6533b7d8fe1ef96bd126a1c3

RESEARCH PRODUCT

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

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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 their construction of social categories and whether those supporting a given stance share the category constructions of leaders. This study of 229 schoolchildren in Britain and Spain was undertaken in the course of the Gulf War. Subjects were given a series of images, which they could choose to describe the nature of the...