Discursive legitimation strategies: The evolving legitimation of war in Israeli public diplomacy

Abstract

This article analyzes discursive legitimation strategies in the public diplomacy of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs over the course of three wars between Israel and Hamas by combining critical discourse analysis (CDA) with a quantitative analysis of legitimation strategies. CDA fulfills a critical role in scrutinizing the power that a foreign ministry may have by influencing the attitudes of foreign governments, populations and media outlets. This power is theoretically assessed by tracking legitimation strategies and lexical choices (e.g. war on terror, human shields) diachronically and discussing legitimation strategies in light of their ability to yield resonance. The study’s empirical contribution is an analysis of how legitimation strategies develop in order to reinforce and obtain resonance with a target audience. It contributes theoretically by arguing that construing a local, particular war as global and universal enables the legitimation strategies of political leaders to obtain resonance with audiences.

The populist style and public diplomacy: kayfabe as performative agonism in Trump’s Twitter posts

“…We adopt discourse analysis (Simonsen, 2019) to explore the hybridisation effects engendered by Trump. Our analysis follows the polyphonic rationalities explicit in public diplomacy as a practice reliant upon multiple genres for traditional and social media circulation.…”

The putative addressee in the persuasion of diplomatic discourse: China’s communication efforts through South African English-language newspapers

“…The existing CDS literature on public diplomacy and soft power reflects a centralized attention to American and European discourses (see e.g. two special issues of Journal of Language and Politics , respectively on the discourses of Iraq War (Chouliaraki, 2005) and EU identity (Carta and Wodak, 2015)), while the other countries’ diplomatic discourses remain comparatively sporadic and under-researched (with exceptions such as Bhatia, 2006; Fenton-Smith, 2007; Li and Zhu, 2020; Simonsen, 2019). The literature reveals a common interest in deconstructing how the symbolic power is employed to legitimize a particular country’s policies and actions and its vision of world order.…”

Legitimizing military action through statistics and discourse in the 2014 IDF assault on Gaza

“…One that is consistently projected is that it is vulnerable (Gamson and Herzog, 1999; Shlaim and Yaniv, 1980). In addition, Israel frames its actions as responses to Palestinian aggression (Chomsky and Pappé, 2015; Philo and Berry, 2011), and self-defence (Simonsen, 2019). Relating the conflict to international Western contexts is an additional representational strategy that Israel uses.…”

“…Manor and Crilley (2018) report that, during the 2014 attack on Gaza, it attempted to align itself with democratic Western contexts. Similarly, Simonsen (2019) argues that a related strategy included appropriating discourse associated with the ‘Global War on Terror’ to legitimate its actions, by claiming it was fighting terrorism. This strategy is likely to draw media attention due to the importance ascribed to covering events related to terrorism (Yarchi et al, 2013).…”