In Transit between Two Wor(l)ds: NATO Military Discourse at a Turning Point.

This paper stems from David Campbell's post-structuralist assumption that "every understanding of international politics depends upon abstraction, representation and interpretation". The tenet of this investigation is that the Military, having lost, in a post-'89 world, their ideological primacy, have been forced to gain public opinion support by means of narratives that should supersede prior and plain us vs them polarisations. An Analysis of Military Discourse methodology is used to examine when, how and to what extent the military doctrinal discourse on Information Operations has been reframed in the West. The analysis is conducted on a corpus consisting of 111 doctrinal documents from 1996 to 2013 published by NATO, US and UK Armed Forces and covering the Info-Ops, PsyOps, CIMIC , Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs areas. Data will be considered either at diachronic or synchronic level to document the evolution of Language Engineering techniques in the last twenty years. On the basis of the findings, the last part of the paper provides hypotheses on the possible evolution of the NATO narrative and doctrine at this epochal turning point.