Mobilization Strategies: Evidence from King Abdullah II’s Speeches during COVID-19 Pandemic in Jordan

Abstract

This paper studies three of the Jordanian king’s speeches during the peak of Covid-19 in the country in order to see what kinds of mobilization strategies are used and why they were employed. Searle’s (1969) speech act theory was employed to classify and analyze the mobilization strategies used in the speeches, and then a quantitative and qualitative analysis was made to find which was most commonly used. The study found that the representative speech acts were the most frequent, followed by the directives, expressives, commissives, and declaratives respectively. It was noted that representative speech acts were used when talking about the health situation in Jordan, while directive speech acts conveyed the king’s orders, to the government and his people, to curb the spread of the virus.