Crafting Enemy

Ideographs in Iranian Political Discourse

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-098-5_2How to use a DOI?

Keywords

ideograph; enemy; political discourse; ideology

Abstract

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the public discourses in Iran have been flooded with a series of ideographs which were characteristically vague, and at the same time persuasive or even provocative. One of the key ideographs, particularly within the realm of political communication that saturates the Iranian mediascape, is <enemy>. As a continuously changing concept, <enemy> has often been used by Iranian authorities as a rhetorical means and political manoeuvring strategy to both influence and unite the masses against the threats from a number of imagined, ill-defined and sometimes shifting adversarial forces. As an ideographic analysis, this study attempts to trace and reflect on the emergence, modifications and implications of <enemy> at several junctures throughout the clerics’ reign in Iran. As such, it briefly surveys the use and development of this ideograph in the years that followed the Islamic revolution, and later the Iran-Iraq war. In so doing, it also provides examples of the incidents when the definition of <enemy> was strategically altered to (de-)emphasize a particular entity, group or nation as hostile, threatening and treacherous. Next, the study moves on to discussing the ways in which <enemy> has been associated with other ideographs, its usage in slogans and its implications in public policy. Ultimately it is concluded that although the extensive deployment of <enemy> in public discourse has effectively secured support for the elites since Islamic Revolution, the mounting nationwide dissidence in recent years have shown signs of a mass realization about the rhetorical/political nature of this ideograph.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Alireza Azeri Matin
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/08/31
TI  - Crafting Enemy
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Communication and Media 2022 (i-COME 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 3
EP  - 16
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-098-5_2
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-098-5_2
ID  - Matin2023
ER  -