Dissertation: "Extremist terrorism and the construction of victimhood in German societal debate"

Main funder

Funder's project number: 00241246

Funds granted by main funder (€)

Project timetable

Project start date: 01/03/2024

Project end date: 31/08/2024

Summary

In this article-based dissertation I ask how victimhood is constructed in German societal debate on extremist terrorism. This study focuses on debates on the far-right terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU) uncovered in 2011 and the ISIS attack at the Christmas market in Berliner Breitscheidplatz in 2016. Despite their ideological differences, these two terror cases caused similar societal debates on victims and their position. This raises the question, how victimhood is being produced and constructed through language use. This study is based on the linguistic approach of the world and phenomena being constructed through language use. In this dissertation I ask how victimhood is discursively constructed and what these two different terrorism cases tell us about the phenomenon of victimhood in German societal debates? The data consists of parliamentary debate speeches, newspaper articles and tweets. This discourse analytical study takes the data-driven approach and examines each dataset with different discourse analytical methods.

Principal Investigator

Primary responsible unit

Follow-up groups

Profiling area: School of Wellbeing (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Well