Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Peace and Conflict, cilt.30, sa.3, ss.462-471, 2024 (ESCI, Scopus)
In this article, we aim to describe the societal meaning-making process of peace processes. Peace processes as proposals for societal change toward peace are challenging because they require not only imagining a future but also reconstructing the conflict history and maintaining a sense of continuity in terms of identity. We look at how the diversity of social knowledge and dealing with this diversity in the meaning-making process can influence social change toward peace. In particular, we investigate how different ways of representing the peace process in Turkey define different forms of actions as appropriate or inappropriate. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of 34 articles from five ideologically different newspapers about the three most important events of the peace process. We identified the existence of three different social representations: (a) a political struggle for democratization, (b) a way to develop Turkey, and (c) a process of destruction and deception. The peace process is made familiar by drawing on various identity constructions, cultural resources, and argumentation strategies; political actors introduce new norms about political participation by using these features of the representations and attributing agency, rights, and duties to the people. We interpret how the way the peace process is represented functions to deal with representations of others and to claim support for or resistance to social change toward peace.