"[…] pour éviter qu’aujourd’hui une guerre en Ukraine accable tant les portefeuilles et que demain un autre événement vienne encore appuyer sur la plaie, il est urgent de mettre en place des mesures réduisant la consommation et renforçant dans un même élan l’autonomie énergétique" (Bernard Demonty, in Le Soir, 16 March 2022).
This excerpt from Le Soir exemplifies an increasingly prevalent journalistic tendency to intertwine contemporary and anticipated conflicts with energy-related concerns. First, the rhetoric adopts a cautionary tone, assuming the stance of a futurist who seeks both to anticipate and to forestall looming crises. Second, the discourse draws upon a martial lexicon and metaphorical repertoire (terms such as accable, plaie, and renforçant) which are cynically juxtaposed with economic imagery (portefeuille, consommation), producing a hybrid semantic field. Third, a strong argumentative linkage (Pour [...] il est urgent) is forged between present urgency and future teleology, underpinned by an ideological conception of temporality. Collectively, these discursive strategies constitute what may be termed a futurological rhetoric: a mode of discourse that fuses speculative narratives of warfare with projections of energy futures, thereby shaping public imaginaries through a blend of anticipation, moralization, and ideological framing.
This project undertakes an enunciative, rhetorical and argumentative analysis of media discourses (2020-2025) concerning the concepts of the “future” and the “aftermath”, with particular attention to narratives addressing the hypothesis of a “future war” in the context of energy transition, state autonomy, and the globalisation of geopolitical conflicts. The research seeks to explore the contemporary collective imaginary shaped by a “conflict futurology”, an imaginary that actively influences how speakers in the first quarter of the 21st century conceptualise both current representations of future politics and democratic practices.
Building on prior research on Discourses and Mythologies of Energy Transition where futurology occupies a central role, this study extends the analysis to contemporary newspaper narratives linking war, geopolitics, and energy autonomy/transition. These three thematic strands – energy transition, geopolitics and international conflict – coalesce within what Critical Discourse Studies terms the “discourse of futurity”. This draws on Fredric Jameson’s Critical Theory and its distinction between positive and negative utopias, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s historical critique, and a reappraisal of Alain Gras’ sociology. An initial examination of our media corpus – Le Soir and La Libre – demonstrates that concerns over energy supply are increasingly entangled with armed conflicts, and, by extension, geopolitical tensions. This emergent discourse is progressively shaped by a form of (techno-solutionist) prospectivism – alternately catastrophic, dystopian, utopian and irenic – that permeates contemporary political, media, and critical-theoretical arenas worldwide.
The overarching aim of this research is to elucidate the formulas, implicatures, recurring formal and argumentative patterns, constructed emotions, latent points of view and ethos embedded within French-speaking (Belgian) newspapers, while situating these discourses within their specific socio-historical and socio-discursive contexts. This approach entails a rigorous and comprehensive examination of the contradictions embedded within the ideological frameworks and positionings of these discourses. To fully capture the interdisciplinary reach of this Discourse Analysis “à la française” (ADF), close interrelation will be required between linguistics, on the one hand, and the history of technology, political science, philosophy (critical theory) and sociology, on the other hand.
The first guiding hypothesis of this study suggests that rhetorical stances and enunciative strategies play a pivotal role in shaping representations of a “future war” or, more broadly, a “future geopolitical conflict”. A typology of such stances and strategies may be established through enunciative linguistics and rhetoric, ranging from futurist endorsement, critical detachment, admonition, incisive critique, positivist techno-solutionism, reactivation of collective memories of past wars to prophetic anticipation. As scholarship has demonstrated, conceptions of time (i.e. future) are invariably embedded within specific historical and social contexts and remain inextricably bound up with (present) ideology and the representation of space.
A second hypothesis interrogates the interplay between narratives of “war futurology” and “energy-transition futurology”, with particular emphasis on the ways in which their argumentative architectures – sometimes implicit (e.g. implicatures) – overlap and increasingly converge within contemporary geopolitical discourse.
The third hypothesis concerns the comparative analysis of Le Soir and La Libre. Rather than presuming that each newspaper reflects fixed ideological positions or that the corpus is internally homogeneous, this rhetorical inquiry seeks to trace the relational dynamics, divergences, contradictions, and points of convergence that emerge between the two newspapers on specific issues. Ultimately, this investigation calls for broader comparative work, extending to media embedded in distinct discursive formations and situated within different national contexts – such as Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Libération – in order to illuminate the transnational contours of energy discourse.
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