Panel 2 - Religion, Security, and Political Communication in Central and Eastern Europe

Politics in Central and Eastern Europe has been reshaped over the past two decades by post-socialist transformations, geopolitical shocks, democratic backsliding, and growing forms of societal insecurity. Beyond conventional security concerns, non-traditional threats such as economic insecurity, supply-chain disruptions, and food insecurity have become increasingly salient in political discourse. At the same time, new political parties and movements have emerged that mobilise religion, morality, and identity as political resources, reframing social anxieties in security terms. My paper examines how food insecurity is constructed as a security issue by new political parties in Central and Eastern Europe through religious and moral narratives. Adopting an international relations perspective, this paper conceptualises food insecurity as a non-traditional human security concern whose political significance is shaped less by material conditions alone than by processes of securitisation. The core research objective is to analyse how political actors translate experiences of scarcity and vulnerability into security claims through political communication, thereby facilitating political mobilisation and polarisation. While existing research on food security primarily focuses on global governance, conflict, or development, and research on religion and politics in Central and Eastern Europe tends to emphasise nationalism, populism, or church–state relations, limited attention has been paid to the intersection of food insecurity, religion, and party politics. In particular, the role of religious and moral discourses in securitising everyday material insecurity remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by bringing together insights from securitisation theory, human security debates on religion as a political resource. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative discourse analysis of, leaders’ speeches, and digital communication produced by new or non-mainstream political parties across Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis focuses on how narratives of scarcity, threat, and moral decline are articulated, and how religious symbolism and language are used to legitimise security claims. Particular attention is paid to processes of moral and spiritual securitisation, through which material insecurity is reframed as a threat to social order, collective identity, and communal survival. The paper shows that food insecurity is rarely presented as a policy or welfare issue; instead, it is discursively transformed into a security problem that justifies exclusionary identities and polarising political positions. Empirically, its findings demonstrate how religion mediates the translation of transnational economic consequences into domestically resonant security narratives. By doing so, the paper contributes to international relations debates on non-traditional security and advances understanding of how religion and political communication shape contemporary party competition and radicalisation dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe.