مسعود دهقان

What was preconceived to be an age of dialogue bringing nations together has occasionally turned instead to be a clash of discourses, in the very time that the notion of the global society--thanks to the advancements in information technology-- keeps coming to the fore. As Derrida puts it, "Like others before, the new 'wars of religion' unleash themselves over the human earth … and struggle even today to control the sky with fingers and eyes". What has been at stake in such clashes is the 'other' as a key concept in relation to which one can probably conceive the entire the logic of the postmodern thinking. 'The openness to the other' seems to form the basis of any movement toward the global society. Despite the many studies carried out to deal with concept both in discourse and pragmatic studies, it is unfortunate that the concept has not been given the attention it deserved, particularly in contexts where democracy and globalization have been thematized. The present study which is in process is an attempt to investigate the place of the other in recent discourse on democracy. In doing so, we focused on ten speeches delivered by western leaders following 11/9. The preliminary results of the analyses on the limited data indicate that such texts are often structured on the basis of a hierarchical dualism in which the other is treated as the lower, weak, and the evil member of the dualism. It seems that this way of treating the other forms a framework which repeats itself not only in western political discourse but also in other non-western instances where democracy is not usually thematized