Diplomatic Tension In American and Iranian United Nations General Assembly Speeches: A Faircloughian Analysis

Abstract

Diplomatic tension between the United States and Iran is visible in their speeches at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), yet how this tension is constructed through language and social context remains underexplored. Previous studies applying Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to UNGA speeches focused on a single leader or nation, so no study has compared two diplomatically opposing states in the same forum. This research aims to identify the linguistic features, discursive practices, and social practices that constructed the diplomatic tension between the American and Iranian representatives in their speeches at the 77th and 78th UNGA sessions. It used a qualitative descriptive design with Critical Discourse Analysis as the analytical method. The data were four official General Debate transcripts of President Joe Biden and President Ebrahim Raisi (2022–2023), taken from the official UN archive; the Iranian speeches were analyzed in their official English translation. The data were collected by documentation and analyzed in six steps based on Fairclough’s three dimensions, with a codebook of three relevance statuses (Direct, Contextual, and Not Clear) applied to 209 data rows. The results show that the tension was constructed in all three dimensions. The American speeches used restraint, conditions, and firm limits, and named Iran in only 1.1–1.2% of their sentences, whereas the Iranian speeches built a contrast between justice and oppression and named the United States in 12.8% and 6.2% of their sentences. Both sides referred to the same documents, especially the 2015 nuclear agreement, in opposite directions and expressed opposing ideologies. The research concludes that the tension is a contest over responsibility for shared events and over the legitimacy of the international order.