Manufacturing Institutional Non-Decision: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the United States Gaza Discourse at the United Nations Security Council

Abstract

This study is an application of qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to the discourse of United States (US) representatives in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on Gaza’s ceaseless crisis that erupted in 2023. Drawing on Fairclough (1995), Van Dijk (1998, 2006), and Van Leeuwen (2008), and grounding the analysis in a corpus that comprises six UNSC records that includes the justifications of vetoes delivered by US representatives across the six Gaza-related resolutions between October 2023 and September 2025, the study investigates how US representatives put into use three discursive mechanisms, namely, euphemism, lexical absence, and agent deletion jointly to shape the linguistic construction of violence and institutional responsibility regarding Gaza conflict. It shows how US representatives softened killing and engineered starvation into a neutral vocabulary of “loss” and “humanitarian needs”, how they kept salient categories such as occupation, collective punishment, and genocide out of the operative frame, and how they removed Israel from the grammatical position of agent of harm while installing Hamas as the transitive cause of the catastrophe. Further, by tracing these mechanisms across the full sequence of vetoes, the study shows that this discursive architecture persists while its surface forms strengthen as the factual and legal pressure on the US grows, moving from the suppression of the ceasefire demand to the delegitimisation of the very instruments that establish atrocity. This paper argues that the institutional lack of decision and non-action is produced and legitimised through the usage of multiple discursive mechanisms which function as discursive enablers, diffusing agency and lowering political and moral costs of institutional inaction. By doing so, the study offers a fresh viewpoint on international relations and discourse studies, explaining how language is used not to justify intervention, but to legitimise deadlock and render institutional failure structurally unavoidable.