Fear-based self-legitimising agency in the climate governance discourse: case study of the European Union’s Communication on X/Twitter

The article offers a timely intervention into the nexus of fear and institutional agency in the EU climate governance discourse. It explores how fear-based discourse is publicly mobilised by the European Union’s key institutions (the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Council/Council of the EU) in their climate governance communication on Twitter/X from 2019 to 2024, and how such discourse performatively constructs and legitimises their agency. As a prominent platform for strategic public communication, Twitter/X offers insight into how institutional actors seek to legitimise their agency in real time. In order to do so, the paper theoretically draws on discursive institutionalism, the concept of performative agency, and the affective politics of fear to conceptualise fear-based self-legitimising agency as a discursive practice through which actors articulate their capacity to act. Methodologically, it adopts a multi-method research design that integrates qualitative content analysis with a discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis. The analysis shows a significant reliance on fear-based appeals in the institutions’ enactment of self-legitimising agency, revealing how three dominant topoi – of threat, urgency, and fight – structure the fear-based discourse that performatively affirm their capacity to act.