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Abstract: The present article discusses the relevance of studying EU political discourse in a linguistically based polyphonic perspective. The claim is that polyphony is a fruitful approach in the sense that it reveals different types of hidden interaction and thus uncovers implicit and unclear messages. Examples are taken from two speeches given by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, on Europe and European integration, speeches which can be characterised as ‘visionary speeches’. A selection of linguistic features indicating the presence of different voices in these speeches, which are formally monological, will be presented. The analysis will thus help to identify the nature of the postulated unclearness in political discourse and to make explicit the complex relationship between text and context. The theoretical framework used for analysing the speeches will be linguistic polyphony as developed in the ScaPoLine theory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely assumed differences between migration governance in the Global South and North. It juxtaposes in-depth empirical case-studies of refugee governance in Lebanon, the country with the world's highest per capita number of refugees, with a review of critical research on EUropean governance of forced and irregular migrants. This exploration demonstrates that the rationales and manifestations of the 'politics of uncertainty' that refugees are subjected to in Lebanon closely mirror those of the 'politics of abandonment' and 'exhaustion' that migrants face in EUrope. Under both regimes, strategic forms of ambiguity operate to spatially and temporally marginalize refugees and render them controllable, exploitable, and deportable. • In Lebanon, state authorities govern Syrian refugees through partially strategic forms of non-policy and institutional ambiguity. • In EUrope, migration governance practices center on imposing informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. • This is done by creating and upholding convenient policy ambivalence and implementation gaps. • This highlights important parallels between the governance of forced displacement in the Global South and North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]