How Can a CDA Approach Contribute to the Study of State Failure?

This chapter suggests that Lebanon’s status as a failed state can be measured not only by its inability to provide the political goods that a state should supply, such as security, health care, infrastructure, and a safe monetary and banking system, but through its discourse practices. Thus, the hypothesis is that discourse analysis can unravel and further enhance our understanding of the effects of bad governance and irrational economic policies, or dependence on an entrenched practice of sectarian politics. At the beginning, I establish a thematic overview of Critical Discourse Analysis in order to answer the cluster of questions raised in other chapters in this book. The second section constructs a novel account of the theoretical framework of gaslighting, which I specifically call “gaslighting the population”.