Nationalistic Rhetoric as a Tool for Repressing Social Movements

Abstract: The presence of state capture and political disadvantages incite the emergence of social movements, which hope to induce a removal of political disadvantages. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) protests and social movements have been initiated for several reasons, often to lay attention on the government's dysfunction. Nationalism has been shown to potentially be destructive in those ways it is used to silence the opposition and this essay has identified how nationalism has been a tool for politicians to repress social movements in BiH. By using the paper's theoretical framework, a discursive analysis of politicians’ repressive statements towards three different types of social movements has been done. The three types of social movements included in the analysis are the LGBT movement in BiH, the student movements in Jajce and Travnik and the ‘Justice for David’ movement in Banja Luka. The results have shown that repression mostly occurs through emphasizing the threat of the movement in different ways as well as invoking nationalism. Nationalism is also frequently present through the classification of a “we” and “them”. Future research would benefit from explaining why specific aspects of nationalistic discourse are more common than others in politicians' repressive statements.