Going negative by metaphors: The Donbass conflict in the Russian and the Ukrainian press

Previous research has established the importance of metaphors as conceptual devices (Semino, 2008; Zinken & Musolff, 2009). This article builds upon existing research and extends the insight into how media use metaphors in their coverage of military conflicts. The media coverage of the ongoing Eastern Ukrainian military conflict (Donbass conflict) presents a suitable case for this investigation. The strength of this study lies in the nature of the data that have been collected, namely articles that appeared in a Russian and a Ukrainian news outlet (September 2014 until January 2015) covering the same stories (same date, same event). Thereby, we investigate metaphor as a conceptual device and an element of framing that contributes to the distinct representation of the conflict in the selected outlets from the two countries. This research follows a qualitative research design, relying on Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004), and Metaphor Power Taxonomy (De Landtsheer, 2015; Beer & De Landtsheer, 2004). We conclude that the selected Russian and Ukrainian media used metaphors for enemy construction, in particular the hostile imagery with “Colony” (Russian outlet) and “Fear” (Ukrainian outlet) as major source domains.

The Image of Russia in Contemporary Russian Society: Political and Psychological Analysis

The article is based on the results of a study of Russian citizens’ perception of their country. More than 500 in-depth interview and nearly the same number of projective tests from 15 Russian regions became the basis for political-psychological analysis. These data enabled to identify the core features of Russia’s image in Russian mentality. This image includes reflections of authorities, leaders, the population, territory and the international role of the country in the country’s perception. The results confirm the conclusion that territorial expansionism is not typical for Russians. Authorities’ perception is an important component of the country’s image. Citizens' mistrust to the state was revealed. This allows us to suggest that Russian society still has not overcome the negative processes that started in the 1980s and led to a serious complex of “national inferiority” in the post-Soviet period.

The Colonialist Roots of Democratic Decay: Collective Action, Experimental Psychology, and Spatial Discourse

Democracy and dictatorship both depend on collective action, which humans avoid because it takes more effort than it is worth. Experimental psychology reveals that positive spatial discourse, explicit or implicit, reduces the effort that humans project a task to require. If so, dictatorships arise because explicit positive spatial cues, capable of retaining coherence only if assigning only to relatively few members of any population, generate the collective repression by a minority that establishes any dictatorship. Conversely the implicit cue to group size in a color metaphor, capable of assigning throughout a population, generates the universal franchise establishing a democracy. By supplementing spatial cues dividing Europeans with a metaphor of whiteness unifying Europeans and their settlers, colonialism made democracy possible once European withdrawal ended white dictatorship over colonial territories. But by erasing the condition that once secured the universal franchise among Europeans and their settlers, loss of colonies invigorates whites’ fears that hard won political rights have reverted to insecurity. That insecurity is responsible for the democratic decay now evident across Europe and its settler territories.

Growing up in contexts with armed conflict: Individual exposure to large-scale violence and differences in emancipative values in Colombia and Mexico

This paper investigates the legacies of growing up in a country with large-scale armed conflict on individuals’ emancipative values. We used a most-similar case research design to analyze these consequences of armed conflict. We selected Mexico and Colombia as cases to compare, because they were similar in variables related to emancipative value preferences at the onset of our comparison. These two cases, however, varied, later on, in the level to which individuals of similar age-cohorts were exposed to largescale political violence. The results show that individuals who have grown up in a country with high levels of armed conflict tend to endorse less emancipative values in adulthood.