“Activism in paradise”: A critical discourse analysis of a public
Tracking number
relations campaign against genetic engineering.
ICA-15-10063
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discourses may then function like a skin, creating a veneer that hides the plurality of
ideologies and opinions circulating in hidden public spheres layered beneath the surface.
Benhabib (1996) and Habermas (1996) call for a move to a deliberative democracy that
depends on dialogue as a means of making political decisions and therefore allows more
easily for a politics of difference. Mouffe (1996) additionally argues that collective identities
create relations of power, that pluralism is political:
To deny the need for a construction of collective identities and to conceive democratic politics
exclusively in terms of a struggle of a multiplicity of interest groups or of minorities for the
assertion of their rights is to remain blind to the relations of power. It is to ignore the limits
imposed on the extension of the sphere of rights by the fact that some existing rights have
been constructed on the very exclusion or subordination of others. (p. 247)
Mouffe demands a new balance of power resulting from the legitimation of oppositional
discourses that contest the power of financial and administrative resources, and collective
identities. She terms this “agonistic pluralism” (1999). Reilly (1996), similarly, calls for a
public sphere where “new discourses can be used to define subjectivity, identity, and politics
in the hegemonic struggle of critical citizens toward a true pluralistic democracy” (p. 38).
Activism and the Internet
Roper (2002) explores the extent to which political activism has, since the late 1990s,
increasingly been facilitated by communication through the Internet. Her survey of 150
activist websites convincingly demonstrates that, internationally, the authority of corporates
has been questioned in relation to the authority of the sovereign state, leading to world-wide
activism and media comment (particularly evident after the success of the Seattle protests
against the WTO ministerial forum in November 1999).
Convention