Measuring Social Cohesion in a Failed State Through the Citizenry’s Own Evaluation and Speech Acts

Here, I turn my attention in the other direction—to the citizens’ discourse and the degree of trust and social cohesion this reveals. To this end, I introduce another discourse feature, namely evaluation and speech acts that express the type of interpersonal relations that exist inside a failed state. My framework draws on Halliday’s contribution to discourse as exchange between participants, and my previous work on solidarity vs. enmity relations (Bazzi, Arab News and Conflict: A Multidisciplinary Discourse Study, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2009), as well as other works on the interpersonal and pragmatic functions of language. Clearly, such a framework begs a number of questions on how to relate discourse as a means of exchange to conceptions of social cohesion.