Us and Them in wartime: The discursive dimension of a geopolitical conflict

The article probes into a polarization of political and media discourses in wartime. The opposition of Us and Them is analyzed with the help of van Dijk’s “ideological square.” A unique quadrilingual 357-million-word corpus of political and media discourses about the Russo-Ukrainian War assisted the critical discourse analysis. The data was collected in five countries (Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) from January 2022 to May 2025. The “ideological square” was operationalized with the help of a Russo-Ukrainian-English-French dictionary containing several versions of the “Us” and “Them” categories along with positive and negative words from the Harvard IV-4 dictionary. The category “Us” predictably tended to have positive collocates, whereas “Them” tended to have negative collocates. The “Us” versus “Them” polarization intensified in war-related speeches of the Russian and Ukrainian presidents as the war unfolded. Several mass media outlets constituted exceptions to this generalization, however. Their existence suggests the possibility of avoiding the sharp discursive polarization of media discourses even in wartime. The study also highlights that an emphasis on “Us” characterized political discourse compared with media discourse.