Discursive Construction of Security and Legitimacy: Media Framing of the Polish–Belarusian Border

This paper presents the results of a National Science Centre–funded project, “Framing the Situation at the Polish–Belarusian Border in 2021.” Historically, Poland has been a country of emigration rather than immigration, with research focusing on the diaspora abroad or “Euro-orphans” left behind by migrant parents. Migration became a politicized public issue in 2015, yet actual inflows remained limited. The situation changed dramatically in mid-2021, when the Belarusian government facilitated a large-scale influx of migrants from Asia and Africa, leading to unprecedented pressures on Poland’s eastern border. The study examines how Polish media framed this crisis and how these narratives shaped public understanding of migration and security. It analyzes coverage during the first five months of the crisis (August–December 2021) across four major outlets—TVP Info, TVN24, Polsat News, and Republika—comprising 2,772 articles totaling over one million words. Drawing on corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), including EmoTagger and HateSpeech, the analysis identifies patterns of emotion, sentiment, and aggression. Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies methods—frequency lists, collocation analysis, and Word Sketch—allow for a fine-grained examination of recurring lexical and semantic patterns. Complementary qualitative visual analysis, based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) notion of visual grammar, explores information value, salience, and framing in news images. Findings are interpreted through the lenses of discursive (de)legitimation, securitization, and Neo-Orientalism. The results show that TVP Info, Polsat, and Republika framed the 2021 Polish–Belarusian border crisis primarily through a securitizing lens, portraying the situation as a form of hybrid threat, empahsizing external orchestration by Belarus and Russia. However, Polsat adopted a more nuanced approach, combining security concerns with humanitarian perspectives and a broader range of voices. In comparison, theperspective offered by TVP and Republika was relatively one-sided. Still, while TVP would often attack opposition politicians and show people at the border as culturally inferior, Republika’s discourse was not based on insinuations or manipulations, even though it certainly legitimized the government’s perspective. This suggests a difference in tone between these two outlets, though not necessarily in ideological alignment. On the other hand, the liberal TVN highlighted the humanitarian dimension, giving voice to people at the border. Simultaneously, its coverage tended to delegitimize the actions of the government and Border Guard by framing them as unlawful or morally questionable. These divergences highlights reflect broader patterns of polarization within the Polish media landscape. Overall, the study demonstrates how corpus-based and NLP-driven methods can advance political science research by providing systematic evidence of how security threats and political legitimacy are discursively constructed in mass media. Further, the visual analysis framework allows the researcher to go beyond the textual level, capturing how visual composition contribute to meaning-making. The project therefore highlights a synergy between political science and discourse studies, calling for a closer cooperation between the two disciplines.