This paper examines how state violence within one military arena can function as a tool of coercion against civilians in others. Focusing on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, it explores how this violence was discursively mobilised as a threat directed at the Lebanese population in an effort to pressure civilians to withdraw support for Hezbollah. Methodologically, the study adopts Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), integrating textual analysis with attention to discursive production and socio-political context. The primary textual material is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the Lebanese public, selected through purposive sampling as a high-salience communicative act issued during a period of regional escalation. Rather than treating the speech as an isolated event, the paper analyses it as a discursive node within a broader campaign of communicative coercion directed toward civilian audiences beyond the immediate theatre of war. To complement the discourse analysis, the study also draws on semi-structured interviews with Lebanese civilians, examining perceptions of the speech and broader understandings of Israeli tactics in Lebanon. The interviews are used not to measure behavioural outcomes, but to establish the lived experience and reception of threat among civilians exposed to such messaging. Interpretive categories, including intimidation, threat construction, and coercive signalling, were developed through iterative coding grounded in CDA concepts such as modality, intertextuality, and evaluative language. The paper argues that the communicative mobilisation of violence toward civilian audiences can be understood within the framework of state terrorism, exposing the limits of terrorism frameworks that exclude stateactors.

Authors:
Makena Micheni, Oxford University, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Makena Micheni is currently a Levin Junior Research Fellow at Lady Margret Hall, Oxford University, United kingdom

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