Abstract
The article examines the use of the metaphor of war in political communication on the novel COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda using two analytical tools of the social representation theory, anchoring and objectification. Drawing data for analysis from six widely televised presidential addresses to the nation on COVID-19 made by Uganda’s president, H.E. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni during the months of March 2020 to September 2020, the article argues that during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a persistent dominant use of the metaphor of war by government representatives as a rhetorical device to communicate about and to make intelligible an emerging unknown virus as a threat that should be managed through combat behavior. In so doing, the use of the war metaphor and its implied call for combat behavior to control, manage, and eradicate the virus spread engendered consequences such as standardizing hegemonic understanding of the nature and causes of the virus as well as normalizing and legitimizing interventions that the government adopted to manage it.
Highlights
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was first globally identified in December 2019
Drawing on illustrations showing the way two metaphorical tools, anchoring and objectification, were deployed to communicate about the emerging novel infectious disease, the analysis reveals that references to an already known guerilla war facilitated: naming COVID-19 in familiar war terms to make it intelligible; prescribing combat behavior the public should enact to mitigate spread of the disease; anchoring the disease to historical and familiar battles against other diseases and epidemics
This study found that through political communication the metaphor of war was used to make known an emerging virus to a Ugandan audience
Summary
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was first globally identified in December 2019. In January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it “a public health emergency of international concern” (World Health Organization, 2020). Proposed by Moscovici (1973), the theory of social representations has been widely applied in scholarship on psychosocial concerns such as infectious diseases most to examine the metaphorical uses of objectification and anchoring in social communication as well as how they enable publics to cope with and to cue collective meaning and understanding of novel infectious diseases (Moscovici 1973; Sontag, 1978; Bauer and George 1999; Wagner et al, 1999; Reisfield and Wilson 2004; Wallis and Nerlich 2005; Nie et al, 2016) It is concerned with how social groups explain, think about, know and understand novel health emergencies. To identify instances of anchoring and objectification, the study examined the names given to the virus and the agents involved in naming, characteristics used to explain it, the historical events and experiences compared to make it intelligible, and the metaphors deployed to make the virus comprehensible and to compare the unknown virus to already known phenomenon
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
