Ideology and the Language of Human RightsPublished online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2026
Chapter 7 reviews the main findings of the analyses presented in Chapters 1-6. These identify essential characteristics of ideology and demonstrate that the appeals exhibit these characteristics and that the methods typically used for the analysis of nefarious ideologies can be profitably applied to liberational ones. They augment Verschueren’s analytic procedures with technical and theoretical devices to account for the interplay among implicit and explicit meanings, indices of discourse interaction, and metapragmatic activities. It reviews the claim that the appeals are designed for at least two audiences: their addressees and Amnesty members. It revisits discussion of ideology in light of the analyses of the Amnesty documents, contrasting these and other human rights documents with mythic and ritualistic elements of two US Nazi documents. The chapter concludes by discussing unexpected findings, changes in human rights, Amnesty’s adaptations to changes in communication technologies, reasons for counterscreening and an invitation to use the additional corpus of appeals in Appendix 3 for this purpose, and suggestions for further research on oppositional activist discourses.
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