State agents’ responsibility for human rights abuses: contrasting imaginaries in (social) media

Pécher, Stéphanie
(2025) 6th DiscourseNet Congress Discourse and the imaginaries of past, present and futures societies — Location: Université Libre de Bruxelles (7.July.2025)

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In October 2019, the Chileans started to protest against social inequalities and in favour of a new Constitution. This social crisis was met with harsh state repression and hundreds of human rights (HR) abuses were denounced. In this context, (social) media played a crucial role in the construction and distribution of contrasting imaginaries (Pécher, 2024). In this case study, we want to explore how (social) media participated in the production of such imaginaries by analysing how responsibility for HR abuses is linguistically constructed for cases of eye injuries (i.e. when the victim lost an eye or became blind because of state agents’ actions), an emblematic type of injury during these protests (220 victims between October 2019 and March 2020 (INDH, 2023)). We focus on newspaper articles and tweets that cover specific cases of eye injuries and analyse to what extent the state agents’ responsibility is made explicit by looking at agentivity -intrinsically connected to responsibility (Yamamoto, 2006). In order to do so, we draw on various discursive, syntactic and semantic parameters that influence the expression of different degrees of agentivity (De Cock and Michaud Maturana, 2014). This study highlights how different conceptualizations of responsibility can shape contrasting imaginaries about the role of the state in HR abuses. We expect to find higher levels of agentivity in the tweets, social media being spaces where alternative voices often rise to challenge more traditional imaginaries. We also expect to find variation within the newspaper articles, more specifically between traditional and alternative media.
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Pécher, S. (2025). State agents’ responsibility for human rights abuses: contrasting imaginaries in (social) media. 6th DiscourseNet Congress Discourse and the imaginaries of past, present and futures societies, Université Libre de Bruxelles. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274964