It’s ‘Just Peace’: Constituting Friends and Enemies in Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Speech

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar Presents: Dialogues about Communication and Culture
  In Paper Session: A Scholar to Scholar Roundtable: Crossing Borders, Crossing Swords: Bridging Divides in Contemporary Foreign Policy Discourse

Abstract

In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama faces a dual challenge, first in resolving conflict within his own positionality, in his position as the president of a nation involved in two conflicts and his position as Nobel Prize winner, and second in unifying an audience consisting of “the citizens of the world,” which could include both sympathetic or critical allies and opponents. Within the speech, these two challenges work against each other; as Obama develops the notion of ‘just peace’ to resolve his conflict in positionality, he polarizes his audience into two categories: us vs. them. Through language and evidence culled from a progressive linear view of history, Obama creates only two constitutive identities for his audience: either perpetrators of violence or proponents of ‘just peace.’ Thus, competing efforts at constituting self and others result in an inability to realize the persuasive ends of the speech—peace.

Author

• Kaitlyn Patia, Univ of Minnesota