State Discourse Research Articles

Foreigner in contemporary Japanese state discourse: Constructing differences between the nation and the Other

Researchers note that Japanese national identity has been shaped by the nihonjinron ideology, which defines the country as culturally unique and mono-ethnic, thus constituting a divide between Japan and the rest of the world. However, in the context of globalization, the Japanese government, following the global trend, has engaged in a national branding program called “Cool Japan,” which aims to attract foreigners and therefore differs in its message from nihonjinron. Previous research suggests that, in reality, Cool Japan is not so much in conflict with nihonjiron narratives, but rather inherits their rhetoric. However, little attention has been paid to how foreigners are represented within this program. Therefore, our research question is this: How is the interaction between the nation/national subjects and foreigners portrayed in the Cool Japan discourse, and what characteristics are attributed to both groups?Through narrative analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study examines government-affiliated media: articles from the “Friends of Japan” section in a government magazine and episodes from the NHK documentary series “Japanology Plus.” The findings show that the analyzed materials reproduce the boundaries between Japanese people and foreigners, rearticulate Japan’s cultural uniqueness, and implicitly reinforce the narrative of mono-ethnicity. In “Friends of Japan,” foreigners are portrayed as enthusiasts of Japanese culture, expected to mediate between Japan and the world without being fully integrated. Similarly, in “Japanology Plus,” foreigners are depicted as “Japanophiles,” helping to bridge Japan and the world by sharing Japan’s uniqueness.The position of foreigners in this discourse is ambivalent: they appear subordinate to Japanese nationals but are also seen as capable of revitalizing the country’s economy and are thus valued. This duality reflects Japan’s struggle to balance globalization with affirming national identity in the logic of nihonjinron, highlighting the challenges of integrating foreigners into Japanese society.

Victory Day in Russia: Performative patriotism and state discourse

Victory Day celebrations in Russia have frequently been characterized as a vehicle for state militarism, particularly in the context of the full‐scale invasion of Ukraine. This article challenges the notion that the state is the sole proprietor of this national holiday. Drawing on recent ethnographies of Victory Day, the article argues that a trend towards patriotic performativity increasingly defines public celebrations. This trend has two outcomes: strengthening participants’ sense of national community while reinforcing statist discourse – even among the holiday's critics. By examining the relationship between the Russian state and Victory Day, the article illuminates the crucial distinction between a reiterated, performative victory and the realities of actual warfare. This analysis contributes to broader discussions on collective memory, state power and the role of public celebrations in shaping national identity in post‐Soviet contexts.

Queer Terrorists, Terrorist Queers: The Sexual Politics of Turkey’s War on Terror

How do the so-called wars on terror impact queer lives and politics? This article addresses this question by exploring the racialized gender and sexual politics of Turkey’s own brand of war on terror and its ramifications for LGBTQI+ lives. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war and public culture analysis, I reveal how the political construction of Kurdish militants as queer figures goes hand in hand with state terrorization of LGBTQI+ people in contemporary Turkey. I anchor my analysis in a novel counterinsurgency trope—“terrorists in skirts”—a trope popularized by the state-controlled media for psychological warfare purposes. I argue that the voyeuristic media fascination with cross-dressing militants is both symptomatic and constructive of an Islamist-nationalist authoritarian regime where terrorism and gender and sexual nonnormativity are violently conflated in state discourse and practice.

Macro-structures framing language policy in Morocco: Which discourse? Whose discourse?

Today, the power of discourse is incontestable. Within the field of language policy and planning (LPP), language policy (LP) has been conceptualized in various ways. One paradigm-shifting conceptualization is viewing LP as discourse. The discursive power of language policies is quite real as it can be contested in official state discourses about language and language-related issues. This paper employs corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to examine the macro-discourses of crisis, quality, equity, equality, and change in Morocco’s language policy. The study scrutinizes these discourses and explores their “manipulative” use in official policy texts. It contends that these macro-discourses are strategically used to rationalize the spread and strengthening of foreign languages to the detriment of national ones. Specifically, the analysis shows that crisis discourse serves as a powerful strategy to legitimize change and create a sense of urgency that often sidelines crucial questions about the nature and beneficiaries of the proposed changes. Furthermore, the discourse of quality ties educational “quality” to the mastery of foreign languages. Likewise, renovation and modernization discourses are found to align systematically with the promotion of these languages. Also, the rhetoric of equity in language-in-education policy appears to justify biased decisions that favour foreign language instruction, risking the perpetuation and exacerbation of existing educational inequities. Consequently, this study implies that more attention should be paid to the intricate dynamics of language policy, especially its discursive power, which could potentially amplify disparities in education systems instead of eliminating them.

Inverted Odysseys: Adventure and homecoming in the global subrogation of women’s care work in Jose Y. Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister

Many Filipina care workers are subrogated to the position of mothers in the more affluent states of Asia. As a consequence, they oftentimes play as the unofficial teachers of the children. In this article, I analyse the process of global subrogation, which often end in what I call an inverted odyssey of the Filipina domestic helper. Using the concept of invertedness in commodity fetishism, this article reads Jose Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister as an inverted odyssey which views the migration of Filipina care workers as an adventure but without the heroic homecoming. The novel represents the adventure as a dialectic of systems of carelessness and selfcare that is symbolically resolved within the narrative through the recurring image of the ‘woman in the box’. Thus, the article argues that unlike Odysseus’ triumphant nostos (homecoming), the heroine of this inverted odyssey falls victim to her own erotic drives, drowns in a far-flung kingdom, returns home in a box, and drowns again in the hands of thieves. The novel weaves a counter-narrative on the Filipina care worker that challenges prevailing Philippine state discourses on its overseas work force, thereby problematizing both the limitations of the heroine’s selfcare and the systemic carelessness of the states that make the subrogation possible. Ultimately, the inverted Odyssey as symbolized by the novel’s central image of ‘the woman in the box’ shatters appearances and unveils the tragic position of the unrecognized ‘teachers’ in the global feminization and commodification of care work.

Disinformation and strategic frames: Introducing the concept of a strategic epistemology towards media

Efforts to raise awareness about foreign disinformation might accidentally increase distrust towards legitimate media. We argue that state discourse on disinformation is comparable to strategic framing in journalists’ coverage of political events, and that it might imbue audiences with cynicism. Furthermore, in contrast to an experimental paradigm that depicts disinformation audiences as passive, we suggest that news consumers actively appropriate and produce content themselves. Conceptualising media content as ‘strategic’ rather than sincere might influence audiences to share and produce media content strategically. This Machiavellian tendency leads to similar effects on bias as motivated reasoning. Most accounts of motivated reasoning assume that limits of psychological processing are the reasons for biased judgements of what is true and fake, however, we argue that biases can also be due to culturally acquired second-order beliefs about knowledge. To explain this, we build on ideas about ‘folk epistemology’ and propose the term ‘strategic epistemology towards media’. Resistance-building efforts against disinformation risk promoting such a strategic epistemology towards media and this can have harmful effects on democratic dialogue. To avoid this, educational interventions should be premised on social epistemology rather than experimental psychology.

Neoliberal Nationalism in Television Commercials: Discursive Representations of Exploring and Entrepreneurial Indonesians

AbstractThe article examines the intertwinement of neoliberalism with nationalism and the new conceptualizations of Indonesianness that it generates. The principles of the two paradigms are often seen as antitheses, but this article shows that the growing neoliberal ideas and practices have informed notions of the nation and Indonesianness. The conjunction of the two paradigms indicates a shift in Indonesia, where until 1998, the state portrayed neoliberal principles as un‐Indonesian. Examining 212 nationalistic television commercials aired between 2005 and 2021, two discourses of Indonesianness can be identified. The first depicts Indonesians as passionately productive and entrepreneurial people, and the second frames the partaking in the marketization and promotion of exotic cultural diversity as acts of nationalism. These discourses reflect the growing acceptance of neoliberal values, especially among the middle class. Despite the relatively new conjunction of neoliberalism and nationalism, these new imaginings continue to build on the older state's discourse that excludes socio‐economic and ethnic minorities. Thus, diverging from the vision of a democratic post‐authoritarian Indonesia, this point of convergence between nationalism and neoliberalism continues to marginalize minorities.

Evolution of the Concept of Vagrancy in Russian Legislation (from the Second Half of the 17th to the First Half of the 19th Centuries)

This article focuses on the evolution of the concept of vagrancy in Russia during the period between the second half of the 17th to the first half of the 19th centuries. A set of legislative acts defining vagrants as a separate social group are analyzed. The stages and causes that underlie the transformation of the concept of vagrancy in the state discourse of the Russian Empire are singled out, systematized, and described. A qualitative shift in the Russian state’s perception and understanding of vagrancy as a multifaceted phenomenon is revealed. Based on the results obtained, it is shown that the evolution of vagrancy unfolded in three stages. In the first stage (from the second half of the 17th to the first quarter of the 18th centuries), this concept had no legal status. In the second stage (from the second quarter to the end of the 18th century), vagrancy was gradually introduced into the official legal space of Russia. The third stage (the first half of the 19th century) was marked by the criminalization of this concept in Russian criminal legislation. The key indicators of this process were the introduction of the passport system, the discussions circulating in the Russian public around the status of fugitive people, the recognition of people «who do not remember their kinship» as a social group, and the efforts to curb poverty. The conclusions drawn contribute immensely to the development of historiographic research, as the concept of vagrancy and its formation have escaped the attention of most scholars and remain insufficiently explored.

Queer Singaporean futures after 377a: establishing homonormativity as concrete labour

ABSTRACT In 2022, the state of Singapore decided to repeal section 377a - a law that criminalizes sex between men. Although it was heralded as an important step towards inclusion, along with the ever-growing global reach of neoliberal capitalism, there has also been an increasing criticism of the ways in which LGBT and queer values have been absorbed by, and sustains, the very systems which creates the oppression it aims to dismantle. Thus, I illustrate homonormativity in Singapore by rereading the state discourse surrounding the repeal of section 377a. In this article, I read homonormativity and concrete labour together in order to reveal how neoliberal states subsume, exploit, and reconfigure queerness by integrating it into expanding neoliberal logics of use values. The repeal of section 377a subsequently reveals the use values of gay sexual labour power in Singapore: one that is private and upholds the heteronormative social order. This article contributes to a growing materialist understanding of queer studies linked to Marxist political economy.

Construction of collective memory through official history education in North Cyprus (1971-2003)

Fundamental to recalling memories and remembering is to look at the past and the future concurrently. Remembering is crucial to have a temporal association so that present changes and developments can be elaborated in understanding the construction of memory. Historical trauma is a psychological and emotional collective and subjective injury which are transmitted from adults to children in a cycle process, and it continues over a life span of individuals and across generations. Soft memories are created and shared as a social process. These are narratives, historical texts and similar, less tangible forms of memory. History education has a profound influence on social discourse and the way soft memories are perceived, and since formal schooling is at the centre of shaping a generation and textbooks are the main medium of knowledge transmission, the official narrative shapes it and is often presented selectively. This research explores how the official regulation of history education is used to align official state discourse with social memory. This research employs secondary data and document analysis by examining the compulsory textbook (1979) used since 1971 in history education. It explores history education’s impact on individual narratives of remembrance and collective memory. It examines the long-term effects of what has been taught in secondary school history education on adulthood perceptions of past historical occurrences. Findings confirm that a consistent, official historical discourse supported by exposure to “hard” and “soft” memories enables the maintenance of collective memory as represented in the official discourse among society members. It also concluded that when difficult history is transmitted to the younger generation as part of education, they may experience trauma and similar negative associated feelings; furthermore, they do not necessarily unconditionally embrace the official history but question it in their adulthood.

Distinguishing between the “soldier” and the “brute”: engraving hierarchies of masculinity in conflict-related sexual violence discourse

ABSTRACT On the one hand, feminists critique the securitization of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) on various grounds, but, on the other hand, also raise concerns that the Western hyper-fixation on CRSV reproduces colonial narratives about race, gender, and sexuality. However, the productive effects of specifically Western state discourse about CRSV have yet to be fully examined in this context. How do Western states make use of the colonial gaze in constructing CRSV as an issue of grave concern, and to what ends? Further, what are the implications of this for the nexus of feminist critique and praxis? This article utilizes a macro-structural approach to discourse analysis to analyze the 2014 Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, led by the United Kingdom. It argues that Western delegates securitized CRSV by relying on tropes of racialized men as maintaining backwards practices of gender and sexuality, and the construction of CRSV as a “pre-modern” weapon of war. This frame reproduces a racialized hierarchy of masculinity that constructs men from “conflict countries” as potential perpetrators in need of intervention, and men from “safe countries” as role models for gender-conscious militarized manhood. The article concludes by identifying potential practical implications of this discourse.

The digital governmentality of marriage migration: policing US spousal reunification, national belonging and borders in digital spaces

There is extensive research on the governmentality of marriage migration, but more is needed about the role of digital spaces. This article focuses on how online US spousal reunification forums and their users define and police ideological norms regarding the US family and decide which transnational relationships are ‘worthy’ of immigration. We show that through their interactions on the site, users perform borderwork and police family, race and nation. More generally, we argue that online forums constitute institutional settings whose members can reproduce or challenge hegemonic state discourses about ‘proper’ families and national belonging. Further, we suggest that advice given to or withheld from forum participants constitutes an exercise in digital governmentality. Overall, our findings contribute to conversations about the role digital spaces play in institutionalising gatekeeping practices intended to police intimacy, immigration and national belonging.

The politics of emotion and domestic violence in northern Vietnam

AbstractChanging social, political, and cultural processes in Vietnam are reshaping people's emotional and social responses to domestic violence on multiple levels. Socioeconomic reforms instituted in the 1980s, the related state revival of Confucian gender ideologies, and the influences in recent decades of international and local nongovernmental organizations’ approaches to domestic violence are significant shifts that have influenced these emergent responses. Using the framework of feminist critical medical anthropology, I explore how different emotional experiences of violence provide insight into patterns of help‐seeking and interventions addressing marital violence. I suggest that Vietnamese state discourses and laws shape people's feelings in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways. State actors, for one, are particularly influenced to express and experience emotional responses in support of the nation. On the other hand, abused women, community members, and professionals experience more ambivalent feelings toward state discourses and practices as they engage moral emotions of care, love, and concern, prioritizing abused women's health and safety. Complicating this is some state actors grappling with their own ambivalent and tangled feelings as they assist abused women. Awareness of the diverse cross‐cultural range of emotional complexity can aid feminist anthropologists and activists in attempts to understand and prevent domestic violence.

What makes co-production work in sustainable neighborhood rehabilitation in China? A stakeholder structure perspective

Globally, co-production serves as a crucial approach to promote sustainable neighborhood rehabilitation. However, in China, where the governance system is characterized by strong state discourse power and a lack of public participation tradition, neighborhood rehabilitation encounters significant challenges, leading to project postponements or even failures due to unsuccessful co-production activities. To reveal the hidden problems, this paper aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the stakeholders' co-production roles and their participation structure in the co-produced sustainable neighborhood rehabilitation process from multiple dimensions. Using the case in Chongqing, the data was collected through questionnaire surveys and in-depth interviews. Social network analysis was utilized as the research method, and one-mode and two-mode networks were established to depict six relationship types with using diverse network indicators. This study revealed the high complexity of stakeholder structure, the awkward role of grass-rooted government, the dilemma of public voices and perceptions, uneven involvement in the co-production process, and the dynamic path of co-production formation. Drawing upon co-production theory, this paper elucidates the intricate mechanism of co-produced neighborhood rehabilitation in China. It offers valuable implications for policymakers and urban planners for project promotion, and contributes empirical insights to research in similar governance systems across the global context.

Soviet Memories as Part of Regional Repertoires of Usable Past in Contemporary Russia

This article reveals how the official patterns of commemorating the Soviet historical past in Russia match its local projections. Based on interviews with experts from 27 regions and some other field materials, the article maps the diversity of commemorative agendas across Russia. Focusing on the violent aspects of Soviet history, it outlines current configurations of the usable past important for local identity and notably used by regional authorities and other mnemonic actors over time. These repertoires of the usable past depend on the cultural infrastructure that was formed over time, but also on the efforts of mnemonic actors, who promote specific memories. This article argues that although regional approaches to commemorating the historical past are evidently dominated by the official federal narrative, local visions of common history are far from being uniform. The aspects that are downplayed or silenced at the federal level might be indispensable to regional and local identities. Expert interviews suggest that collisions between the narratives circulating at different levels typically do not escalate to open conflicts. The commemorative projects supported by regional authorities tend to conform to the federal-level framing, which is flexible enough to tolerate some local peculiarities. However, in many regions there are also non-state mnemonic actors who promote a commemorative agenda that deviates from the official state discourse. While being short of resources for developing memory hardware, they affect public discussions raising awareness about the downplayed aspects of the local past.

The stance and factors of international organizations towards countries from a Chinese perspective

ABSTRACT The degree and scope of constraints imposed by International Organizations (IOs) on States are increasing, and identifying the factors affecting the IOs' stances on States is helpful to enhance the state's discourse power and influence in the international community. First, by coding the records of Regular Press Conferences of the Speaking Office of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the period of 2018–2022, we obtained a dataset of IOs' stances on China-related events. Second, we constructed political relation, economic relation, and humanistic relation indicators to complement the influence factors, adopted the Bayesian logit model, and applied the Monte Carlo Markov chain algorithm and Gibbs sampling to analyze the probability of IOs' positive stances towards China. The result shows that IOs' category, length of establishment, functional position, and relationship with China are all related to their tendency of making a statement about China. In terms of the heterogeneity of event types, forum-type IOs are significantly inclined to give positive assessment compared to service-type IOs on events focusing on China's own development. Further analysis reveals that the model for analyzing and predicting the attitudes of IOs is more effective when the international situation is in a stable period.

Picture book reading improves children's learning understanding.

Mental state reasoning is an integral part of children's teaching and learning understanding. This study investigated whether a picture book reading approach focusing on mental state discourse and contrasting perspectives in a preschool classroom setting would improve children's teaching and learning understanding and school readiness. In total, 104 children from four classrooms aged between 46 and 64 months (53 girls, M = 54.03 months, SD = 3.68) participated in the study. Half of the classrooms were randomly assigned to an experimental group where teachers read picture books rich in mental state discourse and engaged in intensive discussions with children for eight weeks. Children's false belief understanding and teaching and learning understanding were measured before and after the eight-week period. The result revealed that picture book reading improved children's learning understanding with a medium effect size, controlling for demographic variables, children's verbal ability, inhibition, and initial false belief understanding. The experimental group children further demonstrated more advanced school readiness 18 months after the intervention ended in a follow-up study using a teacher questionnaire.

The Power of Citation: Feminist Counter-Appropriation of State Discourses in Post-Reform China

This article presents a comprehensive examination of the new discursive strategy devised and deployed by Chinese pan-feminist communities in response to the pervasive state intrusion, which we call feminist counter-appropriation. These tactics entail adoption and strategic adaptation of the state-sanctioned discourses by feminist netizens to tell their own stories while shielding them from severe punitive measures. Our analysis discerns two types of counter-appropriation practices: deliberate counter-appropriation that involves parodic and satirical redeployment of the party-state’s stigmatizing framing of feminism, and promotional counter-appropriation that uncritically embraces the sanitized version of feminism following the statist and nationalist logic yet creates room for discussion of gender-related and other forms of social inequalities. While acknowledging inherent limitations and susceptibility to manipulation by conservative forces, we argue that these counter-appropriation practices demonstrate the resilience of civil societies in navigating censorship and oppression to subvert the oppressive intentions of party bureaucrats, expose inherent flaws of the official languages, and challenge the entrenched gender inequalities in post-reform China.

Colonial necropolitics in responding to gender‐based violence amidst cascading disasters in Puerto Rico

AbstractThis article analyzes how the practice of cascading disaster responses and the relative erasure of increasing cases of gender‐based violence (GBV), including feminicidio, or feminicide, by the government in Puerto Rico evidence the structural and regularly reproduced vulnerability of marginalized populations. Drawn from fieldwork in southwestern Puerto Rico between 2019 and 2020, this essay juxtaposes the lived experience of frontline GBV service providers with the relative absence of GBV from the public record until 2022. For activists and scholars, the prevalence of GBV and its relative exclusion from state discourse and records is rooted in ideological, cultural, and operational concerns: operationally, GBV is too often excluded from planned disaster response. Culturally, state‐supplied statistics on GBV minimized and otherwise naturalized GBV into a cultural norm or reality‐to‐be‐expected. Ideologically, the exclusion of GBV is also tied to the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. We argue that GBV and its relative exclusion from the public record sustains high levels of violence that have already fueled notable public protest and the constrained working conditions of GBV frontline service providers. The article's focus on frontline worker experiences highlights their important role at the forefront of decision‐making on how to mitigate GBV during and in the wake of cascading disasters.

Subculture, masculinity and place in young rural men’s resistance to counter-migration

ABSTRACT In the wake of deindustrialization, many rural areas in the Global North face challenges such as an ageing population, declining welfare systems and limited job and educational opportunities, problems that have been enhanced by decades of depopulation. Young people have left the countryside for careers in larger cities, contributing to stigmatization of those who stay in rural areas. In Sweden, however, statistics show a slow but steady trend of remigration to rural areas, which is described in municipal and state discourse as positive and necessary to ‘save’ the countryside. This paper examines the perspective of rural youth who feel differently about such counter-urbanization. Based on a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork with youth, the article shows how young men involved in Swedish greaser culture perceived the influx of urban (re)migrators as a threat to their rural lifestyle and the rural place where they wished to stay. This is interpreted as an expression of subcultural, place-based and temporal resistance towards urban and neoliberal ideals that simultaneously reinforce white, masculine values. As these young men will be part of a rural future, they must be considered in the formulation of sustainable politics for rural areas.