For a linguistic modelling of radicalization : study of institutional discourses and social work discourses ; Pour une modélisation linguistique de la radicalisation : étude de discours institutionnels et de discours du travail social

Abstract

The concept of radicalization was embraced by the French public authorities in the mid-2010s through various action plans aiming at detecting potential or proven cases of radicalization before the commission of jihadist-inspired terrorist acts. This institutionalization of the fight against radicalization relied on the territorial outlets of the State and on existing public policies (national education, child welfare, etc.). This thesis primarily investigates specialized prevention organizations, a sector at the crossroads of social labour and child welfare, that were called upon to detect so-called radicalized profiles, because of their presence in areas considered priorities by city policies. This work deals with the semantic-discursive characteristics of the lexeme radicalization in institutional and political speeches, as well as in social work speeches. The analysis uses two types of materials: 680 institutional speeches produced by the French government between 2013 and 2018 (containing the lemma radicalization), and ten semi-structured interviews conducted as part of an investigation of specialized prevention educators of the Occitanie Region. This freely accessible corpus constitutes an unprecedented resource for linguists, sociologists and political scientists, but also for students in social careers, as well as social workers wishing to analyse further the programmes of meaning and uses of the notion of radicalization. On the socio-discursive level, the contrastive study of these two corpora makes it possible to observe the production of a public policy and its reception within a sector that is directly concerned. From a linguistic point of view, it is a matter of developing and formalizing a process for analysing the notion of radicalization. The proposed model is based on an in-depth study of work in the sociology of social movements which aims to describe the mechanisms specific to radical trajectories, a synthesis of which is presented in the first part of the thesis. Three major observations ...