Anti-State Politics in the Syrian Revolution: The Case of Liberated Zones [Protivogosudarstvennye politiki v siriiskoi revoliutsii: primer osvobozhdennykh zon]

Author(s):  
Montassir Sakhi ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Boex

Since March 2011 the revolt in Syria has engendered a considerable and heterogeneous mass of videos made by demonstrators, activists, and fighters and posted on the Internet. During the peaceful manifestations between 2011 and 2013, the videos played a crucial role in the narrative of the revolt but also in the emergence of new modes of protesting focused on the work of the image. The author questions the effects of amateur video on the perception of the protest as well as on protest activities themselves in an ultra-repressive context. She pays particular attention to the relationship between the act of filming and the act of protesting, both linked by bodies, words, and emotions. Thus, it is an issue of exploring the different visual dimensions of the revolt in Syria, in accordance with the evolution of the movement and the spaces it occupied, to understand better how the protest experience is articulated and put into images.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 584-600
Author(s):  
Amaal Al-Gamde ◽  
Thora Tenbrink

AbstractThis study explores the influence of a government’s ideology on linguistic representation in a news agency that characterizes itself as independent. It focuses on the coverage of the Syrian civil war as reported by the Iranian news agency Fars, addressing the discursive constructions of anti-government powers in relevant online reports released between 2013 and 2015. Since the Islamic Republic of Iran was a major regional ally of the Syrian government, we questioned the extent to which ideological independence could be expected during a politically critical time frame. Taking a corpus-based linguistic approach, the study explores the semantic macrostructures representing the opposition as well as the lexical clusters and keywords characterizing the news discourse. The findings indicate that Fars’ representation of the Syrian Revolution was, to some extent, biased, despite its claimed independence of the government’s political stance. It excluded the Sunni social actors, suppressed the Islamic faction identity of the rebels and depicted the uprising as a war against foreign-backed militants. The rebels were stereotyped in terms of terrorism and non-Syrians. In addition, the analysis reveals Fars’ tendency to emphasize the power of the government, depicting it as the defender of the Arab land and foregrounding the discourse of international conspiracy against Syria. The results of this work project the dimension of media bias caused by the underpinning political perspective of media institutions.


2013 ◽  
Vol 369 (18) ◽  
pp. 1675-1677 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Neuhausen ◽  
Michael Spivey ◽  
Arthur L. Kellermann
Keyword(s):  

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