DISCOURSE STRATEGIES IN THE UNITED NATIONS’ APPEASEMENT ENGAGEMENT IN THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT

The Israel-Palestine conflict in today's global discourse has received attention from both linguistic and non-linguistic perspectives.However, available scholarship on the discourse strategies deployed by the United Nations in its appeasement effort is quite lean.This gap provides the basis for this study which is an examination of the discourse strategies deployed by the United Nations in its appeasement effort in the current conflict between Israel and Palestine in order to determine their effectiveness.The study utilizes selected press statements of the Secretary-General of the world body as corpus data and also deploys insights from Reisigl and Wodak's (2009) discursive strategies.Our findings reveal that appeasement strategies such as: accentuation, name-dropping, profiling, scaremongering and other varieties dominate the discourse primarily to engender cessation of hostilities between the two warring nations.In addition, discourse features which include; deixis, toponyms and metaphors as nominative tools; adjectives, prepositional phrases and clauses as predicative instruments are also splendidly used.The paper concludes that the appeasement move of the UN is commendable but it is yet to achieve a de-escalation of the conflict.This study will enrich the extant scholarship on discourse strategies of conflict management.