A Study of Crisis Discourse on the COVID-19 in Brazil: Discourse Manipulation and Power Struggles

Abstract

Public health safety belongs to the category of ‘securitization’. However, in some countries, there is a tendency of discourse manipulation and desecuritization in COVID-19's discourse. This paper first embarks from the perspective of the Copenhagen School's securitization theory and employs an analytical framework of discourse manipulation to deconstruct the process of Bolsonaro's ‘desecuritization’ crisis discourse construction in response to the COVID-19 threat in his country, which consists in discourse restraint, discourse framing, discourse positioning. The results show that: in terms of discourse restraint strategy, Bolsonaro's government realizes this strategy by reducing the frequency of epidemic topics, continuously suppressing scientific discourse on epidemic prevention and control and suppressing public health and safety discourse through political discourse. In terms of framing strategies, the nature, severity, causes and responsibilities of COVID-19 problem are diagnosed, respectively. Through the negative frame of other programmes and the positive frame of the epidemic plan, the president constructs the expected frame of COVID-19 problem. Through incentive framing, his discourse stimulates Brazilian people's support for the federal government and the president himself and enhances public confidence in Brazil's success in overcoming the epidemic. In terms of discourse positioning strategy, the plots of ‘focusing on economic issues’, ‘life first’, ‘freedom first’ and ‘sovereignty first’ are adopted, respectively. Drawing on the three-dimensional analytical framework as a Critical Discourse Analysis tool, Bolsonaro's discourse manipulation and desecuritization strategies reflect an antagonistic regard towards the relations between economic development and epidemic prevention and a rival perspective towards the relationship between administrative authority and professional authority, and furthermore, the overlapping left-right power struggles under the crossover of the era of ‘Great changes not seen in a century’ and the COVID-19's non-traditional security crisis.