How Far from Genocide? The Semiotic Construction of African Foreign Nationals as Existential Threats in South Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18326/jopr.v8i3.934-971Keywords:
Dangerous speech, African foreign nationals, Genocide, Anti-migrant discourseAbstract
South Africa has experienced recurrent violence against African foreign nationals for more than three decades, while organized anti-migrant movements since 2021 have shifted hostile rhetoric from the political margins to the center of public discourse. This study argues that the language used to describe African foreign nationals constitutes dangerous speech that constructs them as existential threats and creates conditions conducive to collective violence. Drawing on Susan Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Framework (DSF), Saussurean syntagmatic and associative meaning relations, and George Stanton’s staged model of genocide, the study pursues three objectives: to identify the discursive construction of African foreign nationals as existential threats; to determine the prevalence of the five dangerous-speech hallmarks; and to assess South Africa’s position on Stanton’s genocide continuum. The corpus comprises 2,324 social media posts from X and Facebook, together with 214 YouTube news segments relating to the activities of Operation Dudula, the March and March movement, and the MK Party between 2021 and 2026. The findings reveal the presence of all five dangerous-speech hallmarks, with dehumanization emerging as the most frequent (60.8%) and threats to women and children the least frequent (27.6%). These patterns are realized through identifiable linguistic mechanisms, including derogatory labels, metaphors of disease and infestation, criminality modifiers, and expulsive imperatives. The study introduces the Dangerous Speech–Genocide Escalation (DSGE) model, which integrates linguistic analysis with the DSF and Stanton’s framework. Applied to South Africa, the model indicates that the country is not experiencing genocide but has progressed significantly along the pre-genocidal pathway, highlighting the urgent need for preventative intervention.
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