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Part of
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 115–136

Chapter 5
Aspects 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
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.06cap
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