OBSERVARE

Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

Vol. 7, Nº. 2 (November 2016-April 2017), pp. 1-13

DISCOURSE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: A THEORETICAL AND

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

Luísa Godinho

lgodinho23@yahoo.com.br

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

the University of Geneva, Switzerland

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.

Keywords

Language; Discourse; Constructivism; Context; Methodology

How to cite this article

Godinho, Luisa (2016). "Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and

methodological approach". JANUS.NET e-journal of International Relations, Vol. 7, Nº. 2,

November 2016-April 2017. Consulted [online] on the date of last consultation,

observare.autonoma.pt/janus.net/en_vol7_n2_art1 (http://hdl.handle.net/11144/2780)

Article received on July 5, 2016 and accepted for publication on September, 25 2016

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

Vol. 7, Nº. 2 (November 2016-April 2017), pp. 1-13

Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

DISCOURSE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: A THEORETICAL AND

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

Luísa Godinho

Since the first half of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1940s onwards, the

social sciences’ interest in the meaning of language focused on the so-called content

analysis, reproducing the dominant positivist paradigm and, in a way, demonstrating a

significant aloofness regarding the intellectual legacy of Wilhelm Dilthey (Dilthey, 1883;

1900).

Dilthey had claimed, back in the nineteenth century, a scientificity specific to social

sciences (Dilthey, 1883, 1900), based on the explanatory method, which opposed the

traditional thinking of the natural sciences, grounded on the central paradigm of

quantitative demonstration. Still, content analysis, which preceded the study of

discourse, emerged precisely in Dilthey’s opposite camp from techniques such as

lexicography, believing in the possibility of the empirical study of the word.

Since the 1960s, due to the analytical deepening that the study of discourse has

undergone (Van Dijk, 1972, 1977, 1988; Ducrot, 1972, 1980, 1984; Grimes, 1975; Hall

et al, 1978), this positivist paradigm has been challenged by the need to explain the

meaning of what was said, thus paving the way for qualitative analysis and the necessary

interdisciplinarity between the two approaches. Accordingly, the text ceased to be

considered a closed construction that statistical analysis allowed access to, and started

to be understood as a structure of meanings, open and dependent on their context, which

many disciplines such as sociology, history, psychology, anthropology, law, and

international relations could aspire to unravel. The scientific potential of this new

discursive approach would soon be demonstrated by a galloping number of studies in all

areas of the humanities.

Also in the field of international relations, there was a growing interest in the study of

world politics as a social construction and in the increasing use of discourse analysis as

an analytical tool. According to Müller, this interest covered a wide range of topics, from

"the rhetoric production of marginality, resistance and otherness” in International

Relations to the “constitutive and disciplining power of geopolitical discourses as truth

regimes. Similarly, discourse and discourse analysis have been among the most popular

concepts to study the formation of geopolitical identities" (Müller, 2010: 1).

The translation of this article was funded by national funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e

a Tecnologia - as part of OBSERVARE project with the reference UID/CPO/04155/2013, with the aim of

publishing Janus.net. Text translated by Carolina Peralta.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

Vol. 7, Nº. 2 (November 2016-April 2017), pp. 1-13

Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

Despite this growing interest in the discursive approach to international phenomena, calls

for the need to use more systematic methodologies in the studies abound and include

discourse analysis works produced in all fields of the social sciences.

As Müller noted, the methodological warning accompanied the emergence of the main

publications in the area of discourse, and Van Dijk, one of the most prominent authors,

in the first editorial he wrote for the Discourse and Society journal underlined the need

for "explicit and systematic analysis based on serious methods and theories" (Van Dijk,

1990: 14). Over a decade after Van Dijk wrote these words, Antaki and Checkel identified,

among the works written about discourse in International Relations, a descriptive and

justifying gap in the “sources and techniques used to reconstruct discourses" (Checkel

2004: 7).

The need for methodological accuracy is imperative in an area that, like discourse

analysis, can offer an invaluable contribution to International Relations. A discourse

analysis of international practice combining textual analysis and contextual analysis

allows making political and sociological inferences that can be of great use for the topic

addressed here. According to Van Dijk "It is precisely this integrated analysis" that allows

a better understanding of the complexity of the practices, institutions and political

processes, precisely the kind of objects of analysis that interest political scientists" (Van

Dijk, 1997: 41).

Van Dijk exemplifies the utility of the discursive approach in Political Science and

International Relations with the study of topics such as the relationship between

immigration and xenophobia, immigration policies and social integration, partisan

positioning and propaganda, or how the mass media deals with ethnic affairs. According

to the author,

“What is at stake here (in the study of the discourse on immigration)

is not only the socio-economic 'facts' of the immigration of others.

In a symbolic perspective, what is at stake here is how politicians,

journalists and the public think, speak and write about the topic and

how this discourse and cognition influence political action and,

consequently, the political structure. This is where the discourse

analysis may allow explanations that otherwise would be absent”.

(Van Dijk, 1997: 42)

The theoretical foundations of discourse analysis

Discourse analysis has very deep intellectual roots in philosophy, linguistics and

pragmatics.

In philosophy, the study of discourse arose from the intellectual movement that embodied

the so-called interpretative shift in the social sciences. At the root of this shift lies, in

turn, hermeneutics, which shares with analytic philosophy the emphasis on the linguistic

nature of subjectivity. Authors like Heidegger, Ricoeur and Wittgenstein stressed the

impossibility of studying reality without understanding the meaning (s) of the actions of

social agents, which, in turn, can only be learned through the study of language. It is

language that allows sharing concepts and the construction of social life, from which

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Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

important theories derive, such as Wittgenstein’s, focused on language game, as well as

the revolutionary schools of Heidegger and Gadamer, which underline the social and

historical nature of subjectivity itself.

From a linguistic perspective, the origins of the study of discourse go back to classical

rhetoric, which recognized, over 2000 years ago, that the quality of a text does not lie

only in its formal correctness, but also in its "persuasive effectiveness” (Van Dijk, 1985:

1). According to Van Dijk, the success of the discipline continued even during the Middle

Ages and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but in the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, the preponderance of rhetoric in the humanities was eventually

supplanted by areas such as historical and compared linguistics as well as by the

structural analysis of language. The Russian formalism of the 1920s and 1930s fostered

the study of narrative, hitherto confined to linguistics, in other disciplines such as

psychology and anthropology, and the fruits of this interdisciplinarity would still be picked

forty years later in the French structuralism, in works by authors like Levi-Strauss and

Barthes, to name a few. Linguistics thus became a vehicle for the study of culture, myths

and now discourse, a topic first published in 1964.

This was the collective work Communications 4, dedicated exclusively to discourse

structure analysis, which included a revolutionary set of topics, including film analysis by

Metz and Barthes’ rhetorical analysis of advertising, who also signed the first introduction

to the newly formed Semiology discipline. According to Van Dijk, "Despite the framework,

guidelines, the research subjects and methods of all these authors being far from

homogeneous, the common interest in discourse analysis within the broader framework

of semiotics inspired by linguistics influenced and gave coherence to these first attempts"

(Van Dijk, 1985: 3).

The French structuralism set the tone for the new area of discourse that would grow over

the next decade in dozens of published works and applications to various disciplines. The

next increase came in the 1970s, with linguistics’ discovery of the philosophical work by

Austin, Grice and Searle on speech acts. The book How to do things with words (Austin,

1962), demonstrated, for the first time, how and in what circumstances to talk is to do,

opening the field of linguistics to pragmatics. With Austin, the speaker becomes a social

actor and the understanding of life in society can no longer do without the study of

language and its use.

In psychology, the study of discourse allowed developing cognitivism against the

prevalence of the behavioural trend of previous decades; sociology, by the hand of

authors like Goffman, focused on the analysis of social structure, studying the daily

conversations of ordinary speakers; anthropology, for its part, took the first steps in the

so-called ethnography of communication, taking an interest in language and its symbols;

law also yielded to the study of discourse, after realizing that its object - laws, legal

action, legal documents - had an eminently discursive nature; history, whose sources

and work are mostly textual, saw a fundamental methodology in discourse analysis; in

the same sense, the study of mass media found in discourse analysis a powerful tool for

understanding phenomena, such as the conditions of message production and reception

and the meaning of the actual published message.

Although deriving from linguistics, this expansion of the discursive approach was so

significant that, today, a growing number of linguists even question the qualifications of

discourse analysis as an area belonging to the language science.

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Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

1. Discourse analysis in International Relations

It is in the light of the previous theoretical framework that the study of discourse in

International Relations must be understood. This discipline received from pragmatics the

concept of language as social action (Austin, 1962) and therefore the performative

dimension of the word has become a key element to understand the relationship between

international actors.

The so-called International Relations are, in essence, discursive interactions between

peoples, i.e. texts that simultaneously reflect and produce a given context. The critical

theory school pioneered this approach, based mainly on the study of actors and the

effects that their discourse cause in international contexts (see image 1).

The critical discourse analysis is based on two fundamental assumptions: first, it indicates

a particular positioning of the researcher, who leaves the distancing of conventional

approaches and has a set of ideological assumptions in the way he studies reality. Second,

it identifies a close relationship between social structure and language, tending to analyse

political systems as linguistic systems and ideologies as texts aimed at creating a

collective political will.

Image 1 – Transformation of the discursive approach in International Relations

Source: Müller, 2010.

In recent years, however, the traditional approach has been accompanied by situational

and proximity analyses, interested in understanding "the micro contexts and daily

practices as the focus of the discursive construction of identities" (Müller, 2010: 8). In

parallel with this expansion of the object, there has also been an international

"reconceptualization of discourse and identities" (Müller, 2010: 8) following a post-

structuralist perspective, the latter being understood as the result of a discursive

construction complex process and not as a natural attribute, which was the prevailing

view in the interpretive and explanatory approaches. Therefore, it was a profound shift

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Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

in the object of analysis in International Relations. The international actors cease to be

the central unit of analysis, with interest now shifting to the identity of these actors and

the discursive processes that allowed its construction.

The discursive shift allowed the emergence of a wide range of topics and methodological

approaches in International Relations (Müller, 2010). Wodak (Wodak, 1999) has focused

on the construction of national identity, in particular studying the case of the European

Union; Nonhoff (Nonhoff, 2006) investigated how the project of a social market economy

in post-war Germany won such broad social support, and demonstrated the existence of

a hegemonic strategy focused on the text and on the particular conditions under which

it was produced. Glasze (Glasze, 2007), in turn, studied the construction process of the

so-called Francophonie as a geo-cultural space, based on methods borrowed from

linguistics, such as lexicometrics and narrative analysis. A group of authors, including

Shapiro (Shapiro, 1992) also analysed the joint processes of articulating and contesting

meaning in the formation of identities, concluding that these processes closely depend

on the contexts in which they occur. In this sense, national identities consist of discourses

in constant formation and reformulation, in permanent dialogue with the conditions of

each historical moment.

Despite the primacy of the critical school in recognizing the contribution of discourse

analysis to the field of International Relations, it was followed by constructivism and,

more than claiming the importance of the meaning of international acts to understand

the relationship between people, it was interested in demonstrating that international

acts are in themselves socially constructed discursive practices, i.e., that "the objects of

knowledge are not independent from interpretation or language" (Adler, 2002: 95). Thus,

we can see how the constructivists incorporated areas like language, communication and

discourse in the theoretical debate in International Relations, demonstrating, as Anna

Holzscheiter notes, that international facts "are not natural, but rather the result" of a

social building process (Holzscheiter, 2013: 4).

The volume and diversity of studies espousing the discursive constructivist approach in

International Relations allow identifying different research strands, according to different

criteria: the belief in the possibility of objectification of international facts, following the

proposal advanced by Wendt and Kratochwil; the dimension of the analysis perspective

and the identity of the power of discourse, according to the proposals of Anna

Holzscheiter.

The proposal advanced by Wendt and Kratochwil divides discursive constructivist type of

studies into two categories: thin constructivism and thick constructivism. The former

believes in the possibility of the objective existence of international facts regardless of

the existence of a subject that conceptualizes them. The latter is based on the discursive

and linguistic concept of the actual international facts, whose existence results

exclusively from their own inter-subjectivity.

The second typology, proposed by Anna Holzscheiter, organizes discursive constructivist

studies according to the dimension of the adopted analysis perspective: macro-structural

studies that view speech as a linguistic structure that determines the relationship

between international actors, and micro-interactional studies, which are pragmatic

approaches centred on real-time communication processes, in which the agents actively

and inter-subjectively build, renegotiate, and transform shared interpretations of reality"

(Holzscheiter, 2013: 6).

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Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

Image 2 – The discursive-constructivist approach in International Relations

Approach criteria

Possibility of objectification of

international facts

Thin constructivism

Thick constructivism

Dimension of the analysis

perspective

Macro-structural

Micro-interactional

Identity of the power of discourse

Intersubjective power

Deliberative power

Type of methodological

approach

Descriptive

Grammar

Stylistic

Cognitive

Non-verbal

Argumentation

Functionalist

Text in context

Autonomous approaches

Hermeneutics

Ideological analysis

Content analysis

Experimental analysis

Source: author’s own.

The third typology, identified by the same author, examines the relationship between

power and discourse, a binomial whose modern parenthood belongs to Michel Foucault

and Jurgen Habermas and which is still a reference among social scientists interested in

understanding the role of language in the process of social construction. Each of these

authors, however, is at the base of the two main lines of approach that can be identified

in constructivist studies in International Relations: a first approach which, following the

legacy of Foucault, perceives international events as discursive actions built inter-

subjectively and impossible to be objectified, the actors becoming hostages of their own

subjectivity; and a second approach, based on Habermas, that believes in the possibility

of a deliberative emancipation of the actors, guaranteed by the rational public debate.

Studies inspired on Foucault’s work are pessimistic, focusing on discourse as a form of

structural and totalitarian power; those inspired by Habermas are idealistic and approach

discourse as the international actors’ power of liberation.

2. Types of discourse analysis in International Relations

From a methodological point of view, discourse analysis in International Relations has a

set of approaches common to other social sciences and language at its disposal. Strictly

speaking, due to the fact it is a recent analysis field, discourse does not yet have a specific

and solid theoretical body, relying on techniques and concepts borrowed from linguistics,

semantics, psychology, sociology, and any other discipline deemed useful to understand

language in society. It is precisely in this interdisciplinary that its analytical richness lies.

The discursive approaches available today in the study of International Relations are

considerable in number and variety, and are divided into three groups: descriptive

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Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

approaches, functionalist approaches and a number of other autonomous approaches

that have no direct relationship with each other but offer important contributions to the

study of discourse. The descriptive analyses are a set of interpretation perspectives

grounded on language, an approach whose relevance stems from the fact that discourse

is, first of all, a form of language. This group includes the grammar approach, concerned

with understanding the formation of words and sentences, and subdivided into

“structural, generative and functional” grammar and into sub-disciplines such as

“phonology, morphology and syntax" (Van Dijk, 1985, 2); the stylistic approach,

traditionally used in poetry, sociolinguistics, and ethnography, assists discourse analysis

by indicating the “appropriateness of a particular discourse to a certain social situation"

(Van Dijk, 1985: 2); the cognitive approach perceives discourse as a result of social

interaction and, accordingly, the researcher should take into account the conditions under

which this interaction occurs, including the psychological dimension of both parties; the

study of nonverbal activity that accompanies the production of discourse, such as

“intonation, gestures, facial expressions or body position” (Van Dijk, 1985: 3) and

determines much of its interpretation; analysis of the existing narrative structure; the

analysis of the arguments between both parties, in particular the strategic argumentative

movements (Van Eemeren, 1999) they make.

While the descriptive approaches focus on the text, almost ignoring the semantic

dimension that is beyond the word, the functionalist approach emphasises the

relationship between text and its context, proposing, in Van Dijk’s opinion, a "fuller

characterization of discourse "(Van Dijk, 1985: 5).

The relationship between text and context is the central pillar of discourse analysis, which

encouraged, moreover, abundant academic production in recent years. The study of

context, in particular, attracted the attention of a large number of researchers interested

in further defining the concept and in developing theories able to relate it to the linguistic

dimension of discourse.

Image 3 – Transformation of the contextual approach to discourse study in

International Relations

Source: author’s own.

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Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

The traditional concept of context in discourse analysis was to see this concept as an

objective social variable, such as gender, ethnicity or social class. According to this

concept, all discourse is determined by the set of social, economic and biological

conditions of the interlocutors and it was in this light that disciplines such as

anthropology, sociology and psychology were worked upon, the first in the context of

ethnography of communication, the second focusing mainly on conversation analysis and

the third through discursive psychology, an area of social psychology (Van Dijk, 2008: 6-

7) (see image 3).

Recently, however, a new perspective emerged from the work of Teun Van Dijk (Van Dijk,

2008) (see image 3). Rooted in what the author calls cognitive theory of context, this

approach was the first multidisciplinary attempt to address a topic as central as this one.

For the author, it is not the historical or social situation of the subject that per se

determines the discourse, but rather how it perceives the communicative situation in

question, the understanding it has of dimensions such as the relative position of the

parties, the motives and purposes of the communication, the language negotiation

involved.

In this cognitive process, the subjective mental constructs that make up true contextual

models intervene decisively. They are responsible for how each participant understands

the communicative situation and adapts his production of language to the situational

environment that is presented to him. This adaptation process, in turn, involves selecting

and using the language resources that each person has at his disposal during the dialogue

and using them at the time each considers to be more appropriate. In this sense,

contextual models are the key link that unites discourse, communicative situation and

society.

Parallel to the descriptive and functionalist approaches, there are also various other

autonomous approaches of great value to the study of discourse (image 2), such as

hermeneutics, concerned with the subjective dimension of interpretation; ideological

analysis, with Marxist roots, which sees discourse as an indicator of social conflicts;

content analysis, focused on a highly quantitative approach to the text and used mainly

in the study of very large works; and the so-called experimental analysis, widely used in

psychology, focused on the procedural dimension of discourse, and interested in aspects

such as discourse activation processes, the measurement of reaction and interpretation

times or transition networks.

Despite the diversity of analytical perspectives examined in the preceding paragraphs,

there are some common points in them, which Van Dijk summarized well: "First, they

demonstrate an interest in the explicit content (and sometimes implicit or absent) of

discourse" (Van Dijk, 1985: 12-13). Second, these analysis perspectives have always

had an instrumental nature for the social sciences, allowing access to the meaning and

the making of sociological inferences. Contrary to semantics and linguistics, whose

ultimate goal is to capture the meaning of the text, for the social sciences the meaning

interests in that it allows understanding the social phenomena under study.

In the same fashion, the interest of International Relations in discourse lies in the

reflective nature it has, perceived as a sample of the social fabric that allows us to

understand the international reality. In recent years, however, this instrumental

perspective of discourse has been abandoned in favour of an autonomous understanding,

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Discourse and international relations: a theoretical and methodological approach

Luísa Godinho

an understanding that rejects the study of the word as an expression of something else,

preferring to see it as an autonomous form of action and interaction between people.

3. Conclusion

In recent years, the discursive approach to international phenomena has experienced a

remarkable transformation that resulted in significant scientific broadening and

deepening.

Traditionally, discourse analysis was based on a descriptive concept of the role of the

word in life in society but since Austin’s pragmatic approach, the text came to be

perceived as a producer of reality, allowing a substantial change in the understanding of

International Relations. This profound epistemological transformation enabled the

development of a new discursive perspective of international phenomena, although

recurrent appeals in the scientific literature denounce the need for greater methodological

clarification in the studies carried out.

This article intends to contribute to filling this gap. Here we reconstituted the intellectual

heritage of the study of discourse, examined the three research strands that can be

identified in discourse-constructivist studies in International Relations and presented the

main methodological approaches followed.

From different perspectives, all of these approaches acknowledge the importance of the

text-context binomial to understand international phenomena. As we have seen, the

latter can be understood distinctly according to the research interests and has recently

seen its field extended.

In this article, three steps are fundamental in the search for greater methodological

clarification in discourse-constructivist studies in International Relations. First, the

explanation of the chosen analysis criteria – regarding the objectification of international

facts, the dimension of the analysis perspective and the identity of the discursive power;

second, the identification of the type of the chosen approach - descriptive, functionalist

or autonomous; third, the position regarding what is meant by context, clearly identifying

the chosen concept - economic, biological, social and/or cognitive. Adopting this

methodological triad in discourse research in International Relations is a very important

clarification factor that not only will give greater rigor and transparency to studies but

also facilitate the replication exercise, which is a determining condition of what is called

scientificity.

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