Representations of violence in the discourse of President Juan Manuel Santos at the General Assembly of the UN

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the representations of violence present in two speeches by President Juan Manuel Santos at the General Assembly of the United Nations. For this purpose, we use the tools provided by Critical Discourse Studies, where we analyze the cognitive and social components of the texts of the speeches, relying on an approach to the corpus at textual, contextual and intertextual levels based on the works of van Dijk (1999, 2009) and Charaudeau (2002, 2009a, 2009b); simultaneously interdisciplinary analysis from political science and international relations. The research showed that in presidential interventions in the international organization are inscribed representations of violence, apparently contradictory, that are intended to legitimize the domestic political agenda and that help to reproduce the discourse of terrorism and thus, the securitization of the international political agenda.