Abstract

This research focusses the interdiscursive analysis of political discourse to expose the hegemonic relations in the world politics. It is backgrounded in the issue of blasphemy that emerged after the release of the movie trailer The Innocence of Muslims. The researcher restricted the context of the study to the UN General Assembly meeting September 2012 where the issue was discussed in the presence of world political leaders. The data of the study contains the speech of the US president Barak Obama and is analyzed by using Fairclough’s (1992) concept of interdiscursivity and hegemony. The analysis is focused on the discourse of the dominant political actor to find out the power relations and hegemony as exposed through the interdiscursive references present in his discourse. The study concludes that the dominant political leader uses different discursive strategies to construct and sustain power relations and hegemony. Interdiscursivity helps him to construct powerful self-image and to marginalise the subordinate group by highlighting its negative aspects and suppressing its ideologies. 

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