scholarly journals A Political Discourse Analysis of the Speeches of President Obama and Prime Minister Gillani

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Tazanfal Tehseem ◽  
Sarwat Jabeen ◽  
Samia Naz

This paper examines the discourse of the two political speeches made by the Pakistan Premier Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani and the US President Barack Obama after the elimination of Osama Bin Laden on May 3, 2011. The objective of this analysis is to discover and explicate how ideology is established and unveiled by the use of language. For the stated purpose, the framework of this study draws on Halliday’s model of transitivity (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) through which we aim to investigate the transitivity choices employed by the individual speakers, the participant roles (Hasan, 1985) assigned to the enemy and the pronoun choices (Butt et. al., 2004) made by the two speakers in order to reveal a particular socio-political stance disseminated through the two speeches in two cultures: of the USA and Pakistan. The findings indicate that linguistic choices in transitivity play a fundamental role in conveying of implicit and dominant ideologies.

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (6) ◽  
pp. 819-832 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efe Tokdemir

Foreign aid is a policy tool implemented with the purpose of fostering both hard and soft power abroad. Yet, previous research has not probed the effects of US foreign aid on public attitudes toward the US in the recipient countries. In this article, I argue that US foreign aid may actually feed anti-Americanism: aid indirectly creates winners and losers in the recipient countries, such that politically discontented people may blame the US for the survival of the prevailing regime. Drawing on Pew Research for Global Attitudes and on USAID Greenbook datasets, I focus on determining both the conditions under which foreign aid exacerbates anti-Americanism and the type of aid most likely to do this. The findings reveal that political losers of the recipient countries are more likely to express negative attitudes toward the USA as the amount of US aid increases, whereas political winners enjoy the results of US aid and view the USA positively accordingly. Moreover, the effect of US aid on attitudes toward the USA is also conditional on the regime type. While US aid increases the likelihood of anti-American attitudes among the losers in non-democratic countries, it decreases the likelihood of anti-Americanism among the losers in democratic ones. This article has important implications for policy in terms of determining how and to whom to provide aid in the context of the possible ramifications of providing aid at the individual level.


2016 ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Anatoliy Oleksiyovych Khudoliy

A Semantic-Cognitive Analysis of the Concept of Ukraine in the Speeches of B. Obama (2014)This article presents a semantic-cognitive analysis of the concept of Ukraine, verbally represented in the speeches of the American President, Barack Obama. The peculiarities of the President’s worldview are highlighted.The objective of the article is as follows. Firstly, it aims to demonstrate that the concept of Ukraine is verbally represented in the speeches of Obama. This means that Ukraine as a country, moving towards democracy despite the war with Russia, is an object of focus for American leaders. Secondly, the article suggests that there is a connection between the concept described, its pragmatic orientation and its cognitive processes. Thirdly, it describes the semantic peculiarities of the concept of Ukraine in the political speeches of the American leader, which are due to the role Ukraine plays in the local and regional context. Our research is based on the content-analysis of political speeches delivered by American President. The functional, communicative and pragmatic orientation of the speeches is highlighted. In line with the approaches of cognitive scholars, the article concludes that the concept of Ukraine is a complex semantic-cognitive structure that consists of core, transition zone and periphery. During the research for this article, fifteen speeches made by Obama in 2014 were analysed.This research presupposes the application of content analysis. It is relevant in the analysis of international relations with respect to the notions used by President Obama in his speeches delivered during 2014 in the relations between: the USA - Ukraine, Ukraine - Russia, the USA - Russia, and Europe - Ukraine. Semantyczno-kognitywna analiza konceptu „Ukraina” w przemówieniach B. Obamy (2014)Artykuł przedstawia semantyczno-kognitywną analizę konceptu „Ukraina”, werbalnie zaprezentowanego w przemówieniach amerykańskiego prezydenta B. Obamy. Autor podkreśla cechy szczególne konceptualnego obrazu świata prezydenta Stanów Zjednoczonych.Cele artykułu są następujące: 1. Pokazanie, że koncept „Ukraina” jest werbalnie obecny w przemówieniach B. Obamy. Oznacza to, że Ukraina jako państwo kroczące drogą demokracji mimo wojny z Rosją leży w kręgu zainteresowań amerykańskich liderów. 2. Zasugerowanie, że istnieje powiązanie pomiędzy opisywanym konceptem, jego orientacją pragmatyczną i procesami kognitywnymi. 3. Konieczność opisu semantycznych cech szczególnych konceptu „Ukraina” w przemówieniach politycznych amerykańskiego lidera ze względu na rolę Ukrainy w lokalnym i regionalnym kontekście. Podkreślam funkcjonalną, komunikatywną i pragmatyczną orientację politycznych przemówień. Zgodnie z podejściem badaczy kognitywnych dochodzę do wniosku, że koncept „Ukraina” jest kompleksem semantyczno-kognitywnej struktury zawierającym strefę przejściową i peryferyjną.Podczas przeprowadzonego badania autor przejrzał piętnaście przemówień wygłoszonych przez amerykańskiego prezydenta B. Obamę w 2014 roku. Badanie zakłada zastosowanie analizy treści. Jest przydatne w analizie stosunków międzynarodowych, w odniesieniu do pojęć użytych przez prezydenta Obamę w przemówieniach wygłoszonych w 2014 roku w następujących formatach: USA-Ukraina, Ukraina-Rosja, USA-Rosja i Europa-Ukraina.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Alla Korzh ◽  
Serhiy Kovalchuk ◽  
Adj Marshall

Abstract This article examines the motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to support the Euromaidan from abroad. Existing research has documented social movements within their national boundaries and the participation of young people in them. However, it has rarely examined the expansion of social movements beyond their national boundaries and the engagement of young immigrants in such movements. Drawing on a larger qualitative study, this article presents the findings about what motivated 24 young Ukrainian immigrants residing in the USA to support the Euromaidan movement of 2013–2014 and compares their motivations to those of the protestors in Ukraine. We argue that motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to support the Euromaidan from abroad manifest themselves in symbolic or psychological causes. Our findings demonstrate that the individual motivations were driven by an ideological commitment to systemic change in Ukraine, manifested through young Ukrainian immigrants’ (1) desire to end injustice, (2) solidarity with fellow Ukrainians, (3) moral obligation to raise awareness among the US public, and, most prominently, (4) sense of agency to contribute to the long-awaited change in the homeland. Our findings also show that overall, the motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to join the movement aligned with those of the protestors in Ukraine.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Riegert ◽  
Lucas Pettersson

•Media debates after the invasion of Iraq suggested that there was a growing anti-Americanism in Europe and that this contributed to an increasing sense of European identity as representing values that differed from that of the USA. But what if this anti-Americanism was really anti-Bushism, and how shared are the shared values on the European side when it comes to representation of the USA as Other? The articles in this Special Issue focus on the discursive image of the USA in the elite media of five European countries at points in time from a particularly frosty Cold War period under President Reagan until six months after the installation of President Obama. Taken together, there are broad similarities in the paradigms and characteristics used to depict the USA from the post-Cold War period, especially in French, Finnish, Swedish and German media. Below the surface, however, the narratives reveal that each country’s commentators are mainly interested in the USA in relation to domestic concerns or as a prism for its relationships with other countries on the world stage. There is a stark focus on the US presidents as symbols through which the USA as a whole is seen. Both Democratic and Republican presidents are likened to Rambo, the ‘space cowboy’, the ‘trade and cultural warrior’, or Hollywood ‘stars’, which could be interpreted as a measure of cultural disdain towards American popular culture and militarism. •


2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert O. Freedman

During the second term of President Barack Obama, US-Israeli relations sharply deteriorated. After a positive visit by President Obama to Israel in March 2013, major disagreements erupted over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, over the nuclear deal with Iran and, especially, over the construction of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Making matters worse, personal recriminations crept into the Israeli-American dialogue on the disputes. While the two countries signed a major military assistance agreement in September 2016, Israeli settlement expansion after the election of Donald Trump as the US President in November 2016 led to a further deterioration of relations between the Obama Administration and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which was demonstrated by the Obama Administration’s failure to veto a UN Security Council Resolution condemning Israeli settlements.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amina Zarrugh

Following 9/11, hundreds of individuals in the USA were detained on suspicion of engaging in terrorism and subjected to a “hold until cleared” policy which permitted their indefinite detention while authorities vindicated them of terrorist connections. However, these experiences of detention are not unique to the post-9/11 era. Drawing on a critical analysis of prominent Supreme Court cases concerning the War on Terror, mass incarceration, and immigrant deportation, I argue that the US state has developed a series of institutions that operate to effectively “disappear” people from public and political life. While discussions of disappearance often focus on a specific type of state violence, several important features of state-enforced disappearance characterize all three of the cases considered here. First, disappearances focus on particular communities on the basis of sociological categories such as gender, age, race and ethnicity, and religion, among others. Second, disappearances foster a sense of uncertainty regarding why someone has been disappeared, and render it difficult to ascertain information about the individual. And lastly, disappearance has protracted and extended effects—psychological, social, economic—on the families and friends of the disappeared person. In the USA, capitalism plays a critical role in the development of institutions that disappear individuals.


2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 735-759 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boonghee Yoo ◽  
Geon-Cheol Shin

Purpose Culture is recognized as a pivotal variable in country of origin (COO) research. The purpose of this paper is to assess culture from an individual perspective and to examine the extent to which individual cultural orientations have similar associations with 33 manager- and consumer-related variables between two culturally opposite countries: the USA and South Korea. Design/methodology/approach An online survey is used. The sample size is 540 for the US sample and 572 for the Korean sample. The correlational similarity between the cultural orientations and other variables is analyzed in three ways and confirmed invariant in the majority cases of each analysis. Findings Individual cultural orientations are measured by Cultural Value Scale (Yoo et al., 2011), a 26-item five-dimensional scale measuring Hofstede’s typology of culture at the individual level. The three-faceted similarity test of each of the 165 pairs of correlations between the USA and Korea samples (i.e. 33 variables × 5 dimensions of individual cultural orientations) shows that the majority of the correlations are significantly similar between the two countries. Originality/value This is a first study in examining the invariance of the relationships of all five dimensions of Hofstede’s culture at the individual level to a variety of variables. As the invariance is found to be a norm, the role of culture in the COO phenomena can be studied at the individual level in a country and be expanded to other countries.


Author(s):  
Ana Belén Cabrejas-Peñuelas

Abstract The present study attempts to make a comparative analysis of two Spanish and American political speeches, which belong to two different debate traditions, in terms of the metaphors used. For that purpose, we analyze the Economy sections of the 2015 State of the Union Address in the US and in the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. The present study aims at answering the following research questions: What metaphors do President Obama and Prime Minister Rajoy use in the American and Spanish political speeches to convince their audiences of America’s and Spain’s economic victory? What are the similarities and differences between the representations depicted by metaphor use in the speeches as the politicians attempt to shape the economic recovery of America and Spain after recession? To answer these questions, we use an analytical framework for the identification of conceptual metaphors and a theoretical framework for the use of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The results indicate that both politicians use metaphors in an attempt to reify the new economy in such a way that the economic policies used to fight crisis are justified, while the negative effects on citizens are not mentioned and, thus, are dismissed as unimportant. However, the politicians take different approaches to reification.


Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Wheeler

How can two enemies, locked into a spiral of fear and insecurity, transform their relationship into a trusting one? Trusting Enemies argues that the field of International Relations has not done a good job of answering this question. This is because it has been looking in the wrong place. Where trust-building has been theorized by the discipline of International Relations, the focus has been on the state and the individual. This book argues that there is a need to appreciate the importance of a new level of analysis in trust research—the interpersonal. In its development of a theory of interpersonal trust between state leaders in adversarial relationships, this book argues that the obstacles to leaders sincerely signalling their peaceful intent can be overcome and that trust-based relationships provide the greatest assurance of accurate signal interpretation. This book examines three cases: the interaction between US and Soviet leaders Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and its role in ending the cold war; the interaction between Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and its role in the Lahore peace process of 1998–9; and the interactions across 2009–10 between Barack Obama and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that did not lead to a breakthrough in the US–Iranian nuclear relationship.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gino Casale ◽  
Robert J. Volpe ◽  
Brian Daniels ◽  
Thomas Hennemann ◽  
Amy M. Briesch ◽  
...  

Abstract. The current study examines the item and scalar equivalence of an abbreviated school-based universal screener that was cross-culturally translated and adapted from English into German. The instrument was designed to assess student behavior problems that impact classroom learning. Participants were 1,346 K-6 grade students from the US (n = 390, Mage = 9.23, 38.5% female) and Germany (n = 956, Mage = 8.04, 40.1% female). Measurement invariance was tested by multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across students from the US and Germany. Results support full scalar invariance between students from the US and Germany (df = 266, χ2 = 790.141, Δχ2 = 6.9, p < .001, CFI = 0.976, ΔCFI = 0.000, RMSEA = 0.052, ΔRMSEA = −0.003) indicating that the factor structure, the factor loadings, and the item thresholds are comparable across samples. This finding implies that a full cross-cultural comparison including latent factor means and structural coefficients between the US and the German version of the abbreviated screener is possible. Therefore, the tool can be used in German schools as well as for cross-cultural research purposes between the US and Germany.


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