The pursuit of power in Iraqi political discourse: unpacking the construction of sociopolitical communities on Facebook

摘要

The paper aims to show how the pursuit of power polarizes political discussions on Facebook and consequently constructs online sociopolitical communities. Drawing on political discourse analysis and Bamberg's tripartite positioning analysis, the present paper investigates how the pursuit of power, by means of de/legitimization, is produced and perceived in the Iraqi political discourses produced in social media as discourses of ethno-sectarian and cultural contestations. The results show that recontextualizing political actions and actors to de/legitimize particular interpretations of political reality based on differentiation and exclusion polarizes the discussions on Facebook. The delegitimization process that is based on differentiation and exclusion emphasizes the distinction between in-groups and out-groups and motivates the commentators to categorize themselves in oppositional sociopolitical communities that are discursively constructed. These sociopolitical communities range from completely imagined communities to the online recreation of actual ethno-sectarian groups.