RP6: Defensive Publics and their Imagined Security - Communities in the Digital Realm
In catastrophic times, never-ending crises and experiences of harm and loss may cause citizens to lose trust in government, its institutions and democracy itself. In this context, the use of digital information intermediaries, e.g. social network platforms, messenger apps, and search engines, by dissatisfied citizens may lead to the formation of counter publics. Historically, these were understood as a refuge for subaltern minorities with an emancipatory, anti-hegemonial impetus. More recently, the focus has shifted to right-wing extremist groups as counter publics who aim to defend their accustomed social status and privileges. These “defensive publics” are discursive spaces in parallel to the broader public sphere which allow participants to develop their own re-imaginings of the state and its promise of security, their own “Imagined Security Communities” (ISC). They serve as testing and training grounds for argumentative patterns, emotional narratives, and symbols that can then be infused in the mainstream public sphere. This dynamic has the potential to exert significant influence, contingent upon the visions concerning the appropriate protection of designated groups, which can manifest in anti-systemic attitudes, radicalism, and violence.
Using a combination of critical multimodal discourse analysis and the latest AI-based methods of content analysis, the project will compare defensive publics with varying discursive power from public spheres with varying degrees of illiberality. This will improve our understanding of how the promise of security by nation states can be weakened by citizens from within and how defensive publics in the digital realm contribute to this.