Discursive Politics Research Articles

To Hunt or to Protect? Discourse-coalitions in the Polish Wolf Management

After the political transformation in Poland in 1989, the management of the wolf (Canis lupus) became strongly debated. The discussions concerned the need to protect the wolf, methods of protection and actors to be involved. Increasing social pressure resulted in a series of legal changes leading to the full protection of the species in 1998. Using the concept of discourse coalitions, we distinguished two groups of actors, which argued for or against changes of wolf policy. We also investigated the story-lines regarding the wolf and its management to find out which of them was institutionalised through the state wolf policy. Engaging with the literature on discursive politics of wildlife conservation, we suggest that the discourse coalition supporting wolf conservation successfully challenged the dominant vision of wolves by creating a new counter-discourse and promoting it, which led to a bottom-up institutional change. The discourse coalition supporting the status quo lacked discursive power to protect existing institutions. Our results contribute to the literature on human-carnivore coexistence by exploring socio-cultural factors related to the major institutional change of carnivore policy and by building capacity to critically evaluate and transcend existing paradigms for a better human-carnivore coexistence.

Gendered securitisation: Trump's and Putin's discursive politics of the COVID-19 pandemic

AbstractThis article presents a study of the discursive politics of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States and Russia from its early onset to 30 April 2020. We examine how official securitisation discourses in the two countries draw on gendered constructions of national identity and discuss what linkages and potential implications they have for the state, its policy, and its society. Our analysis shows that both the US President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin instrumentalise hierarchical gendered identities to securitise COVID-19. They mobilise gendered narratives, imageries, and practices to affirm particular understandings of the threat and create a homogeneous national ‘we’, portraying themselves as its guardians.

The Idea of University as a Discursive Political Project: an Essay on Theoretical Interpretation

The Idea of University as a Discursive Political Project: an Essay on Theoretical Interpretation

미국패권의 조력자 혹은 다자주의 촉진자? : ‘코로나 19’를 둘러싼 국제사회의 패권경쟁과 국내 언론의 담론정치

미국과 중국 간 패권경쟁은 날로 격화되어 간다. 한국은 이 과정에서 선택을 강요받고 있다. 무엇이 최선일까? 본 연구는 국가이익은 발견되는 것이 아니라 정치적 투쟁으로 구성된다는 관점에서 출발한다. 언론이 구축하고 있는 공론장을 통해 여론이 형성되고, 그 결과물이 대외정책으로 현실화된다는 입장이다. 공론장의 관리자로서 국내 언론은 이 역할을 제대로 수행하고 있을까? 인류가 한 번도 겪어보지 못한 대유행으로 패권경쟁 담론과 결합한 코로나19를 분석사례로 정해 이를 평가하고자 했다. 분석 표본은 칼럼, 사설과 분석기사 300개로 한정했으며 국제사회와 국내로 구분했다. 자료를 수집한 기간은 2020년 1월 1일부터 7월 30일이다. 연구문제는 모두 3개다. 패권경쟁을 위해 활용되는 프레임은 어떤 특성이 있는지, 국제사회의 담론지형은 어떻게 분포되어 있으며, 코로나 사태의 진전에 따른 차이가 있는지, 국내 언론의 지배적인 담론은 무엇이며 프레임에 인용된 전략적 정보원은 누구인지 등이다. 분석결과, 국내 공론장의 지배적 담론은 ‘패권유지’로 밝혀졌다. 패권의 경쟁자로서 중국을 인정하지 않는 ‘문제국가, 패권야욕, 권위주의, 자격미달’ 등의 프레임이 많았다. 코로나 사태가 진행하면서 중국에 유리한 상황이 전개되었지만, 프레임에는 별 영향을 미치지 않는다는 것도 드러났다. 다자주의를 옹호하는 ‘성공사례, 정치공세, 대안질서’는 중국, 러시아 및 미국과 대립하고 있는 국가에서만 나타났다. 끝으로, 국내에서 ‘중국 때리기’에 가장 적극적인 언론사는 반공주의, 보수적 기독교, 경상도, 재벌 등과 관련이 깊은 언론복합체였다. 그들은 중국의 반체제 인사, 미국 내 네오콘, 문재인 정부에 대한 비판적인 인물 등을 전략적으로 인용했다. 연구 성과를 바탕으로, 국내 언론의 공론장을 패권유지의 조력자가 아닌 정보주권의 보호자로 개혁할 방안을 고민해야 할 때다.

Contested crude: Multiscalar identities, conflicting discourses, and narratives of oil production in Canada

Canadian politics is alive with references to what oil means to the country and its residents. However, the existing research only intermittently and often superficially discusses how Canada recognizes itself as a petrostate and negotiates its identities in relation to oil. Seeking to fill the gap, this paper offers a nuanced, dynamic, and comprehensive picture of Canadian discursive politics of oil on provincial, federal, and international levels. A systematic intertextual discourse analysis of this heterogeneous collection of texts allows us to achieve two major analytical goals: to reveal the discourses about energy resources that dominate in Canadian politics on federal and provincial levels and to differentiate them from the discourses that are marginalized or even suppressed.

Construction of the Eurozone crisis: re- and depoliticising European economic integration

ABSTRACT The Eurozone crisis is among recent developments that upset the European Union (EU) most profoundly. It deprived large parts of the population of their previous standard of living, put the rationality of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) into doubt and sparked unprecedented contestation. This article adopts a discursive notion of politicisation and the frame of Discursive Political Studies to investigate whether that moment of contestation re-politicised EU economic governance in substantive terms. It argues that, while emerging counter-narratives of crisis projected alternative scenarios of economic integration and established a practice of constructive EU critique, they were co-opted by the dominant mass-mediated story of a public debt crisis. This is shown in a combined content, network and discourse analysis of crisis narratives, which were issued by leading EU representatives, anti-austerity parties and European media between 2010 and 2013.

Gender Equality and the EU's Economic Governance: The Strategic Use of Women’s Employment Within Labor Market Reforms in Italy

AbstractThis article aims to evaluate the political implications of post-crisis governance in the European Union for national gender-equality strategies and policies. It presents a study of recent reforms of the labor market in Italy, where the response to the Eurozone crisis has increased concerns over the low rate of female employment. Through an analysis of policy documents and legislative reforms informed by discursive politics, the article argues that the Italian case provides evidence of the trend toward the further instrumentalization of gender equality, which has been strategically used in order to provide additional legitimation for labor market deregulation.

‘The Rif again!’ popular uprisings and resurgent violence in post-transitional Morocco

ABSTRACT Since 2016, the Moroccan Rif has witnessed an intense movement of protest following the death of a local fishmonger, inexplicably crushed in a garbage truck. The event has been immediately designated as a ‘crime’ and inscribed within the historical intrigue of human rights violations. The political power’s attitudes toward the movement are likewise considered reminiscent of this violent past, despite a politics of reconciliation implemented so that this ‘will never happen again’. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on this embodied feeling of ‘continuity’. The analysis concerns two interrelated temporalities. It refers, first, to the hogging intrusion of a ‘non-pacified’ memory of the past violence, which seriously impedes the work of mourning. The second one refers to the state rebounding violence. In addition to multiple forms of violations, ‘separatism’ is mobilised as a discursive politics to incriminate protest and, hence, to legitimate recourse to repression. We argue that ‘separatism’ is not an issue of cultural structure (or habitus) but rather that of political manipulation of dissensual belongings by the power-system, in order to displace the criminality from its centre to the margins, thereby failing to provide the nation with a ‘renewed ethos’ based on justice and accountability.

Dualing discourse: Democracy, gender equity and discursive politics in rural Morocco

Feminist scholars have long been interested in the ability of grassroots organizations to meet both the practical and strategic gender needs of women in developing economies. One point of contention is the role of the neoliberalist framework, which prioritizes women's economic participation over the creation of political institutions that foster gender equality, in democratic projects. Drawing on feminist, development, and social movement literatures, we show that neoliberalism interacts with local socio-religious contexts to provide a complicated – and gendered – set of discursive opportunities for grassroots activists. Drawing on a three-month participant observation with “The Association of Women” in Ouarzazate, Morocco, we illustrated how gender constrains the discursive politics of a male and female organizational leader. The male leader regards neoliberalism as a legitimate challenge to gender inequity, and uses it to highlight the connections between economic opportunity, gender equity, and democracy. The female leader, in contrast, employs neoliberalism and traditional notions about women's roles in Ouarzazate to maintain her relationship with her male colleague, build bridges between her and women in the community, and to create a space where women can cultivate their gender consciousness. We conclude with a discussion of the promises and pitfalls of discursive politics and argue that scholars need to give the discursive politics within local organizations more empirical attention, particularly if they are concerned with the strategic gender needs of women.

Imagining sustainable energy and mobility transitions: Valence, temporality, and radicalism in 38 visions of a low-carbon future.

Based on an extensive synthesis of semi-structured interviews, media content analysis, and reviews, this article conducts a qualitative meta-analysis of more than 560 sources of evidence to identify 38 visions associated with seven different low-carbon innovations – automated mobility, electric vehicles, smart meters, nuclear power, shale gas, hydrogen, and the fossil fuel divestment movement – playing a key role in current deliberations about mobility or low-carbon energy supply and use. From this material, it analyzes such visions based on rhetorical features such as common problems and functions, storylines, discursive struggles, and rhetorical effectiveness. It also analyzes visions based on typologies or degrees of valence (utopian vs. dystopian), temporality (proximal vs. distant), and radicalism (incremental vs. transformative). The article is motivated by the premise that tackling climate change via low-carbon energy systems (and practices) is one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century, and that effective decarbonization will require not only new energy technologies, but also new ways of understanding language, visions, and discursive politics surrounding emerging innovations and transitions.

The Discursive Politics of Adaptation to Climate Change

Adaptation to climate change is a policy objective of rapidly growing importance for development programming across the Global South. This article offers an interrogation of the discursive politics surrounding the term based on insights from postcolonial theory. By employing a theoretical framework rooted in the concepts of imaginative geographies and discursive violence, this contribution seeks to deconstruct how adaptation is being imagined and promoted by development actors in a Global South context. The underlying study adopts a multisited, institutional ethnography to critically analyze an adaptation project in São Tomé and Príncipe (STP) implemented jointly by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the national government. The article presents evidence for how agents of development (re)produce an imaginative geography of the country’s vulnerability and engage in a discursive violence that renders project beneficiaries vulnerable on the one hand, and seeks to transform them into model adaptation subjects on the other. It discusses how local residents have been effectively excluded from the project based on their perceived vulnerabilities and points to critical political theory and “imaginative countergeographies” as ways in which the disempowering representations of the Global South as vulnerable and the discursive violence committed against its residents can be counteracted.

Engaging with policy actors and the discursive politics of school-related gender-based violence in Ethiopia and Zambia

ABSTRACT School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) has received growing attention in policy and practice over the past decade, increasingly attended to in national and international contexts. Yet we need to understand more fully the processes and actors through which this policy enactment takes place. This article analyses the understanding of SRGBV by policy stakeholders in Ethiopia and Zambia. It shows how the concept is discursively stretched by actors in positive ways, as well as shrunk and fixed in ways that limit its application, in gendered and political processes. We propose SRGBV offers a point where contestation between policy actors and sectors is inevitable. Opportunities for dialogue that include recognition of the everyday and gendered manifestations of violence may offer a contribution to facilitating policy enactment that moves towards a holistic and inclusive account of SRGBV.

European Integration and the Politics of Economic Ideas: Economics, Economists and Market Contestation in the Brexit Debate

AbstractDebates about the economy are central to political exchange and political choice is typically presented as a matter of selecting among rival economic competence claims. The capacity to speak with authority about the economy or to draw upon accredited economic expertise is an important source of political advantage. However, the Brexit process is a form of politicized market contestation that has taken place against the backdrop of significant challenges to expert authority. This article shows how key parts of the Leave campaign developed three strategies within the discursive politics of Brexit: setting aside the economy as a central issue in Brexit; advancing alternative economic knowledge to that of institutionally advantaged professionals; and creating a cadre of alternative economic experts. The article suggests that attempts to use the inherently depoliticizing logic of causal ideas derived from authorized economic knowledge has not prevailed over the central normative beliefs that drive ‘Brexitism’.

The Discursive Politics of Education Policy in China: Educating Migrant Children

AbstractThis article explores the discursive functioning of education policies, bringing into consideration community perspectives regarding policy enactment in contemporary China. With the intention of building upon ongoing discussions surrounding both the conceptions and purposes of policy sociology, we critically analyse policies directly related to the education of migrant children living in and around China's largest urban centres, with a specific focus on those implemented in Beijing. We emphasize two important aspects that previous studies of China's education policies have tended to underplay given their focus on social-economic perspectives. The first argument is that education policies have an underlying agenda that extends beyond that of simply addressing the educational needs of migrant children – evidenced through the discursive functions of policy texts. The second argument is related and seeks to raise questions about who is best served by these policies and for whom these policies are intended.

Eroticism, Pornography, Love: the Discursive Politics of Reactionary French Scholarship on Sexual Imagery

In this article, I focus on a selection of recent French scholars who insist on a fundamental distinction between <em>pornography </em>(<em>pornographie</em>) and <em>eroticism </em>(<em>érotisme</em>). I delve into these scholars’ descriptions of and justifications for the <em>pornography</em>-<em>eroticism</em> distinction, and explore what is at stake in affirming such a difference. I contend that, far from being a question of genre—or even quality—this is a political distinction, which intertwines with important debates about values and social relations that are present in current French politics and academia. This article examines the justifications used and definitions proposed by scholars in France to (re)assert this distinction, and considers the extent to which the new French claims reproduce some of the political assumptions of US anti-porn feminists, as well as an elitist hierarchy based on ideas of artistic quality. Ultimately this article argues that the key concept that distinguishes <em>pornography</em> from <em>eroticism</em> for these scholars is love, and that they conceptualise love in a highly normative and reactionary fashion in order to elevate eroticism and denigrate pornography. In pursuing their analysis in this way, conservative values are permitted to masquerade as apolitical explorations of genre and aesthetics, without open acknowledgement of the political and moral perspectives they reinforce.

“They will not automatically benefit”: The politics of infrastructure development in Laos's Northern Economic Corridor

At a time when the shortcomings of neoliberal development are well known, China's Belt and Road Initiative offers both an opportunity and a requirement to revisit the question of a more inclusive, equitable approach to infrastructure development. This article examines the case of the Northern Economic Corridor, a highway-centered regional trade corridor constructed through northwestern Laos in the early-mid 2000s that was co-financed by the Asian Development Bank and the governments of China and Thailand, and that has been subsequently included in the BRI as one of a group of regional corridors following the historical trajectories of the Silk Road. By examining the discursive politics of infrastructure's formal geography – and focusing on the practices that manage how publicly funded projects address predictable, negative impacts – this paper engages with emerging research on the BRI, wider scholarship on infrastructure, and the political geography of transnational development cooperation and financing at multiple scales. Specifically, I show how vulnerable populations were excluded from the protections of infrastructure mitigation along an early BRI project, and use this to argue that scholars, community advocates, infrastructure planners, financiers, regulators and others engaged with the BRI and other new infrastructure initiatives should rethink established conventions that demote the attention paid to “indirect” impacts. I highlight the arena of formal-geographic mitigation planning as a key field of engagement in the struggle to make new infrastructure live up to expectations about inclusive and equitable development.

Politeness in the interactions of selected Nigerian news-based virtual communities

While the vital impacts of linguistic and discursive politeness on the sustenance of talk and the possibility of community-building have enjoyed a lot of attention in linguistic scholarship, attention is shifting to virtual communities with studies interrogating their language use and interactional patterns. This study seeks to further that line of inquiry by investigating politeness in Nigerian news-based virtual communities. Taking an etic interpretive analytical approach which relies on the facework and relational-work paradigms, it studies virtual communities generated by four Nigerian online newspapers purposively sampled to represent the Nigerian geo-political zones and political ideologies between 2015 and 2018. Given the relative newness of the virtual community in Africa as well as its significant impacts on socio-political activities and attitudes to democracy and governance, the research will contribute significantly to the exploration of online communicative behaviour in the African humanities.

Using ethnography in politeness studies: A discursiveness-based approach

The current study points out the methodological limitations of contemporary discursive politeness research and suggests that in-depth ethnographic data provides a potentially crucial solution. Discursive politeness studies advocate a data-driven, bottom-up analytical approach that stresses the importance of participants’ own contextual assessments. Analysis of such kind requires the corresponding methodological design which allows researchers to obtain the defining information that can be seemingly absent in the on-going interaction. However, in the current body of literature, politeness research focuses on theoretical discussion without specifically organised consideration regarding methodology. Therefore, aiming at providing a more valid methodological approach, the current study proposes to consider ethnography as the foundational data-collection method for discursive politeness research, stressing ‘long-term’ and ‘in-depth’ as the core features in conducting fieldwork. In order to clarify this view, the current study demonstrates a case study via examining an interaction naturally occurring among several family members during dinner time in China. This interaction is examined on two levels respectively (i.e., based on demographic data and in-depth ethnographic data). This paralleled analysis reveals that in complicated real-life interactions, lacking of thorough contextual information of both cultural norms and individually shaped cognition can be misleading in analysis. Therefore, understanding (im)politeness as an interactionally situated contextual/cognitive judgement, long-term ethnography is needed and that the fieldwork should be conducted carefully and patiently in order to gain access to comparatively more solid data and achieve more valid conclusion.

In-between Translation, Transformation and Contestation: Studying Human Rights Activism as Politics-as-Ruptures in Violent Social Conflicts

How can we study the politics of human rights activism in violent social conflicts? International Relations scholarship has long neglected the ambiguous political relationships between human rights activism and violent social conflicts. Addressing this gap requires new research methodologies that place the focus not on the normative or legal dimensions of human rights, but in how their usage constitutes the political. In this article I argue that using post-foundational discourse theory makes visible ‘politics-as-ruptures’ that locate the political function of human rights activism precisely in the resistance to representations of violence in conflict discourses. I analyse this political function by asking how activists translate human rights norms, transform conflict discourses, and thereby contest power relations. As examples, the article presents three types of discursive politics that I studied in Colombia. These examples point out further pathways to pose empirical questions about the roles of human rights activism in transforming social conflicts.

The discursive politics of ‘fracking’: Frames, storylines, and the anticipatory contestation of shale gas development in the United Kingdom

How contested sources of energy such as shale gas are perceived in frontier countries considering their development is incredibly important to national and international climate policies. The UK shale development case is of particular interest currently as the Government attempts to position the UK as a pioneer of European, safe, sustainable shale gas development. We conduct a mixed-methods analysis of the UK policy debate on shale gas development involving 30 stakeholder interviews and 1557 political documents. This empirical focus extends the existing literature by identifying the use of frames in and through the institutions and practices of formal UK politics. We identify nine key frames and their associated storylines, analyse their use over time, and compare these findings with other national case studies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given most UK Governments within our timeframe have supported shale development, pro-shale development frames dominate in the policy debate; however, we also find a high level of anti-shale development frame use, suggesting a deep and ongoing framing contest in national formal political sites. We find in particular a more prominent focus on land-use issues and impacts on the landscape than other UK studies or other national contexts. Conceptually, the study puts forward an integrative approach to the related concepts of frames and storylines, as well as arguments concerning the impotence of storylines in anticipatory political debate and the polyvalence of framing strategies. Questions about governance are raised by the general lack of consensus over the framing of shale development within formal political sites, let alone amongst the broader public; and by the lack of a coherent response from the Government to criticisms of its approach. Finally, we reflect on the apparent lack of evidence for Hajer’s ‘communicative miracle’ in our case, and speculate as to whether the lack of broad-based resonance of the ‘bridge’ storyline signals trouble for the positive-sum thinking of ecological modernisation.