Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 23, Issue 3, 2024

Abstract

Scholarship has underlined how radical right-wing populism (RRWP) emphasizes border control aiming to protect the “people”. Although increasing attention is being paid to the discursive dimensions of border construction, the complexity of the phenomenon suggests the need for further analysis in an interdisciplinary perspective and with an emphasis on the geometry of spatial powers (Massey 1999, 2005). Understanding power dynamics in space is all the more important now that radical right-wing populism (RRWP) is becoming a key political phenomenon. The use of the border in right-wing populist narratives draws on the representation of power struggles in space concerning the management of flows (people, goods, services, capital, ideas, values, etc.). The scope of the introduction to this special issue is to address the connection between radical right-wing populism, borders, and spaces of power, and to present the research articles investigating this link through a series of different case studies.

Abstract

This article deconstructs the parliamentary discourses regarding two migratory incidents in Ceuta, May 2021, and Melilla, June 2022, when hundreds of people attempted to cross the fences that separate Morocco from Spain. Most of them were immediately deported, many injured, and several died. This analysis compares the density of populist, anti-populist, re-bordering, and de-bordering references in forty-five speeches at the Spanish Congress regarding both tragic events. Vox speakers articulate a distinct discourse that instrumentalises these incidents to convey a sense of existential crisis and to (re)define a populist right-wing political identity based on moral hierarchies, a homogenising conception of society and the exclusion of a dangerous “other.” Meanwhile some parties applied a populist logic to promote de-bordering views and others combined re-bordering and de-bordering claims without imposing a populist frame. This was an opportunity to exhibit a progressive sense of place in borderlands contrasting with Vox’s reactionary one.

Abstract

The success of radical right-wing populist (RRWP) parties is based on discourses displaying “power geometries” (Massey 1993, 1999). These involve the representation of power relations, with on one side a globalized elite, boosting the mobility of human beings, goods and capital across borders, and on the other side, a territorially embedded people subject to this borderless mobility. Power geometries can also be used to approach the chameleonic behavior of RRWP politicians and their allies in the political space. The article uses this concept to interpret the attitude of the Trieste City Executive and the reactions to it when it commemorated a past connected to Italian fascism. The results show that the power geometries involving the RRWP and their allies in European borderlands can lead to discursive ambivalence in two overlapping spaces: the territorial and state-bordered space of representative democracy, and the topological and cross-border space of para-diplomacy.

Abstract

To justify the hardening of borders the populist radical right sometimes uses environmental rhetoric to frame migrants as a threat. The radical right’s environmental politics has been analysed through a focus on state borders, but less attention has been paid to the (re)production of bordering within and beyond the nation-state and to the racialising effects of such rhetoric, in other words how racial differences and hierarchies are (re)produced and justified through language on nature. Drawing on geographical literature on bordering and nationalism and postcolonial theory, this article investigates the semantic structures that convey the racist messaging. The article argues that the ‘racialized Other’ is bordered from the ’green’ homeland and Western space by utilising determinist conceptions of nature, through animalistic and environmental disaster metaphors, and by mobilising an idea of the environmentally conscious Finn as the opposite of the littering migrant.

Abstract

This paper draws lessons from security and populism studies to theorize how radical right-wing populism (RRWP) utilizes borders as a symbolic resource in crisis narratives to clearly frame an “Us” and a threatening “Them”. By analyzing the Hungarian Orbán regime’s evolving rhetoric on borders, the paper illustrates how populists employ crisis narratives not to mitigate, but exacerbate ontological insecurities, and thereby facilitate de-democratization by (re)shaping voter attitudes (cf. Homolar & Scholz 2019; Steele & Homolar 2019). The paper suggests that populists-in-power rely on crisis and bordering narratives beyond voter mobilization: such narratives are in fact designed to legitimize and affirm illiberal practices that undermine liberal democracy itself, and contribute to regime building. Border crises, and crisis politics, hence become a template for the manipulation of individuals’ security-of-being, and thereby a tool in the politics of reassurance and control at the broader, societal level.

Abstract

Radical Right-wing populism frequently involves ‘divide and rule’ strategies as a means to attain and consolidate political power. In the cases of Viktor Orban’s political regime in Hungary and Donald Trump’s four-year presidency (and its aftermath), we find a pronounced attempt to create narrative hegemony of a sense of nation built upon Christian civilization and foundationalist understandings of national identity. Moreover, both cases reveal processes of social border-making that are reflected in norming and the creation of distinctions based on degrees of national authenticity. Applying an ontological security and critical borders studies approach, this paper will specifically focus on the different ways in which border-making processes, or bordering, are implicated in the exercise of illiberal political power in the Hungarian and US cases. Despite many similarities, the actual mobilization of popular support reflects local conditions and has resulted in rather different political outcomes.

Abstract

This paper addresses Benjamin Netanyahu’s border discourse in the context of radical right-wing populism. It discusses how, in the speeches and statements appearing in his official government website, Netanyahu construes groups located spatially outside Israel’s borders, mainly terrorists and migrants (the “wild beasts” and the “infiltrators”), as existential threats to Israel. The aim is to prove that, in legitimizing the militarization of borders through “security fences”, so that the “other” can be excluded from the nation, Netanyahu uses the same power geometries and discursive strategies, i.e. Proximization (Cap 2013) and dehumanizing metaphors (Santa Ana 1999, Musolff 2015, Taylor 2021), typically used by right-wing populist parties and leaders. By appealing to both populism and certain interpretations of Zionism, his ethnonationalist view of borders is based on the normalization of the discourse of delegitimation and exclusion of those groups considered as a threat to the nation.

Abstract

Media Representations of Macau’s Gaming Industry in Greater China, written by Yuxi Wu, adopts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis method to compare newspaper media representations of Macau’s gaming industry in 2014 in Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and Macau, the three regions of China with different historical backgrounds, economic conditions, political systems, and social norms. The topical preferences, attitudinal differences and ideological stances of English-language newspapers published in these three regions are revealed in this research.

This article reviews Obesity in the news: Language and Representation in the Press9781108836395

This article reviews The Politics in Climate Change Metaphors in the U.S. Discourse: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Analysis from an Ecolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective