Exploring Global Solidarity and Power in António Guterres’s 2025 UN General Assembly Speech: A Van Dijkian Ideological Analysis

Abstract

The ideological construction of global solidarity and power relations in the 2025 speech by the United Nations general assembly leader, António Guterres, has been discussed in this paper using the Critical Discourse Analysis framework by Van Dijk (1998). The research is devoted to the interaction of language, ideology and cognition which form and maintain the global politics stories of unity, justice and authority. The study relies on Van Dijk (1998) model to identify how cooperating and controlling perceptions are formed in case of inclusive language, moral appeals, and discursive framing. This study is qualitative, and the interpretive analysis is used to investigate ideological connotations in the chosen speech in the framework suggested by Van Dijk (1998). Findings indicate that the speech by Guterres advances solidarity based on moral universalism and indirectly, support hierarchical forms of power. The discussion added information to the study of the validity of global leadership discourse as a means to legitimize authority by using linguistic means.