Legitimising Emerging Power Diplomacy: an Analysis of Government and Media Discourses on Brazilian Foreign Policy under Lula

Abstract This study analyses whether Brazilian foreign policy under Lula successfully legitimised the country's international identity as a rising power in the eyes of the domestic and international media. Based on a constructivist framework, we have applied French Discourse Analysis to a corpus of 36 official addresses by the President of the Republic and the Minister of Foreign Relations and 137 news articles from four news outlets, two Brazilian and two international, concerning two diplomatic episodes deemed representative of Brazil's quest for greater pre-eminence: the leadership of MINUS...