Between a world war and a home affair: Discourse constructions of Russia’s ‘special operation’

Abstract

This paper explores the discourse of the Russia-Ukraine war to outline and tentatively characterize the dominant narrative schemas anchored in the spatial geopolitical representations of globalness and localness. It employs a collection of analytical tools from the domains of critical cognitive discourse studies and narrative research to distinguish between two apparently most salient schemas: the Global Conflict Reality (GCR) narrative and the Local Conflict Reality (LCR) narrative. The GCR narrative conceptualizes the Russia-Ukraine war as a growing international conflict, extremely likely to produce serious political, economic and, not least, material consequences for the global community. GCR uses an emotionally charged coercive rhetoric to call for immediate political and military measures to support Ukraine so the war can be stopped before it spreads beyond its current borders. The principal narrator of GCR is the state of Ukraine itself, though the narrative is re-contextualized in a variety of other countries located in geographical proximity to the conflict, such as Poland and other states of Central Europe. In contrast to GCR, the LCR narrative, performed mostly by the Kremlin, construes the Russia-Ukraine conflict as an essentially local affair (merely a ‘special operation’ conducted by Russian forces) providing no legitimate reasons for foreign intervention. Involving fewer explicit ploys used for threat generation and public coercion, LCR is distinctive for its large number of sub-narratives appropriated for different geopolitical audiences, which include not only the Russian and the Ukrainian people, but also specific audience groups in the West and the Global South. Altogether, the inherent complexity of both narratives, and the process of their re-composition in the global discourse space requires further studies, focused not only on their conceptual design but on strictly linguistic features and lexico-grammatical markers of the GCR/LCR status.