Securitization of International Threats in Speeches of Russian and German Foreign Ministers, 2021–2023: Quantitative Analysis

Abstract. The article addresses the perception of international threats in the public speeches of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and Germany (S.V. Lavrov and A. Baerbock) against the backdrop of deteriorating bilateral relations between Moscow and Berlin after 2022. Based on a quantitative analysis of a corpus of politicians’ speeches (translated into English) using the R programming language, the study concludes that despite differences in the interpretation of security issues between the heads of diplomatic departments of Russia and Germany, their approaches to defining the spectrum of sectors related to security issues largely coincide. The essential difference is that the rhetoric of the Russian minister is dominated by the military threats, while Baerbock’s approach is characterised by greater attention to non-force aspects of security. The theoretical novelty of the study lies in attempting to use a quantitative approach to form a hierarchy of foreign policy threats in the perceptions of modern policymakers.