Abstract This chapter intends to provide an argumentative perspective on the justification of securitization by Southern EU’s political leaders in times of a public health crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic by examining instances of public discourses, specifically addresses to the nation of four EU leaders with different ideological positioning, in different social settings of the European South. Based on the theory of securitization, we perceive public debate as a polylogical phenomenon where multiple actors, from multiple (ideological) positions, in multiple times and spaces interact, creating a complex network of public communication while expressing and supporting their claims. Through this prism, our aim is to shed light on argumentative polylogues by unveiling whether and how the state of emergency has been justified. We employ the frame of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016) to study the socio-historically conditions against which established endoxical premises are (re)constructed by the political leadership and how these interrelate with specific argumentation strategies (topoi) in the social settings under scrutiny. We then draw on the quasi-Y structure provided by the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) (Rigotti & Greco, 2019) to scrutinize the interplay of topical and endoxical premises in the development of single standpoint-argument couplings.
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