The United Nations’ discursive construction of time: a comparative analysis of the United Nations Charter, the Millennium Declaration and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda

Abstract

The work analyzes the construction of temporality within the UN’s discourses in relation to two questions: what the construction of temporality can tell us about the UN’s view of its own agency and to what extent changes in temporal constructs can be related to wider socio-political shifts. Theoretically, it relies on social constructivist, post-structuralist, and critical discourse analysis (CDA) approaches to explore the intersections of agency, discourse, and time, specifically focusing on the political struggle to define temporality. To this end, it starts from the discourse-historical approach and its interest in the mutually-shaping dynamics between discursive structures and agents. It then conducts a critical analysis of the UN Charter, the Millennium Declaration, and the 2030 Agenda. The documents went through two rounds of coding which isolated individual words and explored grammatical structures. The data was reduced through a modified model of decontextualizing discursive strategies. By moving between different levels of analysis, and using secondary sources to reconstruct the historical context from which the documents emerged, the work finds a trend of increasingly concrete temporal settings and increasingly abstract subjects. It argues that this can be related to the growing importance of capitalist realist discourses which have both undercut the agency of individual actors and imbued abstract principles, which the UN embodies, with power. It also finds that the construction of time both within and between the documents is rife with contradictions, and relates this ambiguity to the constant push and pull between conflicting interests which mark discourse as a field and politics as a mode of activity.