Article in:
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Online-First Articles

The pen is mightier than the sword

Malala Yousafzai’s reaction to verbal and nonverbal aggression in her 2013 UN-speech

| University of Innsbruck, Austria
On October 9, 2012 Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani schoolgirl, was severely wounded by a Taliban assassin’s bullet. This was the culmination of a history of conflict in the Swat valley region of north-western Pakistan. The historical, ethnic, political and religious reasons for this conflict are manifold. After several surgeries in Pakistan and Great Britain, Malala Yousafzai miraculously recovered from her serious injuries and was even able to give a speech at the United Nations Youth Assembly on her 16th birthday on July 12, 2013.In this paper, Malala Yousafzai’s speech will be analysed in some detail regarding her main arguments and verbal presentation strategies. Furthermore, I will focus on the way Malala Yousafzai deals with both the verbal and non-verbal aggression of the Taliban. I would also like to show how determined she is to argue against the Taliban’s escalation of the conflict without letting herself getting entangled in a spiral of verbal violence.The theoretical framework for this analysis and the critical evaluation of the speech will be the concept of “strategic maneuvering” as developed by van Eemeren (2010, 2018) within his framework of Pragma-Dialectics. This concept has frequently been applied to the analysis of political discourse (see e.g. Kienpointner 2013, 2017).
Keywords: Malala Yousafzai, U.N. speech, political discourse, verbal and non-verbal aggression, strategic maneuvering, argumentative patterns
Published online: 02 April 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00034.kie
Source texts

Source texts

1.   Malala Yousafzai: Speech at the United Nations Youth Assembly (12.72013) [https://​www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2013​/jul​/12​/malala​-yousafzai​-united​-nations​-education​-speech​-text; last seen on January 8, 2020; my own text is based on the transcription of the British newspaper The Guardian, which has been modified and corrected according to the video (https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=QRh​_30C8l6Y; length of the video (within the ABC News Special Report): 19:35; length of Malala Yousafzai’s speech: 00:40 – 17:36, that is, 17 minutes; last seen on January 8, 2020)]
2.   Yousafzai, Malala and Lamb, Christina (2013): Ich bin Malala. München: Droemer (Engl. Original: M. Yousafzai and Chr. Lamb (2013): I am Malala. New York: Little, Brown and Company).Google Scholar
3.   Yousafzai, Malala and McCormick, Patricia (2014): I am Malala. Teen Edition Retold by Malala for Her Own Generation. London: Indigo.Google Scholar
4.   Yousafzai, Malala (2017): Malala’s Magic Pencil. London: Puffin Books, Penguin/Random House.Google Scholar

References

Aristotle
2006 On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Das, Runa
2017 “He Named Me Malala: Connecting the Historical, the Local, and the Global.” Social Identities. Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. 23(2): 195–211. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eemeren, Frans H. van
2010 Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2018 Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Cham: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eemeren, Frans H. van, Bart Garssen, and Bert Meuffels
2009 Fallacies and Judgments of Reasonableness. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eemeren, Frans H. van, Bart Garssen, Erik C. W. Krabbe, A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Bart Verheij, and Jean H. M. Wagemans
2014 Handbook of Argumentation Theory. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Eemeren, Frans H. van, and Rob Grootendorst
1984 Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions. Dordrecht: Foris. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1992 Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
2004 A Systematic Theory of Argumentation. Amsterdam: SicSat.Google Scholar
Eemeren, Frans H. van, and Peter Houtlosser
2002 “Strategic Manoeuvring with the Burden of Proof.” In Advances in Pragma-Dialectics, edited by Frans H. van Eemeren, 13–28. Amsterdam: SicSat.Google Scholar
2006 “Strategic Manoeuvring with the Burden of Proof.” Argumentation 20(4): 381–392.Google Scholar
Eemeren, Frans H. van, Peter Houtlosser, and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans
2007 Argumentative Indicators in Discourse. Dordrecht: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fahnestock, Jean
2009 “ Quid pro nobis. Rhetorical Stylistics for Argument Analysis.” In Examining Argumentation in Context, edited by Frans H. van Eemeren, 191-220. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Isabela, and Norman Fairclough
2012 Political Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Garssen, Bart
1997 Argumentatieschema’s in pragma-dialectisch perspectief. Amsterdam: IFOTT.Google Scholar
Gilligan, Carol
1985 Die andere Stimme. München: Piper.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen
1981 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Vol. 1. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine
1997 “A Multilevel Approach in the Study of Talk in Interaction.” Pragmatics 7(1): 1–20. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kienpointner, Manfred
1986 “Topische Sequenzen in argumentativen Dialogen.” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 14(3): 321–355. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1992 Alltagslogik. Stuttgart: Frommann/Holzboog.Google Scholar
2013 “Strategic Maneuveringg in the Political Rhetoric of Barack Obama.” Journal of Language and Politics 12(3): 357–377. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2017 “Reason and Passion in Political Rhetoric: The Case of Louise Michel’s (1830–1905) Revolutionary Discourse.” In Argumentation across Communities of Practice: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives, edited by Cornelia Ilie and Giuliana Garzone, 99–125. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kienpointner, Manfred, and Anna Orlandini
2005 “La doxa de la justice à travers les langues et les époques.” Revue Internationale des droits de l’antiquité 52: 181–206.Google Scholar
Kienpointner, Manfred, and Maria Stopfner
2017 “Ideologies and (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, edited by Culpeper, Jonathan, Michael Haugh, and Dániel Z. Kádár, 61–87. London: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kohlberg, Lawrence
1974 Zur kognitiven Entwicklung des Kindes. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Khoja-Moolji, Shenila
2018 “Why is Malala such a Polarising Figure in Pakistan.” April 1 2018 https://​www​.aljazeera​.com​/indepth​/opinion​/malala​-polarising​-figure​-pakistan​-180401054631496​.html
Lakoff, George
2006 Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Larivée, Serge, Carole Sénéchal and Geneviève Chénard
2013 “Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 42(3): 319–345. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mazza, Viviana
2013 Die Geschichte von Malala. München: dtv.Google Scholar
Montefiore, Simon Sebag
2015 Speeches that Changed the World. London: Quercus.Google Scholar
Olesen, Thomas
2016 “Malala and the Politics of Global Iconicity.” The British Journal of Sociology 67(2): 307–327. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Perelman, Chaim, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca
1983 Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhétorique. Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles.Google Scholar
Piaget, Jean, and Bärbel Inhelder
1980 Die Psychologie des Kindes. Stuttgart: Klett.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas N., Chris Reed, and Fabrizio Macagno
2008 Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Alam, Zainab
2021. Violence against women in politics. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 09 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.