Delighted for a dairy queen in Egypt: US foreign policy leadership discourse in the Middle East during Arab Spring

ABSTRACT

Ample studies scrutinized what the Arab Spring meant for communication and politics in the Middle East and beyond. The rhetoric of the U.S. ambassadors stationed in those countries during the Arab Spring, however, remains understudied. Applying critical discourse analysis to the communications of the U.S. ambassadors in Egypt, Kuwait, Tunisia, and Bahrain during the Arab Spring shows that the U.S. ambassadors did not support these movements, but they used them to recruit the countries into the fold of global neoliberalism during an unstable period.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab Spring
• critical discourse analysis
• global neoliberalism
• the U.S. foreign policy
• political communication

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their continued feedback. I am grateful to Andy Crow and Kristin Peterson for their comments on the previous versions of this article. I am grateful to Efe Sevin, Joris Gjata and Idris Erol for their support.

Notes

1 The protests in Kefaya are noteworthy because they emerged as part of a pro-democracy movement opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This movement spurred the first digital newspaper in Egypt, which laid the groundwork for Twitter activism during the Arab Spring. In 2008, there was a general strike at Mahalla, demanding better wages and election security. Both of these protests informed how people reacted to the police, how they shaped their demands, and how they organized their protests at Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring.