Post-Truth as Governance: Parliamentary Discourse and the Securitisation of Migration in Poland

This paper examines how securitization-driven post-truth politics became embedded migration and border management during the Polish–Belarusian border crisis (2021–2024). Rather than treating post-truth as exaggeration, manipulation, or the language of political fringes, the paper shows how emotionally charged claims, strategic secrecy, and the production of ignorance and uncertainty came to structure mainstream parliamentary debate and policy practice in Poland. The focus is not on whether policies were justified by “good evidence,” but on how particular stories about migrants, borders, and national security became dominant, persuasive, and difficult to challenge. The analysis follows three phases of debate in the Polish Sejm, each marking a deeper entrenchment of securitised and post-truth framings. Over time, migrants were portrayed not only as irregular border crossers, but as criminals, terrorists, and instruments of “hybrid warfare.” These depictions were accompanied by exceptional measures: military deployment, emergency and buffer zones, restricted access to the border, and tight control over information. Many of the claims used to justify these actions were unverifiable, exaggerated, or later discredited, yet they proved politically powerful. Crucially, these narratives did not remain confined to one party. They were gradually taken up across the political spectrum, reshaping what could be said in parliament and narrowing the space for humanitarian or critical intervention. Methodologically, the paper uses argumentative discourse analysis to trace how specific claims and storylines were produced, repeated, and normalised across key parliamentary debates. This approach is particularly suited to studying post-truth, which rarely operates through simple denial of facts. Instead, it works through fear, moral polarisation, and the selective visibility of information. By following how arguments travel, settle, and harden, the analysis shows how post-truth moves from rhetoric into routine political practice. The Polish case illustrates what can be described as “deep post-truth”. A situation in which post-truth no longer merely distorts and disrupts debates but reorganises them. Appeals to emergency, secrecy, and national survival gradually displaced other ways of talking about migration, marginalised humanitarian and expert voices, and made emotionally charged simplifications appear natural and self-evident. Post-truth thus functioned not as an aberration, but as a governing logic shaping how migration was imagined, debated, and acted upon.