Abstract
Abstract This article presents an analysis of the evolution of Russia’s image representation in Georgian and Ukrainian political discourses amid Russian-Georgian and Russian-Ukrainian conflicts escalation. Even though Georgia’s and Ukraine’s troubled relations with neighboring Russia have been extensively studied, there has been little attention to the ideational dimensions of the confrontations, manifested in elite narratives, that would redraw the discursive boundaries between “Us” and “Them.” This study represents an attempt to fill the void, by examining the core narratives of the enemy, along with the discursive strategies of its othering in Georgian and Ukrainian presidential discourses through critical discourse analysis. The findings suggest that the image of the enemy has become a part of “New Georgia’s” and “New Ukraine’s” identity construction - inherently linked to the two countries’ “choice for Europe.” Russia has been largely framed as Europe’s other, with its “inherently imperial,” “irremediably aggressive” nature and adherence to illiberal, non-democratic values. The axiological and moral evaluations have been accompanied by the claims that the most effective way of standing up to the enemy’s aggression is the “consolidation of democratic nations,” coming down to the two countries’ quests for EU and NATO membership.
Highlights
The article focuses on the evolution of Russia’s image representation in Georgian and Ukrainian political discourses amid Russian-Georgian and Russian-Ukrainian conflicts escalation
This study suggests that, both in Georgian and Ukrainian discourses Us/Them polarization, along with the narratives underlying the othering of Russia have been employed to describe the situation from a normative perspective
This study examines the othering of Russia through temporal proximization, axiological and moral evaluation of the enemy, as well as through Saakashvili’s and Poroshenko’s discursive strategies of expanding and delimiting US through “clash of civilization” narrative
Summary
The article focuses on the evolution of Russia’s image representation in Georgian and Ukrainian political discourses amid Russian-Georgian and Russian-Ukrainian conflicts escalation. It explores the discursive strategies that former Georgian and Ukrainian presidents Mikheil Saakashvili’s and Petro Poroshenko’s employed to distance ‘Us’ from ‘Them’ It borrows insights from the landmark study of Oddo (2011) that examines how ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ emerge as meaningful categories through the differential deployment of highly moralized lexical resources – especially highly moralized material processes and nominalizations (Oddo, 2011: 288). They seek to enhance national self-esteem, which entails using value rationality to uphold or create a legitimate social order that institutionalizes values, norms, beliefs, and procedures that give them a positive self-image of their country (Clunan, 2009:14) It follows that foreign policy discourse is an expression of collective identity; It is a process of constructing and reconstructing the self and the other, as well as identifying respective levels of difference and danger from others (Minesashvili, 2016:11-12). It places a special focus on the core political speeches of Mikheil Saakashvili and Petro Poroshenko, pertaining to their conceptions of self-enemy dichotomies and the prevailing characteristics of the enemy images of Russia
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