Proximization: a critical cognitive analysis of health security discourse

Abstract

Abstract With the surge of global health threats, “health security” constitutes a large proportion of international security. Drawing on proximization theory, the study aims to reveal how proximization serves to legitimize health emergency measures based on a case study of U.S. policies on travel restrictions amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The study annotated and counted the lexico-grammatical items identified as proximization triggers in terms of space, time, and axiology based on the data from a corpus of approximately 60,237 tokens. An attempt is then made for a critical cognitive analysis of health security discourse, indicating that proximization facilitates the legitimization of travel restrictions through the construction of threats, both synchronically and diachronically. Furthermore, the results suggest that the proximization approach is suited to the analysis of health security discourse. Notably, this study may shed new light on research into state politics, crisis management, and international security.