Discursive diplomacy: Constructing Russia and Ukraine in the English-language press of East Asian democratic nations
Vol.19,No.1(2026)
Discourse and Interaction
This article examines how the public diplomatic, English-language press in East Asian democracies – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – constructed Russia and Ukraine in the first year of the war. Drawing on a 2.06-million word corpus of news coverage from The Japan News, The Korea Herald, The Korea Times, and Taiwan News, we undertake a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the most frequent collocate variations of identity construction terms for both national actors in the data, focusing specifically on referential and predication strategies, as well as the discursive construction of transitivity. Our findings suggest that these outlets’ public-diplomacy patterning aligned with a U.S.-led bloc: Russia is cast as economically central yet norm-violating and is positioned as a legitimate target of condemnation and sanctions, often alongside China. By contrast, Ukraine is cast as a sovereign state and productive economy and represented transitively as the object of Russian attack and the beneficiary/agent of allied support and rebuilding. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding how public diplomati press outlets function toward geopolitical bloc identity-building and polarisation during times of international conflict.
corpus assisted discourse analysis; russia ukraine war; east asian democracies; public diplomacy; categorisation; transitivity; attribution
Zixiu Liu
Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University
Zixiu Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research interests lie at the nexus of media and politics, with a particular focus on media, war, and conflict.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9304-0196
Address: Department of Media and Communication, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China. [e-mail: Zixiu.Liu@xjtlu.edu.cn]
Stephen Goulding
University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Stephen Goulding is Assistant Professor in the School of International Communication at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. His research focuses on (post-)conflict discourses of marginalised political groups, media discourses of conflict, and the construction of ethno-national(ist) identities across different types of media.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7526-915X
Address: School of International Communication, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, China. [e-mail: Stephen.Goulding@nottingham.edu.cn]
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