Discourse, deterrence and hybrid warfare on the defense ministry websites of Brazil and China

Abstract

Drawing on the British strand of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article examines the institutional discourses conveyed by the official websites of the Ministry of Defense of Brazil and the Ministry of National Defense of China, focusing on deterrence strategies, hybrid warfare and the projection of international security narratives. A qualitative and comparative approach is adopted, taking the official pages as corpus and mobilizing the analytical categories of intertextuality, interdiscursivity, modality and appraisal, articulated with the three meanings of discourse — actional, representational and identificational — proposed by Fairclough. The findings indicate that Brazilian discourse builds an inward-facing legitimizing identity, anchored in administrative transparency, citizen service and civic-patriotic tradition, whereas Chinese discourse projects an outward-facing great-power identity, assertive regarding sovereignty and structured by military diplomacy. The article discusses how these discourses activate mental hypotheses, emotions and stereotypes, with implications for military education and for the design of pedagogical resources based on cognitive theory and scenario simulation. It concludes that critical discourse literacy constitutes a first-order deterrent and defensive capability in the face of contemporary hybrid threats.