Although post-socialist civil society has been widely studied, scholars have rarely examined how political conflict reshapes its very meaning. This article addresses that gap by comparing the discursive constructions of civil society put forth by Poland’s liberal-left and conservative-right symbolic elites. Analyzing 53 opinion pieces published in Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita (2015–2023), I demonstrate that both camps instrumentalize the term as a tool for mobilization and legitimation. The liberal-left frames civil society as a pluralist watchdog that safeguards democracy and European norms, while the conservative-right associates it with national identity and cooperation with a strong state. Each narrative marginalizes civic actors that fall outside the partisan divide, thereby deepening polarization. These competing frames reflect a broader struggle between a pro-modernization project anchored in EU integration and a national-conservative alternative, which narrows public perceptions of Poland’s diverse civic landscape.

Transnational anti-trans actors fall into two camps: traditionally conservative actors who pursue transphobia to extend patriarchy and feminists who pursue transphobia to challenge patriarchy. This article investigates how shared language and practices of anti-trans feminist and traditionalist coalitions enact opposing sex/gender orders. I explain this alliance through grounded theory generated from a critical discourse analysis of my dataset of 1016 anti-trans texts from 175 organizations. I develop my Affective Orientation Threat Structure, which explains the affective governing process of this coalition, and then apply this framework to anti-trans discourses about trans threats to womanhood. I find that anti-trans feminists and traditionalists generate fear via shared threat constructions but frame threat differently in order to mobilize affective energy in service of diverging regulative regimes and sex/gender orders. I argue that the illogics produced by contradictions within this incompatible coalition benefit both camps by maximizing affective disorientation and generating momentum through paradox.

In a time of polycrisis, internal contestation, and strained transatlantic relations, European identity is timelier and more relevant than ever. Do EU public policies operating in a multilevel governance system contribute to European identity-building, and what can jeopardise the process of identity formation at the level of policy elites? The article adopts a social constructivist and discursive approach and brings to the fore the lacking process of EU socialisation via discursive practices as a key reason leading to failed identity-building. Focusing on EU Cohesion Policy in Wales (UK), Crete (Greece), and Silesia (Poland), the analysis employs primary data and grey literature sources, along with 64 semistructured elite interviews, to show that, despite key differences among the three cases, Cohesion Policy has not contributed significantly to European identity-building among policy elites at different government levels and among the public. This is because the coordinative discourse about EU policies is dominated by ideas about economic goals and practical aspects of policy-making, while the respective communicative discourse is controlled by domestic political elites and the media and is ultimately determined by broader national/regional political cultures about the purpose and limitations of EU membership. Overall, the article contributes to the literature on European identity-building, EU socialisation, and discourse by arguing that the way EU public policies are designed, implemented, and communicated do not favour the achievement of political goals, such as the cultivation of a shared European identity.

This article offers an original discursive analysis of the construction of terrorism within travel advice published by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It argues that this advice positions terrorism as a very specific – omnipresent, Islamist, and non-state – security threat from which British nationals will never be safe. Three contributions are made. First, empirically, the article offers a descriptively rich exploration of terrorism’s production in an entirely neglected site of discourse. Second, analytically, it details the work done by specific rhetorical mechanisms within FCDO guidance, including the recycling of generic claims relating to terrorism, quantifications of risk, and the imagination of hypothetical attacks. Third, conceptually, it demonstrates the contingent and precarious character of this discourse by highlighting important exclusions that cohere and constitute terrorism as constructed in travel advice. These exclusions – notably the violences of right-wing actors and of states themselves – contribute to a very specific construction of terrorism that helps foreclose discussion of UK responsibility for, or involvement in, terrorism.

When do politicians debate each other in parliament, and when do they prefer to avoid discourse? While existing research has shown MPs to unilaterally leverage the dialogical nature of legislative debates to their advantage, the circumstances facilitating actual discursive interaction have so far received less attention. We introduce a new framework to study the emergence of discourse in political debates. Applying this framework, we expect ideological differences and government–opposition dynamics to shape politicians' choices about seeking or avoiding discourse. To test these hypotheses, we draw on an original dataset of all 14,595 attempted and successful interventions (Zwischenfragen) – extraordinary, voluntary discursive exchanges between speakers and MPs in the audience – in the German Bundestag (1990–2020), extracted using an annotation pipeline developed specifically for this study. We find that MPs separated by diverging preferences seek discourse with one another more often than their ideologically aligned counterparts. At the same time, these exact attempts do less frequently result in discursive interactions. When considering government–opposition dynamics in this process, we observe very similar patterns: Attempts to initiate discourse are particularly common among opposition MPs facing government speakers, and we find tentative evidence suggesting that government actors are most likely to avoid these invitations to discursive interaction. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of elite behaviour in public environments.

This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010–2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face‐to‐face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Passos‐Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail‐out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for ‘credibility’ in order to avoid a ‘negative’ reaction from the markets – later associated with the conditions of the bail‐out – concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors’ bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives.

In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-structuring Potential Questions. We show how these two assumptions combine to yield a comprehensive theory of NAPs that captures their central syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and furthermore sheds light on the mechanisms that govern their linear interpolation.

Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under authoritarian regime conditions serves for securing regime legitimacy in two respects—by supporting CSOs contribution to public welfare and by transmitting state-led legitimacy discourse to the civil society sector. The analysis of applications submitted between 2013 and 2016 to the Presidential Grant Competition (PGC), the biggest public funding programme for CSOs in Russia, shows that the state is (1) supporting CSO activities above all in social, health and education-related fields, and (2) privileging projects that relate to a state-led conservative public discourse not only but foremost within those welfare-related fields. These results highlight the importance of investigating state support to CSOs in order to access the changing role of civil society under authoritarian regime conditions.

Basing his argumentation on an analysis of condition C effects, Bruening (2014) proposes to replace the familiar notion of c-command underlying dependency relations with a precede-and-command condition, which defines dependency relations as precedence relations within a local domain (phase). In this reply I argue that condition C effects cannot be used to show the relevance of phases for the definition of syntactic dependency, and I question the conceptual necessity of the notion phase as currently defined.

Social innovation (SI) is a promising concept that has been developed and mobilized in academia, government policies, philanthropic programs, entrepreneurial projects. Scholars propose multiple conceptions and categorization of what is SI (trajectories, approaches, theoretical strands, paradigms, streams). Some recent work has also addressed the question of who is doing SI. In both cases, the what and the who remain the key characteristic of SI. Two approaches are confronted: one where SI is more presented as a concept that reproduces the neoliberal–capitalist societies; a second that conceives SI as a transformative and emancipatory pathway. With this article, I contribute to the possibilities to conceive SI as performative concept. My proposition is to analyze SI as a discourse with precise performative practices and apparatus. By doing so, it allows scholars and practitioners to better reflect and identify the effects, tensions and ambivalence and possibilities of SI. Moreover, it gives us few key aspects of what might constitute an emancipatory social innovation.

This article addresses the problem of unclear usage of “coercion” and “repression” in literature concerning protest and repression in democratic and nondemocratic states. It questions the bases and conclusions of domestic democratic peace theory and discusses its consequences. The article proposes expanding definitions of coercion and repression in terms of timing, agency, and perceptiveness. Using vocabulary of poststructuralist discourse theory and the “logics” approach to analyzing social phenomena, it introduces the notion of hegemonic coercion and repression and describes their functioning. It argues that contemporary liberal democracies are not free from coercion and repression, but that the hegemony embodied in the state is able to sustain itself by means of hegemonic coercion with little use of direct violence. Consequently, the absence of state violence is not a criterion of a mature democracy, but can also be a characteristic of a totalitarian regime where ideological deviations are strictly and preemptively controlled.

This paper examines the effects of shifts in “development discourse” on the behavior of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Drawing upon detailed case histories of two well-established NGOs in western India, it is demonstrated that (1) the case NGOs have been profoundly influenced by discourses prevailing during their initial, formative stages; (2) NGO behavior is subject to changes in global development discourses that are transmitted to them via a range of mechanisms including consultants, conditions of funding, and reporting requirements; and (3) these NGOs have been able to challenge and adapt certain discourses to suit their own needs and circumstances, sometimes even sparking wider structural change.

In Germany, like in other countries, the notions of volunteering and civic action altogether describe a wide diversity of activities. Often, this wide spectre is put together under ‘civic engagement’, reaching from civic action that is sometimes overtly ‘political’ over to engagement as volunteering in areas like sports or culture. Yet in academic contributions that use such a wide concept, nothing much can be found about a convincing differentiation of the diverse forms of engagement that figure under such a wide cover. Is there a clear line separating voluntary and civic action? In line with the introduction to this special issue, the paper takes up these questions by proposing that a proper understanding of differentiations in the wide field of civic engagement calls for a historical approach that gives a key role to discourses and politics. Looking from such a perspective at historical constellations in German history, four decisive historical concepts get sketched. It shows that kinds of differentiation between voluntary and civic action are very much dependent on discourses and politics and not only the repercussions of socio-economic and cultural changes and megatrends. The kind of approach chosen shows as well that older concepts, notions and attitudes do not simply melt away in the light of new ones. The label ‘civic engagement’ appears as an umbrella notion in front of a diversity of forms and understandings of engagement. Understanding this diversity calls for tracing the historical roots, notably the ordering imaginaries and strategies wherein these forms and understandings took shape and function today.