Project Details
Projekt
Defensive Publics and their Imagined Security Communities in the Digital Realm
Subject Area
Communication Sciences
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544962752
In catastrophic times, never-ending crises and experiences of harm and loss may cause citizens to lose trust in government, its institutions (incl. traditional media) and democracy itself. In this context, the use of novel digital information intermediaries, such as social network platforms, messenger apps, and search engines, by dissatisfied citizens may result in the formation of counter publics. Historically, counter publics were recognised as a refuge for subaltern minorities with an emancipatory, anti-hegemonial impetus. However, 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 so-called “defensive publics” are discursive spaces which exist in parallel to the broader public sphere and allow participants to develop their own re-imaginings of the state and its promise of security, thus creating their own “Imagined Security Communities” (ISC): The ISC may vary in their inclusion and exclusion criteria, the perceived threats and preferred defenders as well as the modes of protection discussed. Through these discursive spaces, defensive publics serve as testing and training grounds for argumentative patterns, emotional narratives, and symbols that proponents can then employ in the mainstream public sphere, facilitated by the networked digital ecosystem. 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. The project will undertake a systematic examination of the role of defensive publics in developing alternative ISC. By comparing defensive publics with differing degrees of discursive power and from public spheres with varying degrees of illiberality on different digital platforms, the project 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. The primary focus of the project is on German defensive publics with additional analyses of defensive publics in three East European countries conducted as points of comparison. Methodologically, the project will adopt a mixed-methods approach that integrates digital investigative ethnography and multi-modal critical discourse analysis with the latest Natural Language Processing techniques and multi-modal automatic analysis to identify issues, events, and modes of communication in defensive publics’ discourses on social media platforms and messenger services.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Subproject of
FOR 5870:
The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times
International Connection
Poland, United Kingdom
Cooperation Partners
Dr. Sabina Mihelj; Professorin Dr. Agnieszka Stepinska; Professor Dr. Vaclav Stetka
