This article takes a closer look at intimate partner violence (IPV) and its semantical, political, and legal interactions with crisis and crisis discourse. Starting from the fact that IPV has been called a “shadow pandemic” and a “hidden crisis”, the article conceptualizes two parallel phenomena: how the COVID-19 pandemic — and crises in general — impact on IPV by exacerbating vulnerabilities and how crisis discourse has been mobilized to argue for a responsive state and strong positive obligations to combat and (...) reduce IPV. The article then draws a parallel between crisis discourse and vulnerability reasoning, analyzing how vulnerability has played a similar role within the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and led the latter to develop a consistent strand of case law concretizing states’ positive obligations. The article also takes a critical stance, examining the risks of crisis discourse and vulnerability when viewed through a crisis lens. To counter these risks, it argues for a nuanced, structural, and dynamic understanding of vulnerability and a focus on resilience-building institutions and mechanisms. Within the ECtHR case law, this signifies elaborating upon the already existing positive obligations, including by taking inspiration from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention). Such an approach is necessary to leave behind the emergency time usually associated with crises and work toward lasting structural change. (shrink)

Personification, one of major types of metaphors often employed to express an attitude, is also an argumentative tool, especially in media texts on politically contested events. The present investigation aims at disclosing the attitudinal stance in personifying Ukraine, Russia, the Western countries and Lithuania in a corpus of texts collected from Lithuanian media in 2015–2018. The study relies on the three-step Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA, Charteris-Black 2004), involving three levels: linguistic, cognitive and rhetorical. More specifically, they include (1) identifying personification (...) cases, (2) interpreting personification through cognitive metaphorical scenarios (Musolff 2016), and (3) explaining ideological implications encoded in the scenarios. The findings indicate that in the scenario of COMMUNICATION, Ukraine is mostly presented positively: active defender and in need of support, with occasional scepticism whether it is capable to change. The West, Lithuania including, is presented as a supporter, whereas Russia is viewed as a negatively evaluated antagonist. (shrink)

This article discusses one of the main problems of the Zalpa-text, namely that its mythological part deals with the relations between Zalpa and Nēša, but leaves Ḫattuša unmentioned, whereas its historical part deals with the relations between Zalpa and Ḫattuša, but contains no reference to Nēša. Following Martínez’ 2016 suggestion that in the text’s historical part Ḫattuša does not have the function of capital of the kings who feature in this story, but is merely used as a military base for (...) the campaigns against Zalpa, it will be argued that during the historical events described in the Zalpa-text these kings in fact ruled from Nēša. A major consequence of this interpretation is that Nēša was the capital during the reigns of the early Hittite kings Ḫuzzii̯a I and Labarna I and also that Ḫattušili I ascended the throne there before he moved his court to Ḫattuša. (shrink)