Chapter published in:
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisisEdited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 115–136
Chapter 5Aspects of threat construction in the Polish anti-immigration discourse
Proximization Theory (PT) (Cap 2008, 2010, 2013, 2017; among others) is a cognitive-critical model that accounts for the ways in which the discursive construction of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the political sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. This article applies PT in the domain of state political discourse in today's Poland, outlining strategies whereby anti-immigration stance and policies are legitimized by discursively constructed fear appeals and other coercion patterns. It demonstrates how the ‘emerging’, ‘growing’, ‘gathering’ threats – physical as well as ideological – are construed by the Polish right-wing government, who thus claim their right to oppose EU immigration agreements and pursue strict anti-immigration measures.
Keywords: anti-immigration discourse, Poland, Law & Justice Party, threat construction, legitimization, proximization
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Discourse space: Cognitive representations and the forcing of worldviews
- 2.1Deictic Space Theory (DST)
- 2.2Proximization Theory (PT)
- 3.Threat construction in the L&J discourse: From ‘cultural unbelonging’ to ‘terrorist risk’
- 3.1The corpus for analysis
- 3.2The US
- 3.3The THEM
- 3.4The THEM against US proximization scenario
- 4.Conclusion
-
Notes -
References
Published online: 07 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.06cap
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.06cap
References
Cap, Piotr
Chovanec, Jan
Cienki, Alan, Bertie Kaal, and Isa Maks
Dunmire, Patricia
Filardo Llamas Laura
Filardo Llamas, Laura Bertie Kaal, and Christopher Hart
Hart, Christopher
Hart, Christopher, and Piotr Cap
Kaal, Bertie
Mann, William, and Sandra Thompson