Abstract
Dehumanization is the process of denying full humanness to others, that is, treating people as less than fully human. This places them outside the boundaries of moral concern, making harm against them seem more acceptable (Volpato and Andrighetto, 2015). This concept has been widely studied in social psychology, a field that examines how people think about, relate to, and treat others. Across this field, researchers have explored how dehumanization supports prejudice, violence and harm. For example, Allport (1954) linked it to prejudice, Kelman (1973) to state violence, Bandura (1999) to moral disengagement. Haslam (2006) distinguished different forms of dehumanization. Together, this body of research shows that dehumanization helps people justify harmful actions towards others. However, these approaches pay less attention to language. When language is discussed, it is usually treated as a tool for expressing prejudice or reducing feelings of guilt, rather than as a central part of how dehumanization works. Bringing Critical Discourse Analysis into dialogue with social psychology, the book under review shifts attention to language itself, arguing dehumanization is not simply expressed in language, but enacted through recurring practices of naming, framing, distancing, and agency management.
The book’s theoretical framework is developed in the introduction and the first two chapters. The introduction situates dehumanization within decolonial thought through Fanon’s ([1952] 1967) concept of the ‘zone of nonbeing’, where colonized subjects are denied full humanity, recognition, and rights. Dehumanization is thus presented as part of a broader structure of power that determines who counts as fully human. Chapter 1 reviews social-psychological research and outlines core forms of dehumanization. One of these is ‘infrahumanization’, which denies outgroups full human emotions, and ‘animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization’, which casts people as subhuman, object-like, or emotionally inert. Chapter 2 examines how dehumanization works through linguistic strategies such as metaphor, metonymy, euphemism, passive voice, agency suppression, and ideological polarization. It introduces two key analytical tools. The first is a psychological-discursive model of moral disengagement, which links Bandura’s (1999) stages to linguistic strategies that justify harm, obscure consequences, distance speakers from responsibility, and dehumanize victims. The second is the concept of ‘discursive worldview’, which describes the version of reality constructed through discourse through its participants, values, categories, and recurrent forms of representation. Arguably, this concept is close to Van Leeuwen and Wodak’s (1999) notion of the ‘discursive script’.
Chapter 3 presents two media case studies. The first examines English-language reporting on the Syrian war. It shows how terms such as ‘collateral damage’ and ‘surgical strikes’ sanitize violence by obscuring agency and minimizing human suffering. Waśniewska distinguishes between ‘veiling euphemisms’ that soften language to fit social norms, and ‘concealing euphemisms’, which withhold information and preserve discursive dominance. This distinction shows that sanitized language does more than mitigate violence. It also hides responsibility by presenting destruction as something that simply happens, while those who authorize it disappear behind passive constructions and impersonal formulations. The second case study examines British press portrayals of Syrian refugees. It identifies recurring metaphors that frame refugees as a flood, an invasion, a burden, or a threat. The widely circulated image of Alan Kurdi, a young Syrian boy who drowned while his family was fleeing the war, briefly personalized the crisis and renewed moral concern. At the same time, it revealed how unstable these media frames were, since this moment of sympathy soon gave way to more familiar dehumanizing patterns.
Chapter 4 examines racist language on Stormfront.org through animal metaphor, color symbolism, nominalization, and the Great Chain of Being. This is a hierarchical model that ranks forms of life from lower to higher, and places humans above animals. Waśniewska shows that comparisons to animals do not all work in the same way. Apes and monkeys are used to mark Black people as primitive and deficient in rationality, while rats and parasites are used to represent Jews, migrants, and other racialized groups as contaminating, invasive, and fit for removal. The chapter argues that racist communication is sustained not only by explicit slurs, but also by recurring patterns of naming, metaphor, and categorization. Through the concept of discursive worldview, it shows how these patterns position White people as fully human and superior, while casting others as inferior, threatening, or expendable.
Chapters 5 to 7 shift the book’s attention to institutional contexts in which dehumanization emerges through professional routine, legal procedure, and political strategy. Chapter 5 analyzes medical communications and shows how nominalization, depersonalized reference and grammatical structures reduce patients to diagnoses, body parts, or cases. These linguistic choices privilege physicians’ observations and clinical data over patients’ own accounts. Chapter 6 focuses on legal language and reveals how deixis, labeling, passive voice and agency erasure create emotional and moral distance between jurors and defendants in U.S. capital punishment cases.
Chapter 7 extends the analysis by focusing on delegitimization, a process closely related to dehumanization. In U.S. Republican anti-transgender rhetoric, transgender identity is constructed as a threat, a disorder, or an imposed ideology. Within this framing, conservative speakers present themselves as defenders of children, truth, faith, and national order. This rhetoric not only stigmatizes a marginalized group. It also strengthens conservative moral and political authority by denying transgender people full recognition as social actors. This is reinforced at the level of linguistic structure. Speakers tend to avoid the phrase ‘transgender people’ and use ‘transgender’ as an abstract modifier, rather than a term referring to persons. This shifts attention away from individuals and weakens their position as agents within discourses. Collectively, the case studies support the book’s central claim: dehumanization is not simply expressed in language, but actively produced through it.
The book leaves several questions unresolved. Its attempt to combine moral disengagement theory with discourse analysis is ambitious, but not always fully coherent. In practice, a single linguistic form can dehumanize, minimize harm, justify action and obscure agency all at once. These overlapping functions are not fully captured by the stage model outlined in Chapter 2. A similar issue appears in the concept of discursive worldview. While it is carefully developed in the analysis of the Stormfront community (Chapter 4), it is less clearly applied in later case studies. These limitations seem to result from the project’s broad scope and its aim to bring diverse forms of communication under a single framework.
Overall, The Discourse of Dehumanization provides a detailed and carefully argued account of how language constructs the boundaries of the human. It will be essential reading for scholars and advanced students in critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, media studies, political communication, and related fields.