This monograph examines the rhetorical nature and function of representations of the future in political discourse, focusing on political actors’ use of hegemonic images of future “reality” to achieve their political goals. It argues that a key ideological dimension of political rhetoric lies in politicians’ use of projections of the future to legitimate policies and actions. This argument is grounded in systemic-functional and critical discourse analyses of the “Bush Doctrine,” the U.S. policy response to the September 11 terrorist attacks which sanctioned a “preemptive” military posture. By focusing on the discursive construction of the future, this project addresses a lacunae in critical discourse studies and calls attention to the crucial role that the discourse and practice of “futurology” has played in post-Cold War politics and society. It will be of value to scholars interested in the discourses of politics, the “war on terror,” U.S. national security, and futurology.
2026. Constructing security discourse during the Russia–Ukraine War (2022–2025): The cases of Lithuania, Hungary, and Ukraine. Discourse & Society
Zhen, Guo
2025. Conceptual Metaphors in Official Documents of International Organizations. Frontiers in Humanities and Social Sciences 5:9 ► pp. 177 ff.
Basarati, Ali & Simant Shankar Bharti
2025. Representing Iran as a Threat: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Obama’s Rhetoric. Journal for Perspectives of Economic Political and Social Integration 31:1 ► pp. 7 ff.
Basarati, Ali & Simant Shankar Bharti
2026.
Against the
status quo
: how Trump’s second inauguration speech pre-configures the privileged future
. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research► pp. 1 ff.
Dunmire, Patricia
2025. Phil Graham: critical insights into the futurity of discourse and the discourse of futurity. Critical Discourse Studies 22:2 ► pp. 129 ff.
Shao, Guosong, Xingxing Fan & Wanfa Zhang
2025. Legitimizing Germany’s intervention policy: A discourse analysis of German media’s coverage on supplying weapons to Ukraine. Discourse & Society 36:2 ► pp. 291 ff.
Wang, Yunyou
2025. The critical cognitive analysis of “hyper-securitization” strategy: A case study of China’s official discourse on the “Japan nuclear contaminated water discharge incident”. Discourse & Society 36:5 ► pp. 725 ff.
Strukowska, Marta E.
2024. Revitalizing America through struggle and threat: The contingency approach to President Joe Biden’s pandemic leadership. Scripta Neophilologica Posnaniensia 24 ► pp. 115 ff.
Strukowska, Marta E.
2024. “Mapping and projecting otherness in media discourse of the Russia–Ukraine war”. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 60:1 ► pp. 77 ff.
Basarati, Ali, Hadaegh Rezaei & Mohammad Amouzadeh
2023. A corpus-based study on the cognitive construction of security in discourse. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Hu, Chajuan
2024. Modeling the audience’s perception of security in media discourse. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1
Mohamad Jamil, Siti Nurnadilla
2023. ‘Remember Our Race, Our Religion and Our Progeny’: An Argumentation Analysis of Malay-Language Newspapers During General Election Campaigns. In Discursive Approaches to Politics in Malaysia [Asia in Transition, 18], ► pp. 139 ff.
Mohamad Jamil, Siti Nurnadilla
2025. Proximizing Fear: Multimodal Racial and Religious Threatoric in Malaysia’s 15th General Election TikTok Videos. In Race, Religion, Royalty in Malaysia [Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, ], ► pp. 183 ff.
Basarati, Ali
2022. Preempting the past: How the future space unfolds in political discourse of Iran. Discourse & Society 33:2 ► pp. 129 ff.
Basarati, Ali
2026. A Discourse Analytical View Toward Iranophobia and Preemptive Policies in the Discourse of the Iranian Supreme Leader. In Handbook of Persian Discourse Studies [Springer Handbooks in Languages and Linguistics, ], ► pp. 573 ff.
Basarati, Ali
2026. Force-dynamics and the pragmatics of counter proximisation in Iranian media discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
Buczowski, Maciej & Marta Eliza Strukowska
2022. Speech act-based legitimisation in selected inaugural speeches of British Prime Ministers. Scripta Neophilologica Posnaniensia 22 ► pp. 25 ff.
Huang, Corey Fanglei
2022. Branding devices in place: Neoliberal academic event posters in a Hong Kong university. Discourse & Communication 16:6 ► pp. 632 ff.
Hussein Jamal, Noorjan, Mei Yuit Chan, Shameem Rafik-Galea, Ngee Thai Yap, Geok Imm Lee & Puteri Azaziah Megat Abd Rani
2022. Question design in veterinary consultations: Question forms and client responses in accomplishing problem presentation in a Malaysian context. Discourse and Interaction 15:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Irshad, Nosheen
2022. Proximization strategies used in Covid-19 prevention discourse: An STA based analysis of official guidelines issued in Pakistan. Discourse and Interaction 15:1 ► pp. 29 ff.
2022. Proximization: a critical cognitive analysis of health security discourse. Text & Talk 42:5 ► pp. 713 ff.
Bjork, Collin & Frida Buhre
2021. Resisting Temporal Regimes, Imagining Just Temporalities. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51:3 ► pp. 177 ff.
McIntosh, Janet
2021. Language and the Military: Necropolitical Legitimation, Embodied Semiotics, and Ineffable Suffering. Annual Review of Anthropology 50:1 ► pp. 241 ff.
Szpunar, Piotr M
2021. Promnesic futures: Technology, climate, déjà vu. Memory Studies 14:4 ► pp. 747 ff.
MacDonald, Malcolm N. & Duncan Hunter
2019. Discourse of Post-9/11 US Security Organisations. In The Discourse of Security, ► pp. 263 ff.
MacDonald, Malcolm N. & Duncan Hunter
2019. Language, Illiberalism and Governmentality. In The Discourse of Security, ► pp. 291 ff.
MacDonald, Malcolm N. & Duncan Hunter
2019. Critical Approaches to Security Discourse. In The Discourse of Security, ► pp. 57 ff.
MacDonald, Malcolm N. & Duncan Hunter
2019. Introduction. In The Discourse of Security, ► pp. 1 ff.
MacDonald, Malcolm N. & Duncan Hunter
2019. Discourse, Disciplinarity and Social Context. In The Discourse of Security, ► pp. 85 ff.
MacDonald, Malcolm N. & Duncan Hunter
2019. Discourse of Olympic Security. In The Discourse of Security, ► pp. 197 ff.
2019. Political Discourse and the Planned City: Nehru’s Projection and Appropriation of Chandigarh, the Capital of Punjab. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109:4 ► pp. 1226 ff.
Ferrari, Federica
2018. In lack of ‘Will’? Strategic ‘Future-ness’ and Barack Obama’s experiment: From intention negotiation to will creation and political action in Barack Obama’s e-mail campaigning. Time & Society 27:2 ► pp. 195 ff.
Forstorp, Per-Anders & Ulf Mellström
2018. Becoming an Exporter of Higher Education: Positioning Sweden as a Knowledge Nation. In Higher Education, Globalization and Eduscapes, ► pp. 195 ff.
Forstorp, Per-Anders & Ulf Mellström
2018. The European Union as Eduscape. In Higher Education, Globalization and Eduscapes, ► pp. 157 ff.
Forstorp, Per-Anders & Ulf Mellström
2018. Key Concepts and Themes. In Higher Education, Globalization and Eduscapes, ► pp. 17 ff.
Forstorp, Per-Anders & Ulf Mellström
2018. Going Global: How to Kickstart a Global HEI. In Higher Education, Globalization and Eduscapes, ► pp. 243 ff.
McKeown, Jamie
2018. A corpus-based investigation of techno-optimism and propositional certainty in the National Intelligence Council’s ‘Future Global Trends Reports’ (2010–2035). Discourse & Communication 12:1 ► pp. 39 ff.
Nilsson, Bo & Anna Sofia Lundgren
2018. ‘For a living countryside’: Political rhetoric about Swedish rural areas. European Urban and Regional Studies 25:1 ► pp. 72 ff.
Hunter, Duncan & Malcolm N MacDonald
2017. Arguments for exception in US security discourse. Discourse & Society 28:5 ► pp. 493 ff.
Selchow, Sabine
2017. Resilience and resilient in Obama’s National Security Strategy 2010: Enter two ‘political keywords’. Politics 37:1 ► pp. 36 ff.
Cap, Piotr
2015. CROSSING SYMBOLIC DISTANCES IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE SPACE. Critical Discourse Studies 12:3 ► pp. 313 ff.
Cap, Piotr
2015. Follow-ups in the US anti-terrorist discourse: Proposal for a macro-discursive approach to monologic follow-up sequences. Discourse & Society 26:5 ► pp. 543 ff.
2017. Health Discourse: The War on Cancer and Beyond. In The Language of Fear, ► pp. 29 ff.
Cap, Piotr
2017. Proximization: A Threat-Based Model of Policy Legitimization. In The Language of Fear, ► pp. 15 ff.
Cap, Piotr
2017. Environmental Discourse: Climate Change. In The Language of Fear, ► pp. 41 ff.
Cap, Piotr
2018. From ‘cultural unbelonging’ to ‘terrorist risk’: communicating threat in the Polish anti-immigration discourse. Critical Discourse Studies 15:3 ► pp. 285 ff.
Cap, Piotr
2018. ‘We don’t want any immigrants or terrorists here’: The linguistic manufacturing of xenophobia in the post-2015 Poland. Discourse & Society 29:4 ► pp. 380 ff.
2013. Precontextualization and the rhetoric of futurity: Foretelling Colin Powell’s UN address on NBC News. Discourse & Communication 7:1 ► pp. 25 ff.
Oddo, John
2013. Discourse-Based Methods Across Texts and Semiotic Modes. Written Communication 30:3 ► pp. 236 ff.
Oddo, John
2025. Discourse Analysis Applied to Communication about Violent Conflict. In The Handbook of Conflict and Peace Communication, ► pp. 111 ff.
Dunmire, Patricia L.
2012. Political Discourse Analysis: Exploring the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language. Language and Linguistics Compass 6:11 ► pp. 735 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Language in Society 41:1 ► pp. 155 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 march 2026. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.
