This important text offers a full and detailed account of how to use discourse analysis to study foreign policy. It provides a poststructuralist theory of the relationship between identity and foreign policy and an in-depth discussion of the methodology of discourse analysis.

Lene Hansen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

1. Introduction Part I. The Theory and Methodology of Discourse Analysis 2. Discourse analysis, identity and foreign policy 3. Beyond the Other: analyzing the complexity of identity 4. Intertextualizing foreign policy: genres, authority and knowledge 5. Research designs: asking questions and choosing texts Part II. A Discourse Analysis of the Western Debate on the Bosnian War 6. The basic discourses in the Western debate over Bosnia 7. Humanitarian responsibility versus "lift and strike" 8. Writing the past, predicting the future 9. The failure of the West? The evolution of the Genocide discourse and the ethnics of inaction 10. Conclusion