About Article

The way security threats are communicated, constructed, and shaped by the media plays a crucial role in empowering particular actors and maintaining or changing the discursive power dynamics and relations within societies. Worldwide, a series of topics are presented in media as threats, demanding and necessitating emergency actions to address them, such as migration (Huysmans & Squire, 2009), minority rights (Prina, 2020), disinformation (Mareš & Mlejnková, 2021), and natural disasters (Lele, 2008). In recent years, especially with the problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a lively academic discussion about emergency threats becoming a political tool for realizing ambitions and how emergency politics and strategic narratives tend to become the status quo, leading to a decline in the public’s freedom, harming democracy (De La Peña, 2021; Guasti, 2020; Heupel et al., 2021; Honig, 2014; Karyotakis, 2024). As scholars have pointed out in the past (Honig, 2009; Lührmann & Rooney, 2021), democracies should not implement emergency politics that centralize power, as such practices alienate the public and harm the country’s unity. Indeed, the power holders may present different issues as security threats, following the public’s needs, or making the public keen on accepting controversial actions, such as fake news laws, restriction of minorities’ rights, centralized political power, environmental destruction, and severe societal division. Unsurprisingly, countries that implemented such approaches and were previously considered democracies have turned into more autocratic regimes worldwide (Chowdhury & Keane, 2021; Keane, 2020). Instead, the power holders could promote different approaches that empower civil initiatives, creating opportunities for more robust democratic development (Honig, 2009; Lührmann & Rooney, 2021)