Beyond warzones: conflict-stricken states as viewed by the Czech corpus collocations

Abstract

The aim of the article is to observe how countries that have faced armed conflicts in the recent decades are perceived in a corpus of Czech, mostly journalism texts. We focus on eight countries where soldiers of the Czech Republic or the former Czechoslovak Republic have been deployed on the basis of a mandate after 1989 (Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, Mali, and Yugoslavia). The picture of each country is determined via a quantitative, corpus-based approach. First, a frequency analysis is conducted in an attempt to show whether texts tend to mention some conflict-affected countries more frequently than others. Second, a collocation analysis is carried out to identify the stereotypes associated with the studied countries. The results show very different perceptions of the states, ranging from those connected solely to warfare (Iraq, Afghanistan) to those that are nowadays mostly seen as holiday destinations (Croatia). Moreover, some countries do not seem to be paid much attention at all (Mali). The outcome of the research may be of use for journalists, political scholars, and geographers and provides the respective disciplines with a new methodological approach.