Contesting Category Salience: A study of the perceptions of the sides involved in the Persian Gulf War

AbstractPrevious studies of political rhetoric in general, and the rhetoric surrounding the Gulf war in particular, have suggested that social categories are not defined by perceptual features of context, but rather rhetorically constructed and contested for the purposes of mass mobilisation. Thus western leaders portrayed the conflict as ‘Civilisation against Saddam Hussein’ in order to maximise the pro-war constituency, while leaders of the western anti-war movements portrayed it in terms of ‘Western leaders against ordinary (Iraqi) people’ in order to minimise the pro-war constituency. However these studies focus exclusively on leaders and fail to show whether ordinary people differ in t…