Since the recent slew of anti-democratic developments on a worldwide scale, from the onset of the xenophobic crisis in Europe to the election of president Donald Trump, scholarly interest in the Western Balkans has waned significantly. Yet new developments have unraveled in Serbia since 2012 and the coming into power of the 1990s warmonger, Aleksandar Vučić. During his now six year reign, the country has fallen into disarray, with the stifling of the freedom of the press, increased poverty, an intense brain drain, and a number of bizarre affairs in which Aleksandar Vučić's collaborators are often involved. His method of governance has shown to be intrinsically linked to the media, especially dailies that have been, for years, framing him as both being a type of Ubermensch, extremely competent, strong and efficient, while at the same time developing a victimhood narrative, via which he is painted as under constant attack, as well as a victim of numerous attempts on his life. From a methodological standpoint of media content analysis, through the theoretical lenses of discursive deception theory (and other relevant media-related theoretical standpoints), this article analyzes the discourses of the Alo! and the Informer, the two most prominent dailies that support Serbia's ruler, Aleksandar Vučić, looking into how they communicate power to their readership.
Since the end of the wars of Yugoslav secession, and since Kosovo’s declaration of independence, the Balkans—Serbia included—have taken a back seat in academic research. Even though media freedoms have been severely stifled following the coming to power of Aleksandar Vučić in 2012, today’s Serbian media are still failing to become a topic for scholarly research. In this article, we scrutinize the daily Informer, the unofficial daily of Serbia’s strongman, president Vučić, via a discourse analysis of its headlines. As shall be shown, the Informer supports the reign of Aleksandar Vučić by framing him as a hero and martyr, fighting for the ‘people’, in a highly populist fashion, discursively painting the opposition in a highly negative light, as well as promoting warmongering and the idea that Serbia is surrounded by enemies. This is achieved via discursive deception, bases on assertive rhetoric, filled with exaggerations.
Ever since the wars of the Yugoslav secession in the nineties, linguistic nationalism has proven to have been among the more relevant instances in the discursive construction of national identity and new languages, dubbed by Ranko Bugarski as 'administrative successors' of Serbo-Croatian. Even though contemporary linguistics still classifies Serbo-Croatian as one language with regional varieties (commonly dubbed 'polycentric standardized languages' in linguistics), nationalist linguists have been working tirelessly to discursively construct their own, local languages, based on national identity, script and religion. Since most scholarly production has been dealing with nationalist linguistics related to the breakup of Serbo-Croatian during and in the immediate aftermath of the wars of the Yugoslav secession, not much has been written on the current state of nationalist linguistics in Serbia in the 21st century. This article deals with the contemporary nationalist linguist discourse on the topic of the Serbian version of the polycentric standardized Serbo-Croatian language, its discursive connections to religion, nationality and the Otherizing of Croatia as the discursive Other against which a Serbian language needs to be constructed. As the article will show, this is achieved by assertive, declarative discourse.
Serbia’s government, led by Aleksandar Vučić, has in scholarship been classified as semi-authoritarian, using Marina Ottaway’s classification. Its media have also been described as being in heavy, biased support of the government. Scholarship has further revealed that the Vučić-led, post-2012 government, has thrown the country backwards in time, with corruption and affairs being the primary instance by which the regime can be described. Expectedly, the response of the government and the government-supporting media to the COVID-19 pandemic has been less than professional. The initial response included official government press conferences in which the novel coronavirus was deemed to be ’funny’ and that, in the middle of the pandemic explosion and increased deathrate in Italy, Serbia’s population was advised to go to Italy for ’shopping’. The media furthermore tried to pin the pandemic to Serbia’s opposition alleged attempts to topple the government via ’coronavirus propaganda’. This article proposes to tackle the government’s and their supporting media’s responses to COVID-19 in February/March 2019 from a Discourse Analytical perspective.
Twenty-first century Serbian nationalism has had little serious analysis. Most works concentrate heavily on the nineties and the wars of Yugoslav secession, which produced a wide variety of rampant forms of nationalism throughout former Yugoslavia. Since 5 October 2000, right-wingers have somewhat softened their line in public discourse and lost some of their popular appeal, but strong nationalist tendencies have remained, taking their place in Serbia’s social and political discourses. These tendencies have been concentrated around certain extreme right-wing groups, chief among them Dveri srpske, which has been active since the early nineties. After organizing itself politically, this movement has refurbished its image and discourse, and, in the April 2016 elections, has even succeeded in entering parliament. Here, the author analyses Dveri’s agenda and key convictions: antisemitism, an anti-EU stance, support for Putin’s Russia, clericalism, and homophobia. He also reviews Dveri’s change of image and discourse over time.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.