Mediated Discourses of Conflict across Languages and Genres : Coverage and Reception of the War in Ukraine

This open access edited book provides a unique entry point to the understanding of politicized journalistic practices as well as rhetorical and linguistic strategies recruited for the coverage of the full-scale war in Ukraine initiated by the Russian Federation in 2022. It consists of a comprehensive set of studies on mediated political discourses from countries neighboring Ukraine – Poland and Romania – presented against the backdrop of English-language reporting of the conflict. The individual studies in the collection explore conflict discourses using either corpus-assisted comparative approaches or interpretative case studies of specific phenomena across languages and genres, basing on a representative dataset from an international project (CORECON, 2024-2026). The authors document the dynamic nature of contemporary war coverage, given a variety of patterns of reception of the discourses of conflict. The collection also highlights a range of problematic journalistic practices in emerging media formats and inspires further research on mediated conflict discourses and war coverage.  “In a carefully reasoned and methodologically transparent approach, the collection explores war media discourses in Romania and Poland, as well as in a comparative sample of English-language coverage. It offers a number of well-founded scientific studies of terminology, stance-making, narratives, visuals, news values, and representations of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By systematically analyzing stylistic, discursive and rhetorical strategies, the authors also interrogate current editorial practices. They highlight critical issues with media outputs and ideologies co-produced by structural and technological affordances of online conflict coverage.”   -- Prof. Valentyna Ushchyna, Chair of the English Philology Department, Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University, Lutsk, Ukraine