Responding to terror: recruiting a martial body of literate subjects

Abstract

In this paper I conduct a Foucauldian discourse analysis of a political speech given by Brendon Nelson in 2006 when the Australian Minister for Defence in the Howard Coalition Government. The speech connects conceptualizations of terror, globalization, education and literacy as part of a whole of government security strategy. The analysis examines this speech as an example of a liberal way of governing the conduct of diverse and unpredictable populations. My analysis suggests that the apparatus of government has been strategically used in order to biopolitically contain the rise of complex social forces and protect a set of homogenous cultural values. The purposes of education and uses of literacy are seen as instruments for the inscription of a coded set of values understood to be synonymous with civil society.