‘Shoot the Messenger’: Dynamics of Positioning and Denial in Response to Human Rights Appeals

摘要

This article offers a psychosocial discursive analysis of audiences' responses to information about human rights abuses. The analysis of focus group members' justifications for their inaction is informed by a view of language as social action and Cohen's concept of denial, with its focus on the culturally available accounts of justifications and excuses that form the vocabulary of moral passivity within our society. Positioning theory is applied to study participants' moral positioning and the storylines used to account for their passivity, with a specific focus on the use of negative positioning of Amnesty International and charities in general.