EPISTEME OF WAR: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS  

Abstract

This study examines how newspaper editorials construct knowledge about war through language, ideology and discursive practice. Editorials do more than report conflict: they explain, evaluate and judge it from institutional ideological positions. Although media representations of war have been widely studied, little attention has been paid to the epistemic function of editorial discourse, that is, how knowledge about war is constructed, legitimised and circulated through language. The study follows an interpretivist paradigm and a qualitative design. It draws on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis, van Dijk’s socio-cognitive account of ideology and Foucault’s concept of episteme. The data comprise 40 editorials (20 each) from Dawn and The News International published between 2019 and 2025 on war and geopolitical conflict. Analysis proceeded at the textual, discursive-practice and sociocultural levels and was organised into six themes: lexical construction of war, representation of social actors, epistemic authority, ideological polarisation, metaphorical construction of conflict, and intertextuality. The findings show that the editorials construct war through moral polarisation, selective agency allocation, conceptual metaphor and moral evaluation, and that they produce epistemic authority through truth claims, institutional references and selective intertextuality. These recurring mechanisms shape public understanding of legitimacy, responsibility and antagonism. The study contributes to Applied Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, media linguistics and conflict communication by showing editorial discourse to be a site of epistemic knowledge production.