Post-Revolutionary Discourse and the Politics of Exclusion: Nikol Pashinyan’s Armenia

Abstract

This paper investigates the transformation of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s political discourse from the period following the 2018 Velvet Revolution to the political and religious confrontations of 2020–2025. Using the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and drawing on the work of Wodak, Van Dijk, Fairclough, Van Leeuwen, and Reyes, it examines how Pashinyan has positioned himself as the moral embodiment of the revolution while portraying opponents, ranging from former political elites to war critics, civil society actors, and religious leaders as threats to the state. Through strategies such as referential reduction, predication, moral evaluation, securitization, and fear-based legitimization, his rhetoric has progressively narrowed the range of acceptable political participation. The study traces the shift from inclusive, reformist messaging toward a crisis-driven style that frames loyalty as virtue and dissent as disloyalty, with the boundaries of the political “enemy” expanding over time. Drawing on speeches, press conferences, and symbolic performances, the analysis demonstrates how this discursive trajectory has contributed to the erosion of pluralism, the redefinition of political legitimacy, and the securitization of opposition in post-revolutionary Armenia. This analysis is based on a qualitative corpus of public speeches, parliamentary addresses, press conferences, and digital communications produced by Nikol Pashinyan between 2018 and 2025. JEL: P16, D72, H11; UDC: 808.56:[323.2+327.5](479.25)