Discursive Construction of territorial disputes: foreign newspaper reporting on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute

Most studies of the news discourse surrounding territorial disputes focus on the domestic newspapers of the conflicting countries from the perspective of “us” and “them”. This study examines how the newspapers of foreign countries discursively construct a territorial dispute within the framework of an intergroup conflict schema. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of articles on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute published online in five newspapers of record (the New York Times, the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Le Monde, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) reveals two main points: First, the articles published by these newspapers share a similar intergroup conflict schema that is based on competition and the pursuit of national interests as interpreted in conformance with the national interests of the respective countries (USA, UK, Australia, France, and Germany). Second, in terms of how news discourse is framed, there are noticeable differences between the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the other four which may reflect the influence of Germany’s socio-historical context on domestic public opinion.