ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

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Protecting Society Against Refugees and Immigrants: The Conservatism of the Radical Right's Defense of Women’s Rights Against Islam

B. De Cleen

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Communication Studies, Brussels, Belgium

Radical right parties and movements have historically been and continue to be among the fiercest proponents of patriarchy and opponents of feminism

and other gender politics, from the right to abortion to same-sex marriage and adoption. At the same time, the radical right’s position regarding gender

issues has become more nuanced and ambiguous. Whilst continuing to defend traditional gender roles, radical right voices increasingly present themselves

as the defenders of women’s rights against“Islamisation”. Indeed, one of the central and most powerful discursive strategies in contemporary radical right

(and broader right-wing) opposition to refugees has been to argue that these people treat women in ways that are incompatible with“our Western liberal

democratic Enlightenment values” and “threaten our way of life”. This paper presents a discourse-theoretical analysis (Carpentier & De Cleen 2007; Glynos

& Howarth 2007) of how the Flemish radical right positions itself as the defender of women’s rights against Islamisation. It looks at both party political

actors (the VB, especially its‘Women against Islamisation’initiative) and civil society voices (Pegida Flanders). Empirical material is taken from the websites

of the VB and Pegida Vlaanderen and includes written, audio, video and photographic texts. The paper’s main argument is that there are profound simi‑

larities between the radical right’s traditional anti-feminism and its anti-Islamic protection of the liberal values of freedom and equality for women. There

are obvious contradictions between both, but both are structured around a conservative logic. In both cases the radical right presents itself as the defender

of what is, of society as it is today against threats to the continuity of society – even if what is being defended is very different and indeed contradictory

on the level of content. The paper shows how both these rhetorics discursively construct a “crisis”, “downfall”, “loss”, “demise”, “threat” and “disintegration”

against which society needs to be “defended” and “protected”. To grasp this similarity we need to move away from the dominant ideological definition

of conservatism (as a set of ideas) towards a more flexible and formal discursive definition (cf. Laclau’s 2005 definition of populism) that is more useful to

the study of political discourse. The paper therefore proposes a definition of conservatism as a political logic that can be used to formulate very different

and even contradictory demands as a matter of ensuring the continuity of the social order between past, present, and future. The need for conservation and

the social order that is deemed in need of conservation are discursively constructed and reproduced in opposition to (a demand for) change that is presented

as a dislocatory threat to the continuity of society. This definition helps to understand the continued centrality of conservatism to radical right politics, and

the flexibility of such politics. And, more generally, it highlights the political agency of conservatives in discursively constructing society by claiming to

merely conserve it, and the power of the claim to conserve as a way to interpellate and mobilise citizens and provide an object of identification.

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The Presentation of the Minority of Yazidi in Turkish Print Media after ISIS Massaccres

S. Aydos

Gazi University, Public Relation and Publicity, Ankara, Turkey

It is expected that plurality and representation should not only be in the parliament but also in various social platforms, one of which is the media. The abil‑

ity of plural and democratic representation of media depends on its ability to reflect all points of views and experiences of all the groups in the society. In

this sense, minority groups should be represented in the media’s agenda as the majority is.There are studies that point out that the press ignores minorities.

The studies also point out that the press only makes news that are functional for the continuity of the system in Turkey. This is also valid for the Yazidis,

forming a minority group. However, after ISIS’s massacres and rapes towards the Yazidis living in the mountains of Sincar and the surrounding villages

in north-west Iraq, they started to appear in Turkish press more often. The news describing the Yazidi practice of life and religion and the news describ‑

ing the murders and rapes by ISIS appeared in the media simultaneously. It is demonstrated that the Yazidis were previously an invisible community for

the Turkish society and press. Three newspapers (Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Yeni Şafak) with different ideological approaches were selected and the news made

by these newspapers describing the Yazidis during August and September in 2014, were analyzed with critical discourse analysis. In this paper, the effects

of the discourses and framing of the news to legitimize and reproduce the prejudice and inequalities toward theYazidis have been dealt with in the historical

and social dimensions. Due to the “Angel Tavus,” a figure in the Yazidi religion, there is a misconception that the Yazidis worship devil. This has influenced

the representation of the Yazidis in the ideologically differentiated press to a certain extent. In the representations of the news related with the Yazidis,

the murders and rapes were frequently presented as independent individual tragedies despite their political and cultural context. Besides this, the press has

used the news describing the rapes and enslavement of the Yazidi women by ISIS, the part of the tabloidization.

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The Mediation of Politics vs. the Political: Indigenous Activists and Institutional Politics at UN Climate Summits

A. Roosvall

Stockholm University, Dep. of Media Studies, Stockholm, Sweden

This paper discusses tensions between transnational activism and international politics at the UN climate summits and the media’s roles in relation to

this. It builds on interviews with indigenous activists at COP 21 (Paris 2015) and COP17 (Durban 2011) together with quantitative and qualitative analysis

of media coverage of these and two other COPs (Copenhagen 2009, Warsaw 2013). The aim is to identify clashes and interplay between the international

summit politics and transnational ideological expressions from groups outside of (inter-)national politics and how the media relate to these. The focus is on

ideological struggles that take place around the meetings, the radical politics of indigenous activists, their calls for justice, and how they relate to diverging

types of media: mainstream/legacy, social, and indigenous media. RQ: What characterizes relationships between media and indigenous groups at the COPs

and how does this relate to the official summit politics and to understandings of climate change as a political and natural issue? Indigenous peoples

often live in areas most exposed to acute climate change effects, and generally fall outside of the formal structure of international climate negotiations.

In connection to this, calls for climate justice (Johnson, 2009) including political justice (Fraser 2008) are increasingly heard from indigenous activists at

the climate summits. Theoretically the study builds on Mouffe’s (2005) understanding of Politics versus the Political, distinguishing between institution‑