Discourse Analysis: Strengths and Shortcomings (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
Discourse analysis has become a mantra for many you ng international relations scholars that would like to place their research within the camps of postmodern theorizing, increasingly fashionable yet still marginal enough to be attract ive to those that do not set for the usual mainstream topics or methods. However, their work h as been frequently put under much methodological pressure by positivist social scient ists that sometimes reject the discourse analysis framework as too fluid to be a “proper” social rese arch tool. Premising that discourse is a social practice, this paper proposes a non-Marxist argumen t for pushing forward this debate and for helping especially social constructivists in advanc ing their methodological concerns beyond the positivist-interpretativist dichotomy.
DISCOURSE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: A THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
Janus.net (Scopus indexed)
Assistant Professor at Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa (Portugal) and researcher in the field of Political Communication. Her academic interests include discourse, digital communication and computational approach to Social Sciences. She has a PhD in Economic and Social Sciences from Abstract In this article, the relationship among international actors is understood as a communicative process in which discourse is a central instrument, a perspective that in recent decades has expanded remarkably in International Relations. This plethora has, however, been accompanied by frequent calls for greater methodological clarification in academic work. This article aims to contribute to this purpose, offering an integrated view of discursive approaches in International Relations and presenting an updated picture of context theory.
Politicians often use discourse to strengthen their positions, power and political ideologies. Critical Discourse Analysis investigates political discourse with the aim to reveal the connection between discourse and power (Fairclough, 2015). Using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this study compares the discursive strategies of Turkish presidents Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Recep Tayyip Erdogan to highlight ideological differences in their language use through the Ideological Square Model. The Ideological Square Model indicated that Ataturk's out-groups are other countries, while Erdogan extends the set of out-groups to include the media and his political opposition. Results demonstrate how ideologies and power relations are represented and created using various linguistic tools and in different ways in political speeches.
International Organizations and Research Methods - An Introduction, 2023
International organizations (IOs) are the setting for the production and dis- semination of overlapping discourses. They annually publish thousands of documents in which one word can be debated over years of negotiations. Discourse analysis assists scholars to grasp both internal processes of dis- course production within organizations and the impact of IOs’ discourses in the making of global politics.
Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics
European Journal of International Relations, 2010
This article aims to show the theoretical added value of focussing on discourse to study identity in international relations (IR). I argue that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. My starting point is a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically borrowed from psychology. Jacques Lacan’s ‘speaking subject’ offers instead a non-essentialist basis for theorizing about identity that has been largely overlooked. To tailor these insights to concerns specific to the discipline I then flesh out the distinction between subject-positions and subjectivities. This crucial distinction is what enables the discourse approach to travel the different levels of analyses, from the individual to the state, in a way that steers clear of the field’s fallacy of composition, which has been perpetuated by t...
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach with a range of conceptual and methodological perspectives on discourse and global journalism. Thus, concept definitions, data selection and data analysis become three vital methodological decision making areas. This methodological paper describes and explains an empirical research design that operationalizes four positions on discourse as a facet of globalization: discourse as objective fact, discourse as social practice, discourse as power relations and discourse as discursive legitimation strategies. Discourse is analysed as objective fact through thematic analysis of discourse beyond the sentence level. Discourse as social practice is revealed at three levels of analysis: text analysis, discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis. Discourse as power relations is operationalized between local identities and global identities manifested as competing legitimation 'social actors'. Discourse as rhetoric is manifested in the form of discursive legitimation strategies. Forming a communicative event of global journalism, 152 proverbs of Yemen Times, which were published between 2003 and 2010, were collected as a topic area. The paper also shows a sample of analysis in which each perspective on discourse is explained.