Analyzing the frameworks of american guardianship over tunisian democracy: a corpus-assisted approach

Abstract

This paper analyzes U.S. news coverage of Tunisia’s democratic trajectory between 2011 and 2024 and its connection to American foreign policy in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. It applies corpus-assisted discourse analysis on an original collection of news articles published in the New York Times, New York Post, National Review, and Wall Street Journal during the Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies. The American guardianship framework consists of three recurring patterns: Americentrism, benchmarking economic prosperity by capitalist values, and Western ownership of democratic successes. Altogether, these frames present post-2011 Tunisia as both a fragile political experiment and the region's litmus test for democratic viability. While Obama-era coverage celebrated Tunisia as a success story, Trump-era reporting criticized its economic fragility and security concerns. News coverage during Biden's mandate increasingly focused on authoritarian retrenchment under President Kaïs Saïed and the erosion of constitutional norms. By combining corpus methods with critical discourse analysis, the paper conveys how U.S. news outlets placed their respective administrations' geopolitical interests at the center of reporting on Tunisia's democratic development.