Ideological Strategies in Barack Obama’s
Cairo Speech: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Hassan A. H. Gadalla
Associate Professor of Linguistics,
Assiut University

This discourse analytical study attempts to explore the ideological strategies in Barack Obama’s Cairo speech. It applies van Dijk’s (1998, 2006) model to the analysis of political discourse in that speech to uncover the ideologies hidden in it and to evaluate the adequacy of van Dijk’s model in analyzing ideologies in political speeches. The first section attempts to situate the paper in the field by offering a theoretical background on critical discourse analysis and ideologies. Section 2 establishes the analytic framework by introducing the approach that will be applied. Section 3 displays the study aim and technique. Section 4 applies van Dijk’s (2006) ideological framework to the chosen speech. Section 5 provides a modified approach that should be applied in the analysis of ideologies in political speeches. The last section summarizes the main findings of the study.