The COLD WAR Concept in Visual English-Language Political Discourse: Semiotic Representation and Pragmatics of Internet Memes and Political Cartoons (2020–2025)

The relevance of the study stems from the “visual turn” in political and media communication, where images in the formats of memes and cartoons have become dominant tools for aggregating and constructing political meanings. They offer instantly recognizable cognitive frames for interpreting complex geopolitical processes, such as the confrontation of the collective West with Russia and China. The historical memory of the Cold War serves as a key semiotic resource; however, the specific mechanisms of its visual reactivation, semiotic adaptation, and ideological reworking in digital discourse remain understudied. The aim of the article is to conduct a multi-level analysis of the specifics of the representation and functional load of the COLD WAR concept in visual English-language political discourse. The empirical material comprises a specially compiled corpus of approximately 150 Internet memes and political cartoons that emerged between 2020 and 2025, selected from social networks and digital media. The methodological foundation is an interdisciplinary synthesis, including critical visual analysis, semiotics, intertextuality theory, the framing approach, and speech act theory. The study established that the COLD WAR concept functions as a dynamic cognitive frame whose slots are filled with current content (modern leaders, digital and economic methods of confrontation). This allows for reducing the complexity of a multipolar world to a bipolar model. A stable set of visual patterns was identified: archetypes of nuclear threat (“Doomsday Clock”), strategies of historical parallels, adaptation of classical metaphors (“Iron Curtain”), and the new semantics of technological confrontation. The dominant pragmatic functions are satire and irony (serving both for criticism and for trivializing the threat) and mobilization through the construction of binary “us vs. them” oppositions. An asymmetry in representation was found: the image of Russia is built on allusions to the USSR, while the image of China is futuristic and technocratic. The visual discourse plays not a reflective, but a constitutive role, actively participating in the production and naturalization of the narrative about a “new cold war” through the manipulation of collective memory. This makes it a key field of contemporary symbolic battles.

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