Power, Resistance, and Counter-Discourse in English Diplomatic Communication: A Pragmatic and Corpus-Informed Linguistic Analysis of Maliha Lodhi’s Responses to Dominant Western Political Narratives

Abstract

The research problem addressed in this paper is the linguistic construction of power, resistance and counter-discourse in English diplomatic discourse, with specific reference to mechanisms used by Maliha Lodhi to respond to hegemonic discourses of Western politics. The study background is the realization that English as the main medium of international relations tends to reproduce unequal power relations in the form of ideologically charged images of states in the Global South. The primary mission of the paper is to look at how these narratives are interred with the use of strategic use of language in official diplomatic language. The research takes an integrated approach to the Critical Discourse Analysis, the pragmatics (Speech acts, politeness), implicature, and presupposition), and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, with an integrated critical-pragmatic-corpus-informed theoretical approaches. The sources are verified English-language speeches, statements and interviews made by Maliha Lodhi in foreign diplomatic situations. The sampling technique is a purposive approach, which is used in order to choose the texts, which talk directly about western political discourses on Pakistan, security and global responsibility. Qualitative pragmatic analysis with the support of corpus tools to determine the lexical patterns, collocations and evaluative stance is used in data analysis. The results demonstrate that resistance is systematically achieved by means of lexical reframing, strategic speech acts, mitigated politeness, and indirect meaning, which allows achieving successful counter-discourse without violating the traditions of diplomacy. The work is related to the theories of critical pragmatics and diplomatic discourse as it shows how linguistic subtlety is an effective form of opposition.