Journal of Language and Politics - Current Issue

Despite increased attention to the far right and environmental issues, little research has focused on the increasingly prominent attempts by populist radical right (PRR) parties to capitalize on farmers’ protests against climate and biodiversity policies across Europe. This article addresses this gap by analyzing PRR discourse through a case study of the Flemish PRR party, Vlaams Belang (VB), a party that has only recently started to present itself as the defender of farmers and rural populations. A discourse-theoretical analysis of VB’s 2019–2024 publications on farmers and agriculture reveals that VB employs the ‘the rural’ as a symbolic signifier to integrate farmers and their demands into its discourse. The party constructs farmers as the symbol of ‘the people’ through both nationalism and populism. Through their link with ‘the rural,’ farmers are positioned as rooted in ‘the nation’ within VB’s nationalist politics and as part of ‘the underdog’ in its populist politics.

Philanthropic foundations are key players in global sustainability governance. This paper explores the legitimation strategies these foundations use to justify their actions and positions in the sustainable development community. By combining Theo van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework with our novel analytical justice framework, we offer a new tool to analyse hard-to-research actors. Analysing data from 41 foundation websites, we find that foundations emphasize Global Egalitarian Cosmopolitanism in their values and objectives to align with global sustainability discourses. However, Libertarian ideas dominate when discussing programs and founders. This indicates there may be internal conflicts within foundations over the relationship between extreme wealth accumulation required for global philanthropy and sustainability objectives. In turn, this has implications for how foundations position themselves as agents of justice in sustainable development. While discourse analysis provides valuable insights into philanthropic legitimation strategies, further research is needed to fully understand how justice intersects with organizational decision-making.

As daily news unveils, fundamental human values such as equality and liberty can be expressed through various terms influenced by multiple factors, reaching significant levels of disparity, ambiguity and controversy, particularly in specific socio-political contexts. This article employs advanced corpus analysis tools to examine the lexical and semantic configuration of the “right to liberty” as expressed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and as North American presidents have transmitted it throughout their presidential inaugural addresses. The corpus of speeches is analyzed diachronically to identify the prevalent terms, connotations, and associated semantic categories and observe their differences and evolution. This research provides a comprehensive understanding of the concept of liberty in this context and highlights its startling malleability in American politics.

This study examines the evolution of (anti)woke discourse in debates within the Canadian House of Commons from 2019 to 2023, analyzing how “conceptual flipsiding” and moral panic operate to transform democratic language into tools of illiberal politics. Our critical discourse analysis of Hansard transcripts identifies three key themes: the semantic shift of woke from social awareness to authoritarianism, the strategic redefinition of woke by Conservative MPs — led by party leader Pierre Poilievre — to construct a moral panic around an anti-Canadian ideological Other, and inadequate attempts by MPs from other parties to challenge this negative framing. We argue that the discursive weaponization of woke demonstrates how political actors appropriate and invert democratic language to advance illiberal agendas while maintaining democratic legitimacy. This Canadian case illuminates broader patterns in how democratic language is manipulated across national contexts while revealing how ineffective counter-frames can inadvertently legitimize anti-democratic action within democratic institutions.

This paper develops the concept of authoritarian institutionalism — understood as a combination of authoritarianism as a form of discursive closure and institutionalism as a non-antagonistic construction of social relations following the logic of difference based on Laclau’s theory — which can yield insights from a discursive angle into the workings of “competitive authoritarian” regimes characterized by formally multi-party systems. Based on these considerations, the paper undertakes a periodization of party politics in Russia since 1993, which presents a useful case for probing the boundaries of authoritarian institutionalism given the regime-engineered dynamics of party competition since the days of so-called “managed democracy.” In applying the discourse-theoretical toolkit of difference/equivalence, the analysis identifies two phases of authoritarian consolidation since 2000 that have expanded the authoritarian dimension while curtailing the institutionalist operation of difference in the party system, raising the question of a “GDR-ization” of party politics since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.