Language and Security

In the information war of the 21^st century, which is gaining momentum, not only real but imaginary fabricated threats often act as arguments in the process of persuasion, and are articulated with the primary aim of creating in the recipients a sense of acute danger to various areas of their existence (their personality, their family, their social group, their nation and various other entities with which they identify and whose status determines the standards of their life).The continuous inducing of a sense of threat is the easiest and most effective method of manipulation because it encourages the listener to “switch off” reason and “switch on” emotions.The sense of threat evoked by an experienced political or media actor leads the recipients of the message (potential voters) to make hasty judgements and decisions based on feelings and emotions, as emotional reactions to the stimulus of the presented threat are often the first responses that accompany the processing and assessment of information and the subsequent action.“If we stop to consider just how much variance in the course of our lives is controlled by cognitive processes and how much by affect, and how much the one and the other influence the important outcomes in our lives, we cannot but agree that affective phenomena deserve far more attention.”¹ Instilling a sense of threat and arousing negative emotions is accomplished through language, and therefore the main goal of our research is to analyse the speech acts in Slovak public discourse by prominent actors who present fabricated social threats to a wide audience in order to achieve their political goals.

The interdisciplinary research presented in this monograph is situated at the interface of political science and linguistics and thematically builds on previous correlated research by the authors’ team published in the form of scientific articles and monographs (Language and Politics²; Language and Conflict³), as well as the university textbook Political Linguistics⁴.The books were published by the university publishing houses in Slovak language.

The research draws heavily on the concept of Critical Security Studies – or securitization theory, which is based on speech act theory and focuses on the perception and conceptualization of security.In addition to the foundations of the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, we draw on approaches developed in political linguistics and discourse- oriented research.

Our attention is focussed on Slovak public discourse concerning security, manifested predominantly in the media and on social networks during the turbulent period since 2014, which has been marked by significant discursive events presented as threats (the refugee crisis in the EU, the Ukrainian crisis after the annexation of Crimea, Brexit, the COVID- 19 pandemic and the associated vaccination, the war in Ukraine and its “consequences” for Slovakia, the economic crisis, Slovakia’s energy dependence).We believe that the continuous articulation of these events as hypertrophied threats has become one of the key causes of the rise of Euroscepticism, isolationist tendencies and extremist sentiments in Slovak society.

In our research, we logically examined the question of what is construed as an entity in danger in Slovak public discourse, but the main goal of our research was to understand and identify the linguistic mechanism of the process.The research is innovative both in its theoretical aspect (presenting perspectives of the application of the foundations and concepts of securitization theory in the process of the lexical analysis of hate speech) and in its applied aspect.The theoretical chapter is followed by case studies analysing the discourse of prominent Slovak political actors of securitization, mainly anti- European and pro- Russian, Slovak left- wing and right- wing extremists, as well as by conspiratorial and disinformation media.

The case studies feature an analytical treatment of representative fragments of public discourse thematizing numerous “threats” to Slovak society, including the aforementioned socio- political events, a politolinguistic interpretation of the employed linguistic devices and an analysis of securitizing speech acts.

The politolinguistic and discursive vector of our research does not allow us to delve into the complex area of the psychological aspects of the security phenomenon (related to cognitive linguistics), but the opinion of an expert in the field is consonant with the premises of our research: “When I started reading about the psychology of security, I quickly realized that this research can be used both for good and for evil.The good way to use this research is to figure out how humans’ feelings of security can better match the reality of security.In other words, how do we get people to recognize that they need to question their default behaviour? Giving them more information seems not to be the answer; we’re already drowning in information, and these heuristics are not based on a lack of information.Perhaps by understanding how our brains process risk, and the heuristics and biases we use to think about security, we can learn how to override our natural tendencies and make better security trade- offs.Perhaps we can learn how not to be taken in by security theater, and how to convince others not to be taken in by the same”.⁵

In terms of this idea, it is important to point out that the research objective of the publication is not to determine whether something is justifiably or unjustifiably articulated as a security threat.The aim is to investigate what is being modelled as a security threat in the spirit of social constructivism, how alleged threats are verbalized, which linguistic devices the disseminators of threat articulations most frequently use in presenting them, and the anticipated pragmatic effects of their use.

We have addressed this topic with the conviction of its exceptional topicality and because the growing level of available Internet technology in Slovakia is actively exploited by the promoters of various creatively- fabricated threats, which serve their political purposes and are an extremely productive means of waging information wars and disinformation campaigns.Social and political tensions in Slovak society are growing, and in this context the idea that “presenting dangers to a particular community becomes the most convenient and appropriate form of the ideology of consolidation, that is, of creating equivalence between different universal meanings and of creating a unified, internally non- contradictory identity” is relevant.⁶

We would like to thank Ing.Vladimír Benko, PhD, from the Ľ.Štúr Institute of Linguistics, who provided us with consultations in the field of corpus linguistics and created corpora for our research.

1 Zajonc, R.B.(1980).Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences.American Psychologist, 35, 151– 175.

2 Štefančík, R., & Dulebová, I.(2017).Jazyk a politika. Jazyk politiky v konfliktnej štruktúre spoločnosti.Bratislava: Ekonóm

3 Cingerová, N., & Dulebová, I.(2019).Jazyk a konflikt. My a tí druhí v ruskom verejnom diskurze.Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave.

4 Cingerová, N., Dulebová, I., & Štefančík, R.(2021).Politická lingvistika.Bratislava: Ekonóm.

5 Schneier, B.(2008).The psychology of security.In S.Vaudenay (Ed.), AFRICACRYPT 2008. AFRICACRYPT 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp.50– 79).Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer- Verlag.

6 Morozov, V.(2009).Rossia i drugie: identichnost i granicy politicheskogo soobshchestva.Moskva: NLO.

The use of discourse theory to reconceptualize the notion of security has become a current trend of scientific research at the interface of linguistics and political science at the beginning of the 21^st century. In addition to a number of objective factors that have influenced the establishment of a given vector in scientific research, a significant role has also been played by the growing dissatisfaction of social science and humanities scholars with the epistemological and metatheoretical consequences of the hegemony of the military and (more broadly) state-centric paradigms in the treatment of the phenomenon of security. Linguistic discourse theories which permit the analysis of a given issue in a broader social context, in terms of the interaction between the domain of language and the domain of society, between word and action, have become more desirable. From a linguistic perspective, every social act is also seen as a linguistic act, since both individual and collective subjects must be voiced, and objective reality must be retold in order to be reproduced or transformed. Thus, language becomes important in terms of ontology⁷, and from the viewpoint of a way of describing reality, language comes to be rightly seen as a way of creating, constructing and objectifying reality, i.e., as discourse.

The turn towards discourse in security research also stemmed from one of the fundamental premises of poststructuralism, according to which material objects and structures acquire their materiality and objective ontological status through discourse representation.⁸ Another point of importance was the linguistic turn in social theory from reality to textuality, since the textualization of analysis implies the recognition that any reality is mediated and determined by a mode of representation, and that representations are not merely descriptions of a world of facts, but a way of producing those facts.⁹ The notion of safety has thus been transposed into the field of linguistics as the linguistic choice of the producer of a speech act. As a result of the aforementioned shift in the research paradigm, security has come to be conceptualized as a speech act through which certain actors, processes, and events are presented as potential dangers to a particular entity, most often a state or a social group.¹⁰