What is it about?
This study explores how Jerry John Rawlings, a Ghanaian revolutionary leader, licensed his actions, including political enemy executions and a crackdown on corrupt practices by examining the legitimation strategies he used in his revolutionary discourse.
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Why is it important?
The study adapts and extends van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework by demonstrating how Rawlings exploited historical memory and the notion of sacrifice in conjunction with the strategies of authorization, rationalization and moralization to formulate his revolutionary rhetoric. By analyzing how legitimation strategies are shaped by sociocultural factors and local politics, we have theoretically offered new insights into how legitimation is discursively enacted to achieve various political goals in discourse generally and revolutionary discourse more specifically. At the same time, the study illustrates the persuasive power of revolutionary discourses in terms of how they function ideologically in the message they communicate (or exaggerate) and conceal.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a useful learning experience as i benefited immensely from the research experience of my collaborators to develop new insights and challenge my own perspectives through engaging with the data, leading to the development of new legitimation categories. I hope this study makes us aware that what may have been considered a phenomenon belonging in the past, a revolution, may actually be much present today in terms of how social actors reconstruct past revolutionary discourses to legitimate actions in everyday public discourse to seek social change.
John Ganaah
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Legitimation in revolutionary discourse, Journal of Language and Politics, November 2022, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jlp.22002.gan.
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