Security, population and governmentality : UK counter-terrorism discourse (2007-2011)

Over the past decade, governments worldwide have taken initiatives both at a national and supra-national level in order to prevent terrorist attacks from militant groups. This paper analyses a corpus of policy documents which sets out the policy for UK national security. Informed by Foucault’s (2007) theory of governmentality, as well as critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this paper analyses the ways in which the liberal state in late modernity realizes security as discursive practice. A corpus of 110 documents produced by the UK government relating to security in the wake of the 7/7 attacks between 2007 and 2011 was assembled. The paper analyses the discursive constitution of the Foucaultian themes of regulation, knowledge and population, though carrying out a qualitative analysis of relevant key wards, patterns of collocation, as well as features of connotation and semantic prosody