Constructing Conflict and Peace: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Digital Nationalism in Bangladesh–India Border Politics
Abstract
Digital news media have become influential arenas in which national identity, conflict, and international relations are discursively constructed. This study examines how Bangladeshi and Indian online news media frame Bangladesh–India border politics and identifies the discursive strategies through which conflict-oriented and peace-oriented narratives are produced. Integrating Constructivism, Framing Theory, and Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis, the study adopts a comparative qualitative design to analyse a purposively selected corpus of 100 online news items published between January 2024 and December 2025, drawn from Prothom Alo and Dhaka Tribune in Bangladesh and Times of India and NDTV in India. The analysis identifies four recurring discursive orientations, Security, Victim, Peace, and Nationalist, each associated with a specific border issue, lexical marker, and ideological interpretation within this corpus. Bangladeshi media construct migration through securitisation and border killings through peacebuilding, whereas Indian media construct diplomatic tension through identity-based victimhood and the Teesta water dispute through digital nationalism. The corpus also suggests a shift in discursive tone across the temporal phases surrounding specific events, from more negative anticipatory coverage toward more conciliatory post-event narratives, while government, security, and public voices, recorded as a single composite source category, dominate reporting across both national contexts. By integrating digital nationalism, border politics, securitisation, and peace journalism within a comparative qualitative framework, the study advances theoretical understanding of how bilateral conflict and cooperation are linguistically constructed within a purposively selected corpus, while offering practical implications for journalists, policymakers, and peacebuilding initiatives.