Legitimizing The United Nations On Social Media:A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Posts On Instagram

Recent years have seen the United Nations(UN)facing increasing challenges posed by external crises and doubts on its internal operation,which is leading to a deficit in its organizational legitimacy.With the advance of digitalization as well as information and communication technologies,the discourse on social media is becoming an important resource for different organizations to construct and maintain their legitimacy.However,most of the current studies on the discursive construction of the UN’s legitimacy focus on organizational public documents or the speeches of Secretary-General(SG),giving insufficient attention to the discourse on social media and its feature of multimodality.This research draws on Van Leeuwen’s(2007)discursive legitimation framework and adopts Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA)as an approach,to explore how the UN employs the discourses in its Instagram posts to realize its legitimation.Based on Systemic Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar,the verbal texts and images of the UN’s Instagram posts are first coded respectively to investigate the discursive choices in terms of different meaning dimensions of the verbal and visual modes.These discursive choices are then further examined under the discursive legitimation framework,to reveal what discursive strategies for legitimation are employed in the posts and how they serve to legitimize the UN.It is found that these verbal and visual choices are interwoven and complementary to each other,legitimizing the UN through four discursive strategies,including authorization,moralization,rationalization and mythopoesis.Authorization constructs the UN’s legitimacy by shaping an authoritative and trustworthy organization which operates based on rules,strict procedures and an orderly structure,and is collectively needed by people around the world.This is realized through invoking the personal authorities of the SG and the UN staff members,as well as impersonal authorities of rules and conformity.Moralization realizes legitimation by directly endowing positive evaluations to the UN and negative evaluations to the events violating the UN’s principles.It also implicitly relates the UN and its actions to abstract moral notions and stresses the morally related generic identities of the public to show its conformity to moral values and evoke the audience’s moral emotions,thereby constructing its moral legitimacy.Rationalization justifies the cognitive legitimacy of the UN,by explaining the altruistic purpose of its actions and emphasizing on authenticity,transparency and public engagement.Mythopoesis reinforces the overall legitimacy of the UN by telling a general moral story about how the UN improves the lives and situations of the public,which stresses the effectiveness of the UN’s work.These discursive strategies work both separately and in combination in realizing the legitimation of the UN.This research provides a discursive and a multimodal perspective for the studies on the legitimacy and legitimation of the UN,revealing the distinctive role social media plays in organizational legitimation and brings practical implications to other international organizations on discursive construction of legitimacy.