliability of a discourse analysis is often criticised by positivist scholars to the extent that the conclusions drawn from the analysis cannot be verified, falsified or tested. However, falsifiability and testing are methods of verification that can only be applied to what Jackson (2010, 31) calls a dualist philosophical ontology which is:

‘the philosophical ontology that makes meaningful the proposition that we can empirically evaluate scientific ontologies, because if there is a world existing “out there” in a mind independent way, we can in principle compare any given scientific ontology to that world and see if it matches in some sense.’

The aim of causal explanations and generalisations is thus to reflect as closely as possible this independent reality against which the scientific production can be tested through a specific array of methods. By contrast, this research is ontologically monist to the extent that it does not see the mind and the world as independent. Accordingly, such verifiability procedures cannot be used. For example, the concept of reliability makes no sense here to the extent that different analysts could come with different results when reading the same texts. Indeed, one reading does not exhaust all others and the same texts can be subjected to multiple research questions with a focus on particular elements. There can however be weaker readings when the discourse analysis is not guided by clear and structured methodological and theoretical criteria