Entangled in a context of increased use of private military and security companies globally, this study sets out to investigate the motivation for Denmark to use private military and security companies (PMSCs) for maritime security in parilious international waters. This study examines the decision making process taking place in the Danish Parliament in 2012 prior to the passing of ​ Law 116 The amendment of the Firearms Act and the Act on Warfare, etc. that mandated the shipping industry to hire PMSCs for armed protection of their vessels. A critical discourse analysis has been applied in order to understand the discursive mechanisms present in the political debate prior to the adoption of the law. The analysis shows that a neoliberal market discourse of necessity, efficiency and competition informs the parliamentary debate on international maritime security and pirate threats. That is, the protecting of the Danish industry and trade are found to be a first priority whereas personal security of the employees, the pirates, and control over weapons are only secondary. The findings indicate that in the political discourse, security has become subjected to a marketlogic. Thus, security is referred to as security for ​the market more than for the population.The thesis argues that this change in thinking about security needs a critical public debate in order to make sure that issues of security stay within the political sphere.

The purpose of this study is to look at how women are represented in neoliberal discourses of development, if there has been a change on representation of women over the last three decades and how these discourses reflect broader developments in gender equality. The World Bank has been selected to serve as an instance of neoliberal development discourse and one World Development Report (WDR) from each decade is analysed. The theoretical perspectives include discourse analysis and the three Western main approaches to feminist development theory; Women In Development (WID), Woman And Development (WAD) and Gender And Development (GAD); the methodology is related to critical discourse analysis. The analysis suggests that the Bank discourse on women has changed from a predominant WID approach in the end of the 90s where women were mainly depicted as passive and poor objects, and moved closer towards a GAD approach in the latest WDR that constructs women as empowered agents with aspirations. Despite changes in Bank language use over time, the underlying message has remained the same; women are discursively framed as a means to enhance economic efficiency. The discursive changes in the analysed WDRs have to a large extent followed the global developments on discourses on women and gender equality, of which the Bank itself is a key influencer. The discursive construction of women in development, structured around efficiency and economic growth thus sustains, rather than challenges, the hegemonic power structures that sustain gender inequalities. The practical consequences of the current development discourse of constructing women as economic actors without addressing the root causes to their subordination will most likely translate into an increase in the workload of women on the ground while gender inequality and poverty continue to exist.

CDA is a multi-disciplinary approach to discourse which study the relationship between discourse, power and ideology. This makes the application of it on political discourse very suitable since it can be applied to analyse the specific structures of language and ideologies used by politicians to influence the recipient’s mind and hence their actions. This paper, based on a CDA’s framework, investigates the connection between the discursive strategies and the ideological strategies used by Donald Trump to represent immigrants during the 2016 presidential campaign. In so doing this study utilizes Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (2001) of doing CDA and Van Dijk’s ideological Square (2006,2011) to analyse Trump’s speech on immigration delivered in Phoenix, Arizona during the elections of 2016. The results have shown that when talking about immigrants Trump represents them only negatively by describing them as being a threat, economic burden and deviant.This is done by exploiting the strategies of actor description, polarization, victimization, empathy, topos, number game, illustrations, lexicalization, syntax, predicational strategies, comparison, evidentiality, local coherence, implication and generalization. This led to the conclusion that by choosing to emphasize the bad actions of immigrants and ignoring their positive actions, Trump was addressing and appealing to the White Americans only.

This thesis sets out to design and execute an in-depth study of the True Fruits controversial advertisements by applying Encoding/Decoding as a theoretical model. It aims at examining visual rhetoric and through Critical Discourse Analysis understanding the cause and effect of the controversial True Fruits advertisements in their 2017 campaign. The research attempts to answer the question: ‘What happened on social media after True Fruits published their controversial advertisements in 2017?’. The thesis presents an analysis of True Fruits´ visual rhetoric in #jetztösterreichts campaign advertisements and then reveals consumer responses to it on social media in 2017. Thus, the thesis presents a comprehensive review of the relevant literature leading toward the key themes of German advertisement, controversial advertisement, and the representation of immigration in advertisements. Towards the end, it states the final remarks concluding the entire discussion and reflects upon the attempts that True Fruits made to communicate a political message and how consumers in social media responded to it.

Representing “Oriental” men as sexual predators in the media is a recurring theme that has proliferated since the New Year’s night in Cologne in 2015/2016. This study investigates how the representation of men with an immigrant background as sexual predators has developed in the year before and after the New Year’s night in Cologne in 2015/2016 in the Bremen local newspaper Weser Kurier. The aim of the study is to find out in what ways the representation of “Oriental” man has changed, how a moral panic is established, and how an idea of fear is created. To reach this aim Critical Discourse Analysis will be used in combination with theories concerned with “Othering”, moral panic and Orientalism. Because of the limited scope of this study, it should be considered as a base for future research into the field.

This Degree Project (DP) deals with the discourses about collective memory in Chile 45 years after a coup d’état that gave way to a dictatorship that lasted for 17 years, during which serious human rights violations were committed. How different actors relate to this traumatic period shows how this is a field of struggle in contemporary Chile.Collective memory has become a key theoretical concept for describing how social groups make sense of their common past. It is deeply entrenched with notions of identity, agency and change. Whereas collective memory is an abstract notion, it has to be somehow concretized in order to allow individuals to activate their own memories, opinions and reactions. Thus, media play a fundamental role in the construction of collective memory. Drawing on a constructivist approach, media are not fixed containers of memories but they actually work on how people perceive their past in relation to the present and the future. This (DP) focuses on the following questions: How do media contribute to the construction of the collective memory around the coup d’état and the military dictatorship in Chile? What are the discourses they diffuse and to what end? Which are the other counter-hegemonic discourses available in the Chilean society?In order to answer these questions, this DP uses a Critical Discourse Analysis of of the two main Chilean newspapers (La Tercera and El Mercurio) complemented with interviews to memory agents. The conclusions point out that these newspapers have a role in diffusing as well as constructing hegemonic discourses around this period of the Chilean history. They do so, mainly by silencing the voices of the civil society making their goals of social change difficult to achieve.

With the help of various advertising strategies this study addresses the Swedish, plant-basedfood-production company Oatly, and their advertisements to see how the discourse onsustainability is approached. By using critical discourse analysis, and primarily Fairclough’sthree-dimensional-model for analysing discourse (1989, 1995) as well as the marketingframework AIDA, these advertisements have been analysed to see how the companymanages to tempt and persuade their consumers into consumption. This paper seeks tounderstand how Oatly portrays their products as the “right” choice, by acting on and creatingsocial, public understandings. But who decides what is “correct” and what is not, and howdoes a company act on contemporary social conventions to portray themselves as the “good”choice? Through a textual analysis of Oatly’s product descriptions on their website as well asof the product packaging in-store, this report has established that Oatly acts on publicunderstandings of environmental sustainability to persuade their audience into consumption.

This thesis critically investigates how female and male opioid users are represented in local newspapers in Ohio, one of the states which has been most severely affected by the ongoing ‘opioid crisis’ in the United States. Through an analysis of 20 articles from the The Plain Dealer and The Columbus Dispatch, the study aims to highlight how women and men who use opioids are portrayed, and what ideologies are hidden in the texts. Guided by Fairclough’s framework for critical discourse analysis and van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach, the analysis was performed on three levels: text-level, whereby journalists’ word choices, contextualisation and linguistic emphasis were studied; discursive level, which focused on processes involved in the production and consumption of the news pieces, and; sociocultural level, which entailed analysing historical and current developments of drug policy locally and nationally. The study finds that journalists downplay the seriousness of (white) male opioid use by calling men by their nicknames, by portraying them as ‘mischievous’ and by using jokey undertones when referring to their drug use. Female opioid use is constructed as abnormal by use of words such as ‘erratic’ and ‘unruly’ and women are discursively penalised for failing in their roles as caregivers to children. This thesis exemplifies how language use by local journalists’ in Ohio reinforces societal perceptions of male and female opioid users, which may influence counteractive measures by authorities.

The aim of the thesis is to contribute to an increased understanding on how immigrant women are being constructed in Swedish media in relation to labour. It is also to gain a greater understanding of the different kinds of expressions of ‘Swedish values’ and ‘othering’ that immigrant women are associated with in editorial pages in Swedish newspapers. Fairclough's critical discourse analysis is used to answer the research questions of the study. 27 editorial texts, published between 2016 - 2018, regarding immigrant women in relation to labour is analyzed. The theoretical framework used in the thesis consists of the framing theory, the concept of stereotypes and othering, and femonationalism. The result shows that ‘Swedish values’ and especially ‘Swedish gender equality’ is utilized to position the immigrant woman as the opposite of the “Swedish woman”. In addition to the overall prevailing discourses of ‘Swedish values’ and especially ‘Swedish gender equality’, the media's image of the immigrant women entailed three sub discourses; the Dependent, the Victim and the Unqualified.

Mass media play an important role in shaping public perceptions about differentthematics, including crime and justice. The consumption of mediatic contents indifferent forms, such as newspapers, television news and crime dramas, can affectthe way people perceive and interpret concepts as deviance and punishments, theattitude towards the criminal system and the level of concern for becoming a victim.In the last years, Streaming Videos On Demand platforms have made easier theaccess and the consumptions of contents as crime dramas; the changes in themodality of fruition have been followed by changes in the representation ofcharacters, with the introduction and the increasing diffusion of morally ambiguousfigures. This opens new possibilities of research, particularly regarding the modesof representation of criminals as antiheroes. The purpose of the article is then toinvestigate how the figure of the offender is constructed as antihero in four OriginalNetflix Productions (You, Narcos, Ozark, La Casa de Papel). A Critical DiscourseAnalysis of two narrative themes is conducted combining Marxist andPostmodernist interpretative approaches.