Journal of Language and Politics - Online First

The article focuses on anti-Ukrainian narratives spread on Twitter. We performed a Thick Big Data analysis of words and hashtags connected with anti-Ukrainian narratives. We collected 16,700 tweets from 25 January 2023 to 22 February 2023, focusing on the most popular and commented ones. Furthermore, we conducted multi-modal narrative and rhetorical analyses to distinguish the typology of narrations. This article sheds light on how vital narration in disinformation campaigns and media warfare on social media is. Most tweets contained narration highlighting the alleged appropriation of Polish culture by displaying Ukrainian nationality. Such narration strongly influences a sense of insecurity and alienation in one’s own country. We discovered that Ukrainian-related posts have negative sentiment and frequently spread disinformation.

It has been over ten years since the Chinese Dream was proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2012. This study investigates the representations of the Chinese Dream in The New York Times (hereafter NYT) from the perspective of speech reporting. The analysis shows that four types of sources are favored: the political elites from the Chinese government, ordinary Chinese citizens, western scholars, and Chinese news agencies. Government officials’ speech is quoted to expose the global ambition of the Chinese-Dream-associated policies or practices, while stories from the ordinary Chinese provide contradictory evidence. Scholars’ speech is to warn audiences of the Chinese government’s global aspirations masked by the Chinese Dream. The reports and practices of Chinese news agencies are labeled propaganda to strangle potential discursive competition. In effect, all converge to strengthen and validate China’s world dream representation.

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 article presents a methodological argument for examining the affective dimensions of political identity formation, with a pivotal focus on the role of practice. Grounded in a psychoanalytically inspired discourse theory framework, it advocates for expanding research beyond textual sources to investigate the affective investment inherent in political engagement and the process of collective identity formation. Through an examination of two empirical case studies — the Just Stop Oil movement in the United Kingdom and the ascent of Javier Milei in Argentinean politics — the article proposes four principles to study the articulation of political identities through practice: Signifiers are not just words; beyond counting words; policy is central, and fantasy is a cipher. By underscoring fantasy as a critical dimension in identity formation and, suggesting that, by transcending the conventional Schmittian friend/enemy divide, novel avenues for analysing collective identities will surface.

In this study we capture power dynamics in diplomacy from a pragmatic angle, by examining a closed-door diplomatic mediatory negotiation and its aftermath. We first analyse the transcript of a mediation session between representatives of Slovenia and Croatia and a European Economic Community (EEC) delegation during the breakup of Yugoslavia. While the EEC representatives officially acted as mediators, they had earlier secretly agreed with the Yugoslav side to keep Yugoslavia intact. Second, we examine the transcript of a meeting between Slovenian politicians shortly after the mediation session. Studying these two datasets helps us to capture how power manifests itself in the mediatory negotiation studied, and how it is judged by the powerless afterwards. Focusing on language behaviour in the two datasets provides insight into the presence of power in a diplomatic situation where it should in theory not be played out. We use speech acts to analyse our data.

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.

Populism has been examined in depth in the last decades both from theoretical and empirical approaches. Among the topics that scholars have studied, the ideological flexibility of populist discourses is one of the most controversial and difficult to analyse. Although a large body of research has explored this peculiar characteristic of populist political discourses, this paper provides an original interpretation of populism by assessing this flexibility drawing on the importance of George Sorel’s theory in discourse theory, which could contribute to a better understanding of populist theory. Understanding populism from a discursive framework could explain the intrinsic contingency of populism and the emergence of both radical right and radical left populisms. This study aims to trace the theoretical path from the influence of Sorel’s Theory of Myth on populist discourse theory to its current implications for populist discourses, resulting in the multifaceted nature of populism.