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It is hardly novel to argue that terrorism is a metaphorical construction. Only five days after 9/11, George Lakoff published a short piece on “Metaphors of Terror” in which he shows that the US-administration at first framed the events as a “crime”, but changed to “war” within hours. Surprisingly, not much research on the metaphorical construction of terrorism has followed since, despite continued terrorist attacks. We will show in our paper that this is a serious failure, as metaphorical analysis allows us to understand not only how we came to understand terrorism in a certain way, but also why we reacted the way we did. As metaphors construct the phenomenon in a specific way, they make certain counter-terrorism policies possible while other means of addressing the issue remain outside of the options considered as a response. To support our claim we present empirical evidence from a comparative study on terrorism-metaphors and their policy-implications in Germany and the UK. Arguing that popular images are at least as important as expert images we have focused on terrorism-metaphors in the tabloid press (‘Sun’ and ‘Bild’). However, we not only compare popular metaphor-use in these two countries, but also examine the way they have evolved over time: while there is little difference between the metaphors in Germany and the UK, they have changed remarkably from 9/11 to Madrid (2004) and London (2005). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructivism in IR, moderate and radical versions alike, suffers from a superficial understanding of language: Looking only at argumentation and content (what is being said), it overlooks that reality is also being constructed below the surface of texts: it does make a difference, how I say something. Style matters! The proposed paper will point to the crucial role metaphors play in this regard: Metaphors create reality by projecting everyday life-worlds onto international relations. They make sense of and give meaning to strange material phenomena such as the fall of the Berlin wall or the WTC-towers. My paper will come up with a method of analysing metaphors that builds on two strands of literature: post-structuralist theories of discourse on the one hand and sociology of knowledge on the other. In order to illustrate how the method works on the empirical ground, it will be applied to the discourse on EU-enlargement, showing that and how enlargement-metaphors construct European identity. Against this background the paper will finally reflect upon linguistic mechanisms of identity construction more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]