The discourse of Olympic security 2012 : London 2012

摘要

This paper uses a combination of CDA and CL to investigate the discursive realization of the security operation for the 2012 London Olympic Games. Drawing on Didier Bigo’s (2008) conceptualisation of the ‘banopticon’, it address two questions: what distinctive \udlinguistic features are used in documents relating to security for London 2012; and, how is Olympic security realized as a discursive practice in these documents? Findings suggest that the documents indeed realized key banoptic features of the banopticon: exceptionalism, exclusion and prediction, as well as what we call ‘pedagogisation’. Claims were made for the \udexceptional scale of the Olympic events; predictive technologies were proposed to assess the \udthreat from terrorism; and documentary evidence suggests that access to Olympic venues \udwas being constituted to resemble transit through national boundaries