Contesting legislation: campaigning against international trade agreements in the public knowledge domain

The dissemination of knowledge about legislation and law enforcement from specialist to non-specialist is usually viewed as constructive and productive, enabling the public to act more responsibly and take more informed decisions. The legitimacy of the legal sources of this information is normally not questioned. This study, instead, considers an area of international corporate law, more specifically mega-regional trade and investment agreements, which have become the focus of concerted opposition and radical contestation by public activists in major non-profit campaigning organizations. The data for the research comes from three sources: drafts of the most recent trade pact, TiSA; a series of digital WikiLeaks analyses; and a set of online publications from Friends of the Earth International from the topic section “Economic Justice and Resisting Neoliberalism”. The study addresses two main issues: how are the legal sources and the language of the law “entextualized” in the information flows of this vertically-organized and hierarchical set of discourses? And secondly, how is the argumentation used by both sides constructed, in order to legitimize and substantiate their respective ideological positions. The theoretical frameworks for the analysis are mainly Critical Discourse Analysis (van Dijk, 1998; Wodak and Meyer, 2009) and Argumentation Theory (van Eemeren et al, 2007). Corpus linguistic tools provide detailed semantic profiling on key topics and concepts; lexical phraseology breaks down macro into micro ideological indicators and argumentative propositions; finally, modality resources are aimed at persuasive and effective argument, in a bid to be judged as both “reasonable” and “right”. The study provides insight into how ideologically-driven specialist discourse comes to be appropriated, challenged, and transformed by agents in the public knowledge domain in an attempt to achieve significant economic, social and cultural change.