Book review: Piotr Cap, The Discourse of Conflict and Crisis: Poland’s Political Rhetoric in the European Perspective

This book investigates the linguistics features and strategies of conflict, crisis, and threat construction in the context of Poland, especially when the right-wing populist and conservative political party, Law & Justice (L&J), came to power in 2015. The party is known for its anti-democratic and anti-European disposition, which especially gained supports from the people who viewed European integration as obstacles to develop their own economy and who defended national identity and traditional beliefs. This book focuses on the discursive construction, and examines how the populist rhetoric is produced by L&J’s leaders to enact their leadership and reinforce their ideologies. It covers discussions of the parliamentary and governmental discourse against the opponents who weaken the ruling legitimization, and the complicated relations with the European Union related to immigration and economic activities. Through conducting a comprehensive discourse analysis on parliamentary discourse and governmental discourse from L&J leaders, this book highlights the threat generation as a powerful instrument for L&J to exert social coercion and consolidate the leadership. It also provides insights into the relations between L&J and the populist right-wing rhetoric trend in Europe. Along with the introduction and concluding remarks, this book is composed of six chapters. The first two chapters give details about the background of the study. Chapter 1 presents a synthetic account of the theoretical underpinnings of political leadership and political communication, and illustrates intertwined relations between threat construction, social coercion, (de)legitimization, propaganda, fear dichotomies, and credibility. It discusses the important role of the threat production and conflict management in enacting the political leadership, and further argues for the discursive construction of the Us-and-Them conflict as central instrument of generating threat. Finally, this chapter introduces the feasible analytical models, for instance, discourse space theory (DST), political metaphor (PM) and proximization in the examination of the discursive 1170676 DCM0010.1177/17504813231170676Discourse & CommunicationBook reviews book-review2023