Discourse and imagined communities in perceived threats and adversaries: A comparative media analysis of the South China sea conflict

This study critically examines how English-language media in Southeast Asia construct collective identities and frame China as an adversary in coverage of the South China Sea conflict. Extending Benedict Anderson's imagined communities, it argues that national belonging is produced not only through narratives of internal cohesion but also through the symbolic construction of external threats. Media thus operate as key sites for articulating sovereignty, legitimising territorial claims, and constructing in-group/out-group boundaries. Comparing The Philippine Daily Inquirer , The Saigon Times , and The Jakarta Post , the study first applies semantic similarity clustering to a corpus of 1737 news articles (2013–2018) to identify periods of discursive intensity. Three flashpoints emerge: the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling, the 2014 Haiyang Shiyou oil rig standoff, and the 2016 Natuna confrontations. From these clusters, 12 articles are selected for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Grounded in Fairclough's (2003) view of discourse as social practice and Reisigl and Wodak's (2001) framework of identity construction, the CDA examines labelling, metaphor, modality, and evaluation. Philippine media frame China as a hegemon and celebrate the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruling as a moral and legal triumph. Vietnamese reporting foregrounds collective victimhood, while Indonesian coverage invokes collective memories of territorial loss to frame the dispute through national self-reflection. The findings show how imagined communities are reinforced through adversarial framing and affective discourse. By foregrounding how discourse constitutes geopolitical meaning, the study contributes to understanding how media shape imagined national identity and legitimise state narratives in contested maritime spaces.