Preempting the past: How the future space unfolds in political discourse of Iran

Introduction

Ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran (henceforth the IRI) was settled as a revolution-born political and governing system, the notion of ‘doshman’ [the enemy] has always been present as a pivotal key term at the heart of the discourse of the Iranian topmost political actors such as the then and present Supreme Leaders: Ayatollah Sayyid Rohollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, respectively. In respective discourses, doshman [the enemy] has always been construed to be historically aggressive to Iran during pre- and post-revolutionary eras. As Ayatollah Khamenei says:

The Supreme Leader, Feb. 8, 2010 (emphasis added)

Not only has doshman allegedly programmed and set off certain threats to the IRI during the contemporary history, but also it has been construed to be casting disruptive measures to the IRI’s future. For instance, in early days of being succeeded to the position of Supreme Leadership, Ayatollah Khamenei says:

Due to the representation of doshman [the enemy] in the Supreme Leader’s (hereinafter the SL) discourse as a ubiquitous antagonistic entity in Iran’s historical space, it is of indubitable importance to investigate discursive mechanisms of construing the pre-configuration of the future vis-a-vis the recontextualisation of the past and evaluation of the present. The importance rises from the fact that the future, as Dunmire (2007: 19) argues, ‘represents an ideologically significant site in which dominant political actors and institutions can exert political power and control’. In so doing, political actors and institutions constitute the future and its ideological aura based on the recounts of the past (Halbwachs, 1992, cited in Achugar, 2009: 289). The past is itself a social reflection of heteroglossia in which it is constructed and reconstructed and the present states of affairs and social circumstances impose their influence upon its reproduction (Coffin, 2003: 219). In fact, the construction of the past is manufactured by the present goals looking towards the future (Achugar, 2008: 22). On these accounts, this study will examine the representation and reconstruction of the past and the future as being influenced by the present political, economic, strategic and social statuses of the IRI as well as the existing series of actions that are regarded as threats of doshman. Therefore, I shall ponder upon the particular function the future space is destined to serve in connection with long-existing past-to-future threats of doshman. In so doing, it is necessary to go over the particularities of the discursively characterised values, policies and programmes of doshman and the IRI (the Islamic Republic of Iran). Moreover, it begs to recognise the typology of the construed threats that allegedly encroach upon the IRI to lay certain impacts.

Thus said, guided by the Proximisation Theory (PT) (Cap, 2013), this paper aims to indicate that the SL’s discourse represents certain miscellaneous physical and ideological threats that have been construed to target the IRI. I shall show that the construed threats have been encroaching upon the ideological and material values, policies and programmes of the IRI in an extensive temporal scale. I shall also indicate that the construal of doshman’s threats via linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive toolkit will contribute to obtaining public legitimsation to certain measures and proceedings that would give birth to a specific future space in the IRI. Furthermore, I argue that in the SL’s discourse, the future is designated to preempt the revitalisation of Iran’s pre-revolutionary past in the future and neutralise the threats that are generated in the aftermath of the Iranian 1979 Islamic Revolution. Lastly, the future space construction may arguably lead to stabilise and strengthen the roots of great socio-political changes that occurred as a consequence of the Islamic Revolution.

Methodologically, to take into account what I have sketched thus far, I shall start with analysing the discursive characterisations of doshman-IRI spaces within the SL’s discourse space. Then, I shall be concerned with analysing the construals of threats of doshman towards the IRI which are assumed to result in destructive consequences. Finally, I shall sketch the discursive configuration of the future space and the intended function it is ordained to serve. To these ends, recruiting the Proximisation Theory (Cap, 2013) as a theoretical framework, I approach a corpus of 180 speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, extended from 2005 to 2013. The presented excerpts from 2005 to 2013 are translated into English by the author and are checked by three experts in translation to minimise the author’s bias towards the original excerpts. However, regarding the analyses, I considered original versions of the excerpts in Farsi.

According to the Article 110 of the Constitution of the IRI, the Supreme Leader in the Islamic Republic of Iran is in charge of ‘determining the overall policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran after consulting the Expediency Discernment Council [Majma’ Tashkhis-e Maslahat-e Nezam]’ (the Constitution of the IRI: 75). The responsibility necessitates the designation of certain policies and programmes for the future of the IRI in relation to the present political, economic, strategic and social circumstances. On this account, the SL’s discourse appears to be a fine locus to mull over and investigate how certain vision of the future is constructed. The full list of his speeches can be retrieved from www.leader.ir

The timespan 2005–2013 accords with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s two-term presidency and it is rightly a phenomenal historical point in the IRI’s political history. This era is widely recognised with Iran’s record political isolation and heavy tides of the US, Europe, and the United Nation’s unprecedented economic sanctions as well as the possibility of the US’s military intervention with Iran. Iran’s political entanglement as well as these sanctions were in response to Iran’s partly-covert pursuit of nuclear programmes, proclamation of Israel’s elimination, denial of Holocaust and vast support of the Hezbollah and other militia forces in the Middle East. What followed from the imposition of multifarious global pressures on Iran was nothing but extensive mutual mistrust that surmounted little hope of appeasement in the rough Iran-west relations. Of more importance to this era, which makes it more significant to study, is that the SL did not cut short his full-fledged support of the recurrent policies regarding the pursuit of the nuclear programmes and reinforcement of the Hezbollah and militia forces. In consequence, unabating pessimism prevailed and still does, the conception of the west and the US in Iran’s ruling political environment. Since then, two important topics has become far more stereotypical in the SL’s discourse: construing the west and the US as historical and future enemies of the IRI and calling for strenuous pursuit of certain economic programmes, such as resistive economy, and technological-scientific developments with a hope to loosen the west’s heavy influence upon Iran’s economy.

Designing the future on account of the past exhumation

Studying the future involves creating certain alternative possibilities for the future (Bell, 2009 [1997]). The main trend in this field of inquiry is to ‘make the possibilities of the future more known to us and increase human control over the future’ (Bell, 2009 [1997]: 2). From a critical perspective, Inayatullah (1990: 115) asserts that the discourse of the future ‘creates new epistemological spaces that enable the formation of alternative future’ through historicising and deconstructing the future. Studying the future from a critical stance in political and cultural terrains has rendered ‘the future as a site for analysing and a framework for critiquing dominant political discourses’ (Dunmire, 2008: 83). In this outlook, the future space is monopolised by panoply of strategic policies, strategies and discursive practices ordained to ‘design and shape the world system so as to maintain the particular balance of power’ (Dunmire, 2014: 340). For example, in the field of policy and planning discourse, pure technological visions towards urban futures attempt to cast utopian visions of the cities (Bina et al., 2020: 2). Critical position-taking against such future constructions, therefore, may contribute to deconstructing the utopian theory and speculative fictions concerning the constructed future of urban life (Bina et al., 2020: 2).

Political discourses delineate the overall architecture of the future space by setting an ideologically-tainted framework. Edelman (1964, 1971, 1988) notes that it is intended to sort out certain strategic actions, behaviours, and policies that should be taken as reinforcing and warranting the desired future space while particular realities/actions must be prevented to take place (Dunmire, 2005: 483). Following this track, Dunmire (2008: 81) contends that the future space is a discursive construct and the linguistic organisation of the politicians’ discourse functions as a persuasive instrument. Further, she observes that power-holding institutions exploit future representations in their policy documents so as to legitimise particular policies and actions (Dunmire, 2008: 81).

The persuasive and legitimising functions of the future space construction, thus, take their root from ‘the material and ideological stakes embedded in representation of the future’ (Dunmire, 2008, p. 83). Relatedly, for instance, Dunmire (2015: 298) assumes that the United States has long programmed to serve its national political, economic and security interests and affairs by invoking to re-shaping the future of the US and the world. Therefore, the post-cold war national policy of the US, Dunmire (2014) suggests, should be understood as ‘global shaping activities’ that seek to ‘maintain a particular balance of power and particular division of global economic production’ (p. 340). Moreover, in her seminal work, Dunmire (2011) critically investigates the discourses of politicians and institutions as universalising the future realities through the ideological working of their rhetoric. Critically studying the Bush doctrine, she indicates that in Bush national security policy, the future is constructed as a site abound with threats and it is exploited to invoke vast public legitimisation to the US preventive measures (Dunmire, 2011: 98–99). Accordingly, as McAllum (2017: 15) shows, threat-based orientation to the future in the presence of Europe’s others is followed in populist and authoritarian solutions that are proposed to resolve EU’s systemic dysfunctions.

Considering the ideological, persuasive and preemptive functions of the future, thus a question arises: what would construct the strategic, ideological and political ground base to (re)shape the future space in a particular way? As a possible response amongst many, Masini (2002: 250) maintains that under the influence of the World War II, the state of affairs in the present was assumed to determine and constrict the premeditations and the choice of changes and possible alternatives for the future. Thus said, critical readings of the history of the present and the past will throw light on what is going to happen in the future (Alessandrini, 2003: 213).

In this regard, looking critically at the relationship between public crises and the possible scenarios that politicians and social leaders proffer for the future, Mahony and Clarke (2013: 935) state that the instillation of the present perception as a site of crises demands public as well as governmental bodies into action so as to make resolutions for the future. Nonetheless, Masini (2002: 250) then argues that the significance of the present by no means dismisses the determining role of the past in constructing the foundations of the future. As a matter of fact, the past underlies and moulds the prospective goals and identity of institutions and individuals (Halbwachs, 1992, cited in Achugar, 2009: 289). Duncan (2011: 164) also suggests that coherent narratives of the present and the past remembrance and commemorations serve to exert a strategic function: it projects discursively constructed futures. Put differently, the constructed reality of the past or present obliges the exertion of certain measures to warrant the materialisation of the depicted future as an inevitable space (Elmer and Opel, 2006: 480). Case studies such as investigating discursive construction and commemoration of Israel and Zionist-entwined future world (Duncan, 2014), indicating the emergence of the ‘new Europe’ from the ashes of the ‘bitter past’ (Forchtner and Kølvraa, 2012), and scrutinising the discourse of job opportunities in Britain and Austria stemming from the pre-WWII colonialism and anti-Semitism (Richardson and Wodak, 2009), would prove that historiography of the past that would construct the main building blocks of the preferred future space.

To conclude this section, the primordial objective of political agenda, to a greater extent, is to pre-configure and exert control over the future by producing knowledge about the historical accounts of the past and present as well as the construed entities that allegedly threaten Our sovereignty. In so doing, the birth of ‘the privileged future’ (Dunmire, 2005, 2011) remarkably requires the preemptive measures that not only may insulate the privileged future from the alleged threats that may abrogate its materialisation, but also regulates the socio-political behaviours in such a way to pave the way for a so-called better future. Nevertheless, the body of scholarly works reviewed here deal less directly and explicitly with how and exactly whereabouts in the history of the context under observation the threats triggering the future start to exist. More importantly, they also disregard how the manufactured future space, in its own right, turns out to be a strategic counter-threat zone. Guided by these assumptions, the present study, taking a corpus of the Iranian Supreme Leader’s speeches into account, will examine the construed nest of the threats that are allegedly encroaching upon the present and the future of the Iran and the IRI. Also, it will observe how the future space in the SL discourse is architectured to preempt the represented threats.

The proximisation theory

Proximisation Theory (PT) (Cap, 2006, 2013) is a further elaboration of the Discourse Space Theory (DST) (Chilton, 2004), later renamed to the Deictic Space Theory (Chilton, 2014). Cap (2013: 21) notes that DST provides certain conceptual premises for the underlying foundation of the Proximisation Theory. Therefore, it seems necessary to give due space to the depiction of the DST prior to sketching the main tenets of the Proximisation Theory.

The main claim of the DST is that in any discourse processing, people, places attributions and events in discourses are located at a relative conceptual distance from the centre of a deictic centre (the self) (Cap, 2013: 16; Chilton, 2004: 58; Hart, 2015: 240). The distance, as Chilton (2004) maintains, cannot be measured by any explicit markers as ‘near relations’, ‘close relations’ and ‘remote relations’ from the self (p. 58) since people tend to position different entities, events and attributions ‘along a scale of remoteness from the self, using background assumptions and indexical cues’ (p. 56). All forms of discourse, for Chilton (2004: 57), involves certain assumptions not only about entities, locations, temporal aspects and their relationships, but also ‘the ontological status of these entities in the represented world’. Therefore, people’s representation of the entities and events subsumes various epistemic modifications due to their assumptions and perception of the situation. In this connection, Chilton (2004: 57) adds that ‘people’s representation have entities that may exist, might have existed, repeatedly exist, definitely don’t exist and so on. Entities and the relationship among them may be represented as physically necessary, socially imposed or as morally imperative’ (emphasis in original). On these accounts, Chilton (2004) suggests that people position different other entities at a relative distance from and in relation with themselves along with space (s), time (t) and modality (m) axes. The deictic centre is at the intersection of the space, time and modality axes and the other entities are located on these 3-D axes with a conceptual distance from the deictic centre (Chilton, 2004: 58).

The space axis (s) involves spatial deictic expressions and indexical cues. The self (the speaker) is at the origo of the deictic space (here, now, I/we). The other entities, then, are positioned along the s axis with a distance from the self; some nearer to and some more remote from the self (Chilton, 2004: 58). Spatial representation of entities and processes, therefore, seems to be fundamental due to its close ‘relation to physical extension and as a source domain for metaphorical representation’ (Chilton, 2004: 152). It has extensive political interest and significance; political speakers tend to invoke spatial representations since, in political affairs, it mainly has to do with considerably critical lemmas such as ‘defending territory and extending one’s own realm forcefully’ (Chilton: 152). In fact, spatial representations are unavoidable factors of legitimising. By employing spatial representation of entities and processes, Chilton (2004: 152) puts, political speakers can generate fear and anxiety of the other’s threatening actions towards the self. More particularly, Chilton (2004: 153) states:

“The peculiar spatial connection with the legitimising function enters the picture in two ways. First the general public will not have direct experience of the realities that are at issue- territories that are physically and psychologically remote. The entire burden is then on linguistic expression, which somehow has to induce hearers to make mental representations of something for which they have no, or only very indirect, sensory evidence. . . Second, the electorate has to be persuaded that there is a significant reason for undertaking the risks of fighting war. One way to do this is to stimulate anxiety or fear”.

On the temporal (t) axis, the origin is the ‘now’ of the speaker: the time of speaking. It is ‘surrounded. . .by an area that counts as “now” dummytxt”’. (Chilton, 2004: 58). The time, for Chilton (2004: 58), is ‘conceptualised in terms of motion through space in a relative distance to or from the speaker’. The time of happening of events is conceptualised and located as near or remote from the origo (Chilton, 2004: 59). This is the main reason why ‘time’ is also of considerable significance to the political discourse. In fact, Chilton (2004: 59) maintains that ‘generally, subjectively “positioned” time periods can be of considerable importance – history, and which part of it are “close” to the “us” is central to national ideologies and to justifying the present and future policies’.

The importance of t axis further emerges when the political discourses involve historical flashbacks and analogy, metonymically connected the present states of an entity on s axis to historical events so as to gain legitimisation. For example, in analysing Bill Clinton’s text on Kosovo affair in 1999, Chilton (2004: 145) states that ‘Sarajevo is linked metonymically to WWI and WWI to WWII and the Holocaust. The link can be said to be metonymic because the relation between Kosovo, the Sarajevo, and WWI is of conceptual “contiguity” in a historical knowledge frame’.

In the m axis, besides being located at the origin of space and time, the self is ‘the origin of the epistemic true and the deontic right’ (Chilton, 2004: 59). Epistemic and deontic modalities are closely connected. The epistemic scale represents S’s commitment to the truth of a proposition, ranging from confident prediction to near impossibility (Werth, 1999: 314–15, cited in Chilton, 2004: 59). At each end of the m axis, scales including true are near or collocated with the self and untrue or falsity are proximate or collocated with the Other (Chilton, 2004: 59). Similar to the epistemic modality, deontic scales conceptualise remoteness-proximity structure (Chilton, 2004: 60).

The concept of ‘proximisation’ has recently been emerged in cognitive approaches to critical discourse analysis (Cap, 2014). It was first in Chilton (2004) that the verb form ‘proximise’ showed up (Cap, 2014: 190). The concept of ‘proximising’ in Chilton’s (2004) DST has ‘organisational and representational’ role in the sense that it solely points to ‘discourse role of certain words and expressions carrying “proximizing” meanings’ (Cap, 2013: 22). Discussing the conception of ‘proximising’ and ‘proximity’ in the context of DST, Filardo-Llamas (2015: 281) notes that positioning the entities and events as proximate to the deictic centre acquires ideological meaning. Moreover, construing the conceptual, perceptual and metaphorical proximising of the entities and events on the 3-dimensional axes (s, t and m) is represented as threats and danger to the deictic centre which results in fear and anxiety (see Chilton, 2004: ch. 7 and 8). Accordingly, the representational proximising, thus, involves ‘the representation of the location of a particular territory in subjective geopolitical space, the representation of potential dangers to the self and the representation of frightening and morally outrageous acts perpetuated by enemy’ (Chilton, 2004: 153)

The fear-generating feature of proximising of peripheral entities and events towards the deictic centre is followed in Cap’s (2013) theorisation of the conception of ‘proximisation’. Proposed by Cap (2006, 2008, 2010) to study the patterns of coercive rhetoric in the U.S. political interventionist discourse (Cap, 2017), ‘proximisation is a discursive strategy of presenting physically and temporally distant events and affairs as increasingly and negatively consequential to the speaker and her addressee’ (Cap, 2018: 97). Same as the proximising of entities and events in Chilton’s DST, the construal of the ‘proximisation’ in Cap’s (2013) terms contributes the speaker to solicit legitimisation for certain actions and/or policies to neutralise the cumulating threat of the deictically peripherised (distant) entity (see Cap, 2013, 2017, 2018; Chilton, 2004, 2014). Proximisation Theory (PT) holds that the threat comes from the entities at the periphery of the discourse space, known as ‘Outside-Deictic-Centre’ (ODCs) (foreigners, enemies, evils, they, Others). It is conceptualised to be crossing the conceptual spatio-temporal as well as ideological centre-periphery distance to invade the speaker-addressee territory, ‘Inside-Deictic-Centre’ (IDC) (friends, allies, good, Us) (Cap, 2018: 97). Influenced by Chilton’s (2004) proposal that proximising is done on the 3-dimensional space, time and modality axes, Cap (2013) indicates that the movement and proximisation of the distant entity (ODC) to the central one (IDC) in the discourse space is systematically organised in terms of a 3-dimensional deictic conceptualisation of Spatio-Temporal and Axiological axes (STA). This means that proximisation is enacted in terms of the conceptual axes. Both in Chilton’s DST and Cap’s PT, the proximity of peripheral entities is construed to be socially and/or individually consequential.

Spatial proximisation involves a forced construction in which distant entities (ODCs) encroach physically upon the central entities of the discourse space (Cap, 2013). It is conceptualised in terms of the following lexico-grammatical framework (Cap, 2013: 108):

Temporal Proximisation (TP), in Cap’s own terms, is a ‘forced construal of the envisaged conflict as not only impending, but also momentous, historic and thus needing immediate response and unique preventive measures’ (Cap, 2018: 97). By using analogies, spatial and temporal proximisation conflate the present cumulating threat with the actual past catastrophic events to reinforce the threat construal and (re-)gain legitimisation for some preemptive/preventive policies and/or actions. As cap (2013: 116) puts, the main lexico-grammatical framework for the conceptualisation of TP includes:

Axiological Proximisation (AP) is a forced construal and embodiment of the ideological mismatches, conflicts and/or collisions between the constructed values of the home (IDC) values and the values of the constructed peripheral entity (ODC) (Cap, 2013). As a compensatory discursive tool, thus, AP seeks to maintain the legitimisation of the enacted/under-negotiation pre-emptive agenda in the absence or breakdown of the other two strategies, namely spatial and temporal proximisations (see Cap, 2013). The main lexico-grammatical framework for the conceptualisation of AP, as Cap (2013: 122) includes:

Proximisation strategies have undeniable correlations with soliciting legitimisation, that is, proximisation strategies instigate fear and anxiety, thereby motivating to obtain legitimation to preventive/pre-emptive arrangements so as to keep the discourse space (DS) safe and secure from the presumed destructive and catastrophic impact of the ODC. The STA (Spatial, Temporal and Axiological) proximisation strategies contribute to fostering fear appeal in order to solicit legitimisation for the benefit of some preemptive or preventive policies. According to Mueller et al. (2006: 1) preemptive policies in the US National Security Strategy (NSSS) involves ‘defending oneself by attacking an enemy before it strikes, instead of seeking to deter attacks or striking back if deterrence fails’. What makes preemptive actions incontrovertible is the transition from a traditional era wherein ‘visual mobilisation of armies, navies and air forces preparing to attack’ to the time in which ‘terrorists are prepared to strike without warning against innocent civilians’ (Payne, 2005: 2).

Back to our main concern, the SL’s discourse subsumes the mechanisms of legitimising the future space construction based on construal of certain threats as encroaching upon IDC zone. The linguistic frameworks designed for proximisation strategies as well as pragma-cognitive equipment enables an analyst to scrutinise upon fear generation, threat construal and legitimising the politics of preemption. Also, the analytical facilities of the PT seem appropriate to examine the connections between threat construal and future space construction. What’s more, the theoretical and analytical strength of PT makes it an apt theory to reflect upon the strategic and ideologico-politically significant role the future space is doomed to serve in IRI’s socio-political terrain.

Data and analysis

The data for the present study comes from 180 speeches, statements and comments of the Iranian Supreme Leader (the SL), Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, spanning from 2005 to 2013. This timespan in considerable to be studied since during this era the IRI was put under heavy economic sanctions, threatened to be militarily attacked by the US and globally isolated due to its radical perspectives towards Israel, denial of Holocaust, pursuit of partly-covert nuclear programmes and support of the Hezbollah and para-military groups. All these events, on the one hand, invoked the SL to bestow his full-blown support to the recurrent tense domestic and international policies during and after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s two-term presidency and, on the other, put emphasis upon otherisation of the west and called for extensive scientific-technological developments in the future more than anytime. The selection of the present data set was based on the depiction of doshman and construing its threatening plots, policies and values. The rationale lying behind opting for this corpus is to investigate how the characterisation of doshman contributes the SL to picturing the image of the future space of the IRI under the shadow of the construed threats. The analysis concentrates upon pragma-linguistic toolkits and discursive moves that pave the way to characterise doshman as a threat to the present and the future of the IRI.

Discussion and conclusion

By virtue of the analyses conducted via pragma-linguistic and cognitive toolkit, I indicated that spatial and axiological threats are conceptualised in the SL discourse as encroaching upon the home camp to impact the IRI’s central values, programmes and policies. Importantly, unlike Cap’s (2013, 2017) analyses of the axiological proximisation in which it plays compensatory function in the absence of the spatial proximisation in the US ‘war on terror’ discourse, axiological proximisation figures in a cardinal position in the SL’s discourse and it constructs a cause-effect relation with the spatial proximisation.

Using different pragma-linguistic structures to represent the temporal aspects of the STA proximisation (Spatial-Temporal-Axiological), the SL’s discourse projects the so-called threatening spatial-axiological threats as being prospective and encroaching upon the future of the IDC space. In this regard, in the SL’s discourse the opposite future would resemble the pre-revolutionary space of Iran’s history provided that the envisaged threats of doshman would come true in the present and future of the IRI. On the contrary, the privileged version of the future is the extension and development of the present values, programmes and policies. The latter, thus, manifests preemptive function; it puts forth certain policies to maximise the possibility of the privileged future occurrence and at, the same time, leaves no manoeuvring room for doshman to find a chance to materialise the opposite future.

As findings suggest, it may be inferred that both the alleged successful status of the post-revolutionary era (the IRI time) and the submissive atmosphere of the pre-revolutionary period are the direct repercussions of different political systems that ruled each of these historical points. This may guide us to infer that in the SL’s discourse, the full-fledged responsibility of constructing the history and epoch-specific habitus of the political system falls on the political actors of each period. Then, it signposts to track the resources of threats through investigating the ‘mediated actions’ and ‘mediational means’ (Scollon, 2001) of the political actors that reproduce socio-political structures in one way or another. In the same vein, recognising various entities and agents in the ODC space with different sorts of threats that each of them casts towards the IDC space might provide the PT with a radial structure of the IDC-ODC spaces.

Concerning the future space, I attempted to describe the implicational correlation between the strategic function of the privileged future space and the construed past-to-future threats. I then argued that the privileged future space is construed to preempt the re-contextualisation of the past states of socio-political affairs (the opposite future) in the IRI space. The preemptory function of the future space does by no means dismiss the legitimising and persuasive functions of it; in fact, it serves to orchestrate the workings of the three. This finding provides a different perspective towards the structure and the function of future space construction in political discourses. Besides, the very preemptive function renders the investigations of the threat construal inevitable in constructing the future spaces in political and public discourses. To this end, the Proximisation Theory appears as an apt theory to cast critical look at accounts of future construction in terms of threat construction and fear generation in political and public discourses.