From Eco-Heroes to Eco-Zeroes: A Critical Review of the Shifts in International Political Discourse Around Climate Activism

Abstract

Climate activism faces sustained political and legal pressure across democracies, yet the accompanying media discourse has been far more studied than the discourse of officeholders. This thesis explores how climate activism, personified in the activist Greta Thunberg, is discursively constructed as a threat in international political discourse and how it legitimises such security construction. The corpus comprises seven congressional and presidential texts, dated between 2019 and 2026. Though the texts are from the USA, the thesis focuses on international discourse, treating the USA not as a national case but as a privileged site of international discourse. The object of the discourse is a transnational movement, addressed through one of its figures, with hegemonic political discourse shaping climate activism's reception elsewhere. Each text is analysed through an integrated apparatus at three levels: van Leeuwen's social-actor representation and van Dijk's ideological square at the micro-level, Wodak's discourse-historical approach at the meso- level, and Hansen's poststructuralist-intertextual approach at the macro-level. The analysis reveals that the shifts across the phases are not an assessment of Thunberg but rather the subject position assigned to her. Her admission to political discourse...