Restorative nationalism and revolutionary legitimacy: An ideological square analysis of Ahmad Al-Sharaa's debut speech at the UN General Assembly

Ahmad al-Sharaa's address to the 80th session of the UN General Assembly on 24 September 2025 was the first by a Syrian head of state at that forum since 1967, and it was delivered by a leader who took power through armed struggle. Studies of al-Sharaa's discourse have examined his early speeches, interviews, media coverage, and online commentary, while his speech in a multilateral forum has not been analyzed. This qualitative study with descriptive quantification applies van Dijk's ideological square to 75 propositional units transcribed from the original Arabic audio. Emphasize positive 'us' dominates the speech (65.3%), followed by emphasize negative 'them' (26.7%) and de-emphasize negative 'us' (8.0%). The mitigation of in-group wrongdoing is placed between the criminalization of the old regime and the glorification of the new Syria, and it is realized through qaṣr, total negation, nominalization, and vague referents. The old regime is named as the agent of violence or remains recoverable, and its unnamed foreign supporters are marked by strongly negative lexis. In contrast, the agents of in-group violence are left unrecoverable, and their acts are softened. A Qur'anic iqtibās anchors the claim to victory in sacred authority. The speech represents restorative nationalism and revolutionary legitimacy, reconciled by dividing the past into a distant past to be recovered and a recent past to be ended. The findings suggest that the use of this strategy may vary with the speaker's legitimacy position, a proposition that comparative research can test.