A Discourse Analysis of the Conflicting Implications of Terrorism: the Iranian and U.S. Perspectives

Abstract

There are many approaches in analyzing the prolonged Iran–US impasse. We can taxonomize them into objective and subjective perspectives. We can explain Iran–US tension for realistic and geopolitical reasons. But discourse analysis is a subjective approach that maintains social facts are constructed in a discursive way by social players. This article aims to provide a discursive overview of how the definition of terrorism has been influenced by divergent discourses, as well as conflicting political interests by Iran and the US. In the discursive approach, as what anti-foundationalism maintains, social phenomena and social concepts like terrorism, miss a fixed essence or meaning. The present article applies the term discourse analysis mostly in Foucauldian philosophy and other like-minded political scientists in the deconstruction of the relationship between power and knowledge. This research concludes that definition and determining the instances of terrorism is a discursive action by Iran and the United States, so it explains the subjective reasons why there has been a dichotomy between Iran and the US in characterizing terrorism or ‘resistance movements’ in the Middle East. Therefore, subjective reasons as much as objective ones play a major role in the Tehran–Washington discord.