Radicalization and Identity Crisis in The Runaways (2019) by Fatima Bhutto: A Critical Discourse Study

The paper is a critical analysis of The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto (2019) using Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (transitivity system of Halliday) to analyze how language creates the radicalization and identity crisis, as well as gendered subject positions in the post-9/11 period. Through 55-60 paragraphs of the purposive sampling of analyzed clauses conducted through the UAM Corpus Tool, the research notes how radicalized youth are discursively represented as ideologically influenced subjects grappling with exclusion, disorientation, and belonging-seeking processes. With transitivity analysis, it is shown that material and mental processes focus more on justice, inner division, and identity conflicts, and female characters develop as victims as well as resisters, although their voice is not as low as that of narration. This paper demonstrates that fiction is a discursive location in which global and local ideologies are brought together, influencing the vision of terrorism, identity, marginalization, and resistance.