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Article published In: The Soft Power of War: Legitimacy and community in Iraq war discourses
Edited by Lilie Chouliaraki
[Journal of Language and Politics 4:1] 2005
► pp. 11–39

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The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq

 | University of Waterloo and University of Queensland
 | Nanyang Technological University
Published online: 8 June 2005
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.4.1.02gra
Beginning from recent critical work on globalisation, many critical scholars have extended the analytic vocabulary of ‘advanced’, ‘fast’ and ‘postmodern’ capitalism to explain the geopolitics of the Iraq War. This article offers a counterclaim: that current geopolitical economy can be more usefully characterised as a form of neofeudal corporatism. Using examples drawn from a 300,000 word corpus of public utterances by three political leaders — George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard — we identify and explicate defining characteristics of this system and how they are manifest in political language about the invasion of Iraq.
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