Discourse creates a social reality of what we believe to be the outside world

Those not familiar with the term “discourse” often ask: Is everything discourse? Where is the boundary between discourse and the material (touchable and observable) world? Discourse scholars answer this question by stating that discourse is the space where human beings make sense of the material world, where they attach meaning to the world and where representations of the world become manifest. The existence of a material world outside discourse is, thus, not denied—what is refuted is the assumption that we can relate to this material world without discourse (Holzscheiter 2010). In its essence, discourse analysis is an engagement with meaning and the linguistic and communicative processes through which social reality is constructed. Discourse can therefore be defined as, basically, the space where intersubjective meaning is created, sustained, trans- formed and, accordingly, becomes constitutive of social reality. This preliminary and broad understanding of discourse already allows distinguishing discourse from language inasmuch as discourse is an inherently social concept. Rather than simply investigating the use of language in international politics, an explo- ration of discourse asks for the social and political effects that result from using a particular vocabulary on the one hand and the productive effects of particular constructions of reality on the agency and identity of individuals and groups. Any singular event of speaking or producing text, thus, is part of a larger social and political process: It is conceived of as “text in social context.”