From terrorism to extremism: the UN Security Council and the evolution of the discourse on terrorism.

The object of study of this thesis is the discursive construction of “international terrorism” within the United Nations Security Council. It examines the discourse produced within this body in all the items included in its stream of meetings “threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts” from 1998 until 2018. The present thesis is grounded in the comprehension that its object of study can be understood as a social construction which is historically, socially and politically contingent – and thus highly dependent on discourses. It is, consequently, inserted within the Critical Terrorism Studies, Critical Security Studies and, more in general, Constructivist and Post-Structuralist literature in International Relations. Its main objective is analysing how “international terrorism” was discursively constructed within this context, what were the consequences of this construction and what relations of power shaped it. Through, mainly, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it follows the dynamics of the discourse, its evolution throughout the years, the creation of new categories such as “radicalisation” and “extremism” and their merging with “international terrorism”. Discourses and practices, however, co-constitute each other. Therefore, the research also discusses the consolidation of the Council’s construction of the threat through the creation of bodies and legislation to deal with it. In other words, the study examines not only the discourse but the UNSC’s dispositif of “international terrorism” and its resulting international governmentality. It argues that the dispositif’s stabilisation at an international level on a specific kind of violence depended on the shared, hegemonic features of the Members of the “international community”, also analysed here. The creation of this dispositif was pivotal to the construction and maintenance of the Westernised and Orientalist “international community” and to the legitimisation of its hegemony. The thesis thus also reflects on the power relations that shape the international sphere, and the Security Council, and on how the construction of “international terrorism” and the “international community” played a pivotal role in the maintenance and legitimisation of the latter category.