The 2024 election of Donald Trump has been followed by executive decisions never before experienced in the history of American democracy. This new approach is grounded on a radical right (RR) program that had already been put in place in the Hungary of Viktor Orbán, who is presented as a model by Trump. Both leaders have defined a performative communication style, attracting a large segment of their respective citizenry. This style is based on the strategic use of common sense. However, we barely know how commonsensical executive RR leaders are during one of the most sacred events in a liberal democracy: the annual State of the Union or State of the Nation address. Based on a critical discourse analysis of the multiple speeches produced by Trump and Orbán in the frame of these events, the current research investigates the routinized and multifaceted usefulness of common sense to contest liberal democracy. The findings indicate that these leaders use the state address as a ritual of liberal democracy to impose a new RR order grounded in commonsensical policies, polities, and authorities.

Existing studies of EU foreign policy often contrast its normative and geopolitical ambitions while overlooking its colonial entanglements. Although recent scholarship has interrogated the Union’s neo-imperial tendencies, the structuring role of race in external relations remains underexplored. This article introduces the concept of the “Mediterranean colour line” to capture how the EU’s relationship with its Southern Neighbourhood has consistently cast the region as politically marginal, economically extractable, and epistemically devalued. These hierarchies are not incidental: they are central to the reproduction of capitalism within racialized global orders. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) provides a key site to examine these dynamics. Through a critical discourse analysis of the 2021 New Agenda for the Mediterranean, the article shows how colonial logics are retooled in the language of reform, resilience, and partnership. By focusing on digital transition and green growth—domains rarely read through race—the analysis demonstrates how racial capitalist governance persists precisely where its effects are most obscured.

This study addresses a critical gap in research on public services digitalization, specifically, how technology’s role and its relationship with ageing are framed within policy discourse. While digitalization holds the promise of enhanced accessibility, streamlined bureaucracy and greater transparency, it also has the potential to exacerbate social exclusion in ageing societies. Macro-level factors such as policy frameworks and societal values play a key role in either mitigating or intensifying these risks; they shape the way critical issues are defined and which responses are deemed conceivable. The study aims to critically examine how digitalization and ageing are framed in European and Italian policy documents, and assess the implications of these narratives for older adults. Methodologically, it analyses a corpus of 29 European and Italian policy documents on public service digitalization (2010–2023). Keywords extraction identified ten documents for critical discourse analysis, which revealed a dominant narrative of technological optimism where digitalization is presented as a universal solution, with limited acknowledgment of its potential downsides. At the European level, some documents recognize the rights of older adults, though such recognition remains sparse. Italian policies, in contrast, tend to prioritize technical and economic aspects, with little or no attention to digital exclusion or inequality. This study sheds light on how policy discourse can obscure structural inequalities and calls for more inclusive, reflective approaches to digitalization in ageing societies. It argues that policy discourse should be leveraged not only to promote innovation but also to foster social change and reduce exclusion among older adults.

Archaeology has been closely entangled with dominant power structures since its formal emergence in the nineteenth century. Recent scholarly work has sought to challenge this relationship and destabilize the fundamental Eurocentrism of archaeological theory and praxis. The extent to which this effort is reflected beyond academia has, however, not been as widely explored. In this article, the author presents evidence concerning the production of archaeological knowledge within the academy, the dissemination of knowledge of the past in schools and the media, and the consumption of this knowledge by members of the British public, including adults and secondary school pupils aged 11–14. He concludes that there exists a fundamental disjuncture between contemporary scholarly work and popular perceptions of the past and suggests some ways the academy may challenge the continued prevalence of Eurocentric perspectives of the past in popular discourse.

The radical right is now able to impose its personnel and its agenda as the ‘new normal’ for a different European Union (EU). Nevertheless, there is still a lack of research into how this normalization is circulated by radical-right members of the European Parliament (MEPs), eager to be part of the social world of the liberal democratic European parliamentarians. This process of normalization is investigated in this article by carrying out a critical discourse analysis of the argumentation used by radical-right MEPs to reject an EU regulation supposed to preserve press freedom, currently threatened by the radical right in many EU member states: the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). The analysis shows that these MEPs have been keen to use a series of topoi to claim their embeddedness in liberal democracies, while mobilizing symbols and meanings revealing their autocratic roots and their willingness to redefine media freedom.

Political discourse is a persuasive device used to gain public support, and official counterterrorism narratives are no exception. Drawing on theoretical convergence between Critical Terrorism Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in their understanding of discourse as a persuasive tool, this research aims to demonstrate the utility of discourse analysis in deciphering the political ideology sustaining official counterterrorism rhetoric. Through quantitative diachronic observation of key terms (terrorism, separatism, and extremism) and the systematic codification of Xinjiang White Papers (2003–2019), this research applies van Leeuwen’s (2008) model of social practice analysis, participant representation, and legitimation categories to reveal the specific rhetoric tools ultimately aimed at securing the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) political legitimacy. This article builds on CDA theory by linking discourse and political practice, reflecting on the pragmatic consequences of implicit power structures within official counterterrorism discourse, involving in this case the CPC and ethnoreligious groups in Xinjiang.

This paper explores metalinguistic social media discussions on the variation of Finnish third-person singular pronouns in reference to nonhuman animals. Finnish uses two third-person singular pronouns: hän and se. In standardized Finnish, hän takes exclusively human and se nonhuman referents, but in colloquial speech, the difference between hän and se is not based on the human/nonhuman distinction. I examine the discursive construction of the human–animal relationship in social media discussions about the use of hän in reference to nonhuman animals, as well as the intersection between discourses on the human–animal relationship and language ideologies through a critical perspective. Two major discourses are identified: one centres on equality and the other emphasizes the differentiation and hierarchy of species. Both discourses are closely connected to language ideologies, which shape and are shaped by views on the status of nonhuman animals in human society.

Through a critical discourse lens, a review of formal police documents detailing historical contact with the perpetrator of Canada’s worst mass casualty event aims to demonstrate that the perpetrator’s Whiteness and socio-economic status deemed him benign and thus invisible to law enforcement officials during the early stages of the mass casualty investigation. This exploration contributes to a broader racialized analysis of who is deemed suspicious or harmless within the context of policing. By contrasting the experiences of Black Nova Scotians with the police to those of the perpetrator, this case study will demonstrate how institutional procedures and processes, influenced by biases, not only produce and maintain racial disparities within the criminal justice system, but also negatively impact law enforcement officials’ ability to conduct fair and thorough criminal investigations, ultimately impeding public safety. The impact on police legitimacy is also discussed.

Besides being unjustly incarcerated, Sabrina Butler, Kristine Bunch, Ru-el Sailor and Larry DeLisle endured various forms of police mistreatment, as detailed in a collection of transcripts from the Wrongful Conviction Podcast (WCP). Understandably enough, their criminalization had a profound impact on their perception of external and internal realities. Given their unique socio-demographic backgrounds, variations in the discursive patterns of their communicative interactions are anticipated. As extensively analyzed in sociolinguistics, both gender and ethnicity influence how individuals construct discourse; particularly, these traits appear to account for how the subjects under study express their emotions and opinions. This is because they are silenced and unable to directly confront their trauma; often, they are incapable of discussing their feelings or identifying those responsible for these traumatic events. Drawing on Appraisal Theory, this paper investigates the language of evaluation used in these texts taken from the WCP. To this end, our analysis of the data is performed using UAM CorpusTool.

The radical right has become a central political force in most Western democracies. This process has been the result of the normalization and mainstreaming of its political leaders, discourses, and visions of society, notably involving the scapegoating of immigration and the use of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. However, the normalization and mainstreaming of radical right actors competing for the leadership of their overall political family remain an under-researched topic. The scope of the current article is to explore this phenomenon by considering the case of France, which after the United States, is the largest Western state that could potentially be ruled by a radical right president with extensive executive powers. The analysis shows that actors competing for the leadership of the radical right in a given country can generate diverging strategies of normalization and mainstreaming to secure their political distinction. Immigration and the Great Replacement constitute, respectively, a topic and a conspiracy theory that are emphasized and/or downplayed by opportunistic stakeholders weaving a web of interactions to define their comparative legitimacy and supremacy in the public sphere.

El presente artículo aborda los alcances y limitaciones del reconocimiento obtenido por el Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente Chileno en el proceso constituyente iniciado en Chile luego de la revuelta social de 2019 y, particularmente, en las deliberaciones de la Convención Constitucional que sesionó entre 2021 y 2022. Además de analizar la presentación y votación de normas relacionadas con el Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente, el principal foco está puesto en los discursos de los/as convencionales constituyentes relacionados con dichas normas. Mediante un análisis crítico del discurso, se identifican tres ejes discursivos que enmarcaron el apoyo o rechazo de iniciativas en torno al reconocimiento afrodescendiente, vinculados al significado de la categoría jurídica de “pueblo tribal”, a la cuestión de la preexistencia y a la extranjerización. El artículo concluye con una discusión de las posturas adoptadas por diferentes sectores de la Convención, identificando algunos imaginarios que comportaron límites para la inclusión del pueblo afrochileno en la propuesta constitucional.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the media provided daily coverage of this unprecedented crisis in the history of the 21st century. Some topics, such as how the virus affected older adults, were widely covered. The way in which COVID-19 was documented evoked a ‘tragedy’ narrative through consistent reporting about the suffering it was causing and the deleterious consequences it had on specific populations, including residents of long-term care homes (LTC). This article explores how reports on COVID-19 in LTC homes in a national newspaper (The Globe and Mail) fuelled a tragedy discourse that modulated the value of life of older adults living in those environments. We used critical discourse analysis and analysed 74 articles focusing on older persons residing in LTC homes in two Canadian provinces (Quebec and Ontario) during COVID-19. This article offers a brief overview of the notion of tragedy and how the discourse of tragedy is intertwined with humanitarian crises, life and death, and the value of life. Our findings revealed the construction of three types of tragedies that shape our societal values around life and death in LTC: the tragedy of the threat to life, the tragedy of the unfortunate (old, vulnerable and lacking in agency) and, finally, the tragedy of historical neglect and abandonment. Our findings suggest that the nature of reporting on life and death in LTC homes during the COVID-19 pandemic provoked a sense of fear and pity for a passive other. Re-thinking what gets reported in the media, including whose voice is represented/missing and how tragedy narratives are balanced with contesting stories, could elicit more sentiments of solidarity and action rather than reinforce pity, distancing and immobilisation.

This article examines how individual police officers in China interpret and justify the use of excessive force on social media through their WeChat Subscription Accounts (WSAs). Existing research examines how the police department uses social media to justify deadly force, but overlooks individual officers’ online justifications. Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, this study analyses 211 articles commenting on a prominent case of police violence in China. The findings shed light on the online voice of Chinese frontline officers, revealing an ideology that defends the use of excessive force. The articles published in WSAs displayed strong empathy towards the involved officer; contested the characterization of the incident as police brutality by police officials, the public, and the media; and employed various strategies to justify the officer’s actions. The discussion section expands on these findings by drawing comparisons to justifications in the United States, emphasizing the distinctive dynamic between individual officers’ online expression and official police discourse in China, and offering insights for scholars examining online expression and digital nationalism in the Chinese context.