Eticising the emic: Epistemic violence and the reframing of the 2023 Gaza War

This article introduces the concept of eticising the emic, the process through which emic perspectives are selectively incorporated into etic news frames, rendering them legible only through dominant geopolitical logics. This framework critiques epistemic hierarchies and the coloniality of knowledge in global war reporting. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis (CDA), informed by ethnographic attention to the relationship between text and production context, the study examines the discursive reframing of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led operation and Israel’s subsequent military response. The analysis examines international news agency coverage through close textual analysis of focal reports from Reuters and Al Jazeera English, representing divergent epistemic frameworks. The findings reveal systematic disparities in naming strategies, agency attribution, and quotation practices. While the dominant etic perspective (Reuters) foregrounds Israeli civilian suffering and frames military retaliation as rational statecraft, Palestinian emic voices are selectively filtered, abstracted, or recontextualised to align with prevailing geopolitical norms. The article demonstrates how localised, experiential knowledge is epistemically managed rather than excluded, and how competing frameworks of epistemic authority shape the production of legitimacy in conflict reporting.