Crisis, Conspiracy and Rights; Imaginaries of Terrorism in Documentary Film

The dispersed character of terrorism as a practice became more coherent to the Western realm through the operationalisation of counter terrorist discourses. The media played a major role in that in the sense that they provided public ‘visibility’ upon the potentiality of terrorist threat. What this essay would like to discuss is the way such representations of threat negotiate a number of issues evolving around ‘civil rights’; discrimination, intensification of surveillance or militarization legitimacy of a state of emergency; and how public discourses of broader issues of ‘rights’ are contextualized in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. The case study is a documentary produced shortly after a terrorist event that embraces the question ‘why bomb London?’ regarding the London public transport attacks of 7/7/2005. The analytical paradigm used is based on Critical Discourse Analysis which provides a structure that can respond to different questions of ‘how’ the signification of emergency is constructed.