Obama Research Articles

The war in Ukraine: the failure of deterrence

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it became evident that the longstanding American deterrence policy that had worked during the Cold War failed. In February 2022, Russia started a war of conquest against its neighbor, and the United States and its European allies were unable to prevent it. America’s deterrence broke down for two main reasons. First, successive American Presidents failed to act when Russia used its brute military force against its neighbors. In 2008, Russia attacked Georgia and captured two provinces, proclaiming them “independent states.” In 2014, Russia attacked Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and established military control over two other provinces in Donbas, and announced their “independence.” In both cases, the United States and its European allies imposed mild trade sanctions on Moscow, most of which they soon repealed. The most remarkable act in this regard was sponsored by the Obama administration, which in 2011-2012 pushed hard for Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization by bullying Georgia not to veto Moscow’s application. The second, more significant cause for the failure of deterrence was America’s refusal to invest in a new generation of strategic weapons. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has developed very little in terms of upgrading its nuclear arsenal and creating new delivery systems. At the same time, Moscow invested hundreds of billions of dollars in developing and deploying new long-range cruise missiles, new hypersonic missiles, and a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Unravelling President Obama’s Myanmar Policy: Pragmatic Liberalism at Play

This study aims to examine the US’s Myanmar policy from the perspective of pragmatic liberalism and explore the primary factors behind the policy shift in 2009. It fills a gap in the literature by offering a rare analysis of US-Myanmar policy through the lens of pragmatic liberalism. The research methodology employs document search and elite interviews to gather comprehensive insights. The research questions focus on understanding how pragmatic liberalism manifested in Obama’s Myanmar policy and identifying the objectives he aimed to achieve. The findings reveal that Obama’s Myanmar policy aligns with the principles of pragmatic liberalism. It can be analysed through two dimensions: modelling creation and hegemony maintenance. Within the context of Sino-US competition, the primary factor driving the US's policy change in Myanmar is China. Consequently, the US’s policy shift aims to establish a new strategic partner to contain Chinese influence in Southeast Asia, thereby maintaining US hegemony in the region. This study contributes to the understanding of US-Myanmar relations and sheds light on the underlying motivations and dynamics of the US’s policy shift. By adopting a pragmatic liberalist approach, the US seeks to shape Myanmar’s trajectory while safeguarding its strategic interests in the region.

"POLITICS BY TWITTER: POLITICAL COMMUNICATION, DIGITAL TECHNOLIOGY AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMON INTERESTS"

In his recent Farewell Address US President Barack Obama remarked that if we want to improve our pol itical environment and accomplish significant political ends we need to stop attacking one another on Twitter and on line, and converse with one another face to face. We here explore the implication of Obama’s comment that technology is currently an obstac le in political communication. We further explore the position that the strongest ground for political activity, especially democratic political activity, is the identification and pursuit of common interests within one’s community and across borders. In t he end, there is no reason to think that digital technology is necessarily detrimental to useful political engagement and communication with one another. That we often use it detrimentally contributes to misunderstanding and social divisions. More genuine communication in the sense of engagement through shared meanings is critical and a necessary condition of experience and growth, both individual and social. Such communication, digital or otherwise, is enhanced through the pursuit of common interests.

"FEMINIST RHETORIC IN BARACK OBAMA AND HILLARY CLINTON’S DISCOURSE "

November 8, 2016, marked the beginning of a new era in the American political setting. The Obama era was known as a period of great opening, minority friendly approach and liberal vision. Of the two candidates that were running for office in 2016, Hillary Clinton seemed to have the most similar approach to the now former president of the USA, Barack Obama; Clinton was framed as the de facto carrier and enforcer of Obama’s legacy. Feminist approaches are not gender determined; Obama himself has made a mark as a feminist leader. Clinton ran for the highest office as a pioneer of women’s representation in politics. The aim of this paper is to discover the similarities between Obama’s discursive style and Hillary’s approach. Through critical discourse analysis, we launch this research in order to emphasize gender negotiations, in terms of both content and style.

Exploring Multiple Identities in Barack Obama’s Speeches to the African and Arab Audience

Presidential speeches aside, being a type of political discourse is a viable expression of the different types of identities purposively constructed and negotiated to achieve intended communicative outcomes. Using two Barack Obama's speeches to the Arab and African communities, the study seeks to investigate how political actors construct their identities to a wider audience. Using an eclectic theoretical dimension of Stance Taking, Audience Design Theory and drawing insights from Discourse Pragmatics, the study notes that the discursive features of intertextuality, metaphor, rhetorical questions, pronouns, if conditionals, multiple audience, epistemic stance are deliberately deployed to reveal their individual, social, national, and racial identities of political actors to achieve both self and communal positionings. The study concludes that identity is consciously deployed in every form of language used to show both alignment and distinctiveness.

UE - US: new barriers to trade

The article analyses the reasons for the complication of trade and economic relations between the European Union and the United States in recent years. The first section is devoted to the failed bilateral TTIP project, which was given strategic importance under the Obama administration. The destructive role of the Trump administration's policy toward the EU is noted. The hopes of improving bilateral relations after the arrival of the Biden administration were justified to a limited extent. New areas of conflict have emerged alongside the resolution of existing trade disputes. The Inflation Reduction Act adopted in the U.S. in 2022 became the most acute cause for discord. It has not yet been possible to reach a full agreement on how to mitigate negative consequences of this law for the EU. The EU, for its part, is forced to take retaliatory measures to protect its interests, including by strengthening its technological sovereignty, protection from economic coercion by third countries, etc. The analysis of emerging contradictions between the U.S. and Europe in the 21st century in trade and economic sphere leads to the conclusion that their most important cause is the increase in geopolitical rivalry throughout the world, due to which trade is progressively affected by geo-political reasons. At the same time, the problem of confrontation with China intensifies the differences between the U.S. and the EU.

Nonverbal communication as argumentation: the case of political television debates

This paper demonstrates how nonverbal communication may perform argumentative functions in television debates by acclaiming and defending the debater’s own ethos and in attacking the opponent’s ethos. We argue that studies of non-verbal communication in debates should not only study what is done nonverbally, but also how it is done. This informs our analyses of excerpts of television debates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the 2008 primary election campaign. Our analyses establish two main types of nonverbal rhetoric, enacted actio and restrained actio, and show how these may be used argumentatively. We introduce the concept of the personal qualifier to signify how debaters nonverbally can express degrees of certainty and emotional involvement, similar to the function of qualifier in Stephen Toulmin’s argument model.

Waiting in Captivity: Slow Borders, Predatory Bureaucracies, and the Necrotemporality of Asylum Deterrence

In recent years, the US government has implemented several bureaucratic changes aimed at stalling the influx of asylum seekers. From the “metering” system initiated under the Obama administration to the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) implemented by the Trump administration, these measures have erected a bureaucratic wall against asylum seekers that has kept them captive in Mexican border cities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tijuana, Mexico, I examine how these policies have produced deadly conditions for asylum seekers by calibrating time and space in such a way that increases their exposure and vulnerability to highly precarious environments and predatory bureaucracies.

THE FRAME-SLOT MODEL OF THE CONCEPT OF MOTIVATION ON THE BASIS OF MOTIVATIONAL SPEECHES BY PUBLIC FIGURES

This article introduces the outcomes of the conceptual analysis of motivational speeches delivered by prominent public figures, obtained by means of the UAM Corpus Tool – a cutting-edge software renowned for conducting both automated and manual text annotations. Furthermore, the study is enhanced by a conceptual metaphor analysis, revealing that ontological and structural components are the predominant and efficacious elements in constructing a frame-slot model. In accordance with Minsky’s theoretical framework, the frame-slot model consists of the main concept, and frames as complex structures, resembling multi-layered networks. It is figured out that these intricate structures are formed by slots and subplots [17]. Accordingly, the concept of MOTIVATION comprises a combination of frames reflecting embodied speakers’ experiences such as A LIVING BEING, DIFFICULTIES, PURPOSE, MATERIAL OBJECT, STATE, COGNITION, MOVEMENT, INSPIRATION, LIFE, WORLD, EDUCATION, and LANGUAGE. These components collectively serve as a comprehensive reflection of the perceptual paradigms employed by the selected public speakers, whose speeches serve as the primary corpus for this research. Consequently, the corpus comprises 20 speeches delivered by eminent male and female public figures, featuring Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Madonna, Kamala Harris, Melinda Gates, Angelina Jolie Voight, Arianna Huffington, Condoleezza Rice, Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, David Beckham, Mark Zuckerberg, Jay Shetty, and Steven Spielberg. This research underscores the significance of conceptual metaphors in understanding how motivational speeches shape our perception of the world and influence our actions. By dissecting the linguistic elements that construct these metaphors, the insights into the strategies employed by public figures to inspire and motivate their audiences are received and elaborated.

Simultaneous Interpretation of Religious Quotes Used in Selected Speeches by Barack Obama

Simultaneous interpretation is a common style of translation used in media, especially in political events. It requires training, experience, and mastery of various skills, including listening, comprehension, retrieving, reformulating, and creating accurate translations. The paper analyzes English transcripts of original texts and Arabic transcripts of interpreted texts, broadcast live on Arabic TV channels. The paper focuses on two speeches by former US President Barack Obama. The objective of utilising religious terms in most political texts is not to deliver a religious message, but rather to create a rhetorical and pragmatic plan that leaves a pleasant impression in the minds of the audience. The examples of the simultaneous interpretation of utterances with embedded messages in political discourse illustrate that implicatures, which do not convey a corresponding message to listeners of interpreted texts similar to that transmitted to recipients of original texts, may result in dissimilitude between the impact of the original message and that of the interpreted one. This incompatibility may lead to differences in audiences' attitudes.

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Aporia in Barack Obama’s 2016 Dallas Police Memorial Speech

ABSTRACT On 13 July 2016, President Barack Obama delivered a speech memorializing five police officers slain during a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas, Texas. Obama’s speech came on the heels of many other mass shootings, some associated with acts of racialized violence, during his administration. We argue that by deploying aporia, Obama addressed the conflicting constraints and exigencies exposed by the Dallas shooting and opened inventional possibilities that included virtuous behavior, commemorative speech, and dialogic-reciprocal encounters that also reappraised the concept of double consciousness. We conclude by exploring how aporia enables and undercuts discussions of complex social problems during epideictic encounters.

Design of X’s platform masks discontent with presidential social media posts instead of reflecting public opinion

ABSTRACT This study calls into question the notion that X (previously known as Twitter) serves as an effective global “town square” for political debates. An analysis of replies to the posts of former U.S. presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump finds that, even when they posted remarkably similar messages, public reaction to Trump was far more negative than was reaction to Obama. However, this more negative overall sentiment was masked on the platform because there was no way to gauge aggregate reaction to the posts other than by reading each reply individually. In this sense, X serves the interests of unpopular politicians by relegating discontent in replies to their posts to relative obscurity. The study lays out a number of ways social networks could be better designed to shape political debate, including by using artificial intelligence tools to summarize the tone and nature of replies to politicians in order to reflect public reaction.

THE COHESION AND COHERENCE IN BARACK OBAMA’S SPEECH TEXT “FINAL PRESIDENTIAL PRESS CONFERENCE OF YEAR”

This research aimed at analyzing the cohesion and coherence in Barack Obama’s speech text “Final presidential press conference of year”. This research designed by the qualitative method with descriptive approach. Then, researcher used the Miles, Huberman, & Saldana theory to analyze the cohesion and coherence in the speech text. The result of this research showed all of cohesion and coherence devices were found. The data of this research were words and phrases. Based on summary of the result, that Barack Obama’s speech text “Final Presidential Press Conference of Year” contained grammatical cohesion devices, they are reference (34), subtitution (1), ellipsis (12), and conjuntion (60). And then, it contained the lexical cohesion devices. They are; reiteration (47) and collocation (11). Moreover, it contained the coherence devices. They are; repeat key nouns (9), consistent pronoun (5), transition signals (53), and the ideas in the speech text are arranged structurally. Based on the research finding, in the spech text, the cohesion devices dominanted in grammatical cohesion, especially in using conjuction. And the coherence devices dominanted in using transition signals. It is suggested that English learners’ should pay attention about the usage of cohesion and coherence in order to create a good text as well as a speech. For the teachers, hopefully this research could be used to enrich their teaching material. And for the next researcher, can get information and knowledge to create a text grammatically and semantically.

Language and Politics: Framing the Use of Conceptual Metaphors in Political Discourse

This article examines the intricate relationship between language and politics through the lens of conceptual metaphors utilized in contemporary political discourse. By analyzing the framing and use of conceptual metaphors in political communication, the study aims to elucidate how language shapes and influences political narratives and ideologies. In this study, a qualitative research approach was adopted, incorporating critical discourse analysis (CDA) to delve into the use of conceptual metaphors in the context of American political discourse, taking as a case study Barack Obama's 2009 Cairo speech and Donald Trump's 2017 Inaugural Address. Drawing upon insights from studies on cognitive linguistics, politics, and discourse analysis, the research investigates the ways in which political actors strategically employ metaphors to construct persuasive arguments, shape public opinion, and advance specific policy agendas. This research thus aims to contribute to a nuanced understanding of the relation existing between language and political persuasion.

Joint framework for tensor decomposition-based temporal knowledge graph completion

Knowledge graphs (KGs) usually contain a lot of missing information, static knowledge graph completion (KGC) is widely used to solve their incompleteness. In recently, since the incompleteness of temporal KGs which typically contain lots of temporal facts, like (Barack Obama, Is-president-of, USA, 2008), temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC) is proposed to predict the missing part of (?, Is-president-of, USA, 2008) or (Barack Obama, Is-president-of, ?, 2008). In particular, tensor decomposition method has shown excellent performance in KGC and therefore many existing methods extend it to TKGC. One of the key challenges is how to make full use of static information and effectively fuse static (non-temporal) and temporal information for improving the performance of TKGC. The existing models usually concatenate or sum the static and temporal embeddings directly. Moreover, we observe that neighborhood information of temporal facts may be very useful for inferring the missing parts of temporal facts while has not been fully explored and utilized.To address these challenges, we propose a joint framework composed of temporal and static modules for tensor decomposition-based TKGC. In temporal module, we propose a new neighborhood time sharing technology for aggregating richer temporal semantic information. The static module is proposed as an auxiliary model to further learn embedding representation of static information based on our proposed two training strategies (named typed entity strategy and adjacent active entity strategy). Finally, we propose a novel way of fusing static and temporal information through joint learning of two modules based on our proposed entity sharing technology. A series of comparison and ablation experiments show that our model can make better and full use of static information while capturing richer temporal semantic information, coupled with an effective fusion method, thus achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to existing tensor decomposition-based TKGC methods on four benchmark datasets.

План Дж. Байдена по налаживанию отношений США со странами Латинской Америки: ожидания и реальность 2021 года

Introduction. During the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the relations of the United States with the countries of the Latin American region were greatly damaged. The election plan of Joe Biden meant providing assistance to some countries in Central America and assumed a return to the foreign policy strategy of Barack Obama. After the Democratic candidate’s victory in the 2020 presidential race, the expert community of Latin Americanists expected the expansion of Biden’s plan and the formation of a new U.S. foreign policy doctrine regarding Latin America. The purpose of the article is to find out what expectations the experts (scholars, former politicians, representatives of human rights organizations, etc.) had for the reviving of U.S. relations with Latin American countries in 2021 and how these expectations were met. Methods and materials. The research is based on the analysis of the expert community opinion towards the Latin American policy of Biden’s administration and the correlation of this opinion with the actual policy. The author uses methods of discourse analysis and comparative analysis. Analysis. The cancellation of Trump’s migration orders by the new administration was perceived by experts as a positive signal to improve U.S. relations with Latin American countries. However, Biden’s first 100 days showed that the president did not intend to expand the provisions of his election plan. The increasing flows of illegal migrants and local crises emerging in Latin America have forced the expert community to doubt the possibility of Biden’s plan to cope with new challenges. Results. The study showed that most of the expectations about the improvement of U.S. relations with the countries of the Latin American region were not justified. The reason for that was not only the narrowness of Biden’s plan itself but also the imperfection of the American bureaucratic system and external crises. According to experts, by the end of 2021, the Latin American policy of the new administration did not have any fundamentally new achievements that could significantly change the situation that had developed under President Trump’s administration.

Shifting balance of power and the formation of AUKUS in the Indo-Pacific region

ABSTRACT The US network of military alliances and security partnerships in the region has allowed it to influence Indo-Pacific affairs. But, a rapid shift in the balance of power in favour of China has threatened the US interests and security commitments with its regional allies. Hence, the AUKUS is a continuance of the US strategy of pivoting to Asia conceived by the Obama administration and a part of broader US efforts to balance revisionist China in the Indo-Pacific. Through AUKUS, the US has an opportunity to enhance the capabilities of its ally, Australia, to balance aggressive China. Convergence of security and foreign policy objectives with the US has encouraged Britain and Australia to be the parties of AUKUS. AUKUS would boost Australia's capabilities for shaping its regional strategic and security environment and develop a durable strategic power balance in the region. As a natural ally of the US and Australia, Britain also opposes China's illegal territorial claims and activities in the South and East China Seas and has developed a policy of integrated and collective actions with allies to protect the common interests through the AUKUS partnership.

A study on the role of lawyers in India’s freedom struggle and towards nation building

While we talk about Law as a profession, it is undoubtedly a vast area with innumerable persons contributing to it across the globe. It is also one of the most challenging professions for it encompasses tough thinking, analysing, reasoning, contemplating as a part of the process or for rendering advisory services, rule or policy making or simply when it comes to representing a client and arguing on behalf in a court of law. As per a report in the United States News’ List for the year 2016, the profession of a lawyer has been seen standing at the rank of 16 among the top 100 best paying jobs and the same stood at 71st rank across the world. Again, it not just the same being group as higher earning that makes it more attractive, the pride of the profession of law also entails the dynamic aspect of the job which is often reflected due to the emergence of several influential leaders of the world from the law background. Starting from the former President of USA, Barack Obama, Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, former US President Bill Clinton, former President of Russia, Dmitri Medvedev, managing director of International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde who are the contemporary world leaders worth mentioning to Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are the ones who had earned their highest degree in law and are the seasoned lawyers among others who passed their whole life in pursuit of emancipation of the human beings. Former President of Cuba, Fidel Castro and Former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew were also the law practitioners. The current paper is subdivided into various chapters which deals with the concept and development of legal profession, jurisprudential aspect, the role of lawyers in the Indian National Freedom Struggle Movement and their contribution towards nation building.

Master Narratives in US Contemporary War Discourse: Situating and Constructing Identities of Self and Other

The present paper aims to discuss the discursive strategies of otherization, legitimation, and normalization typically found in extracts from the author’s video corpus of US Presidents’ selected official statements at the height of actual or potential armed conflicts between the First Gulf War (1990-1991) and the end of the Obama Administration (2016). The underlying working assumption is that, to consolidate asymmetrical power relationships and monitor dissent and/or win domestic consent about the use of force, the US Administration systematically resorts to a relatively restricted inventory of political myths and cultural constructs sustained by strategic storytelling and powerful master narratives, or Intertextual Thematic Formations. The qualitative analysis, informed by a systemic functional, critical discourse approach, is undertaken at both the macro- and micro-levels, with a view to highlighting how master narratives project distinct/conflicting standpoints and socio-institutional roles and identities (e.g. the-President-as-Father-of-the-Nation; the-Community-as-Protector-of-its-Members'-Interests; the-West-as-Civilizer), while feeding the myth of a ‘super-empowered’ President and ultimately sustaining the ideological square. The final contention is that awareness-raising pedagogical models are needed which work upwards from the bottom of the hierarchical narrative structure, contextualizing the master narrative and linking it to the audience’s individual narratives, so that discourse can fulfil its critical function of dismantling potentially manipulative and/or normalizing discourse practices and foster civil society-led, personal counter-narratives that remove stereotyping and oversimplification.