Knowledge dissemination and ideology in the discourse of securitisation and control in the EU

This paper explores the connection between knowledge dissemination, ideology and the discursive strategies deployed by the EU law enforcement agency Europol in a corpus of annual reports published from 2008 to 2017. Since ideology is associated with specific world views and governs social relations, it forms the basis of European security discourse in a time of great social turmoil, especially when the idea of unity (Jenkins 2000: 7), the acknowledgment of EU legitimacy (Papathanassopoulos, Negrine 2011), and the enforcement of its values (Jocak, Kochenov 2017) are most needed. Specifically, the approach will be both quantitative and qualitative, in identifying the salient lexical features in the corpus that elicit ideology and the strategies deployed at the institutional level in shaping securitisation discourse, in order to legitimise or de-legitimise a specific ideology or group knowledge.