scholarly journals First, They Came for the Clocks: Understanding the Syrian Revolution Through Competing Temporalities

Author(s):  
Michele Cusi
Keyword(s):  
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.


Women Rising ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 58-67
Author(s):  
Mohja Kahf

“Stop the Killing” and “Brides of Peace” are two campaigns initiated by Syrian women to revitalize nonviolent resistance in Syria, in response to the militarization within the Syrian revolution and the rise of Islamist extremist militias. In this chapter, Mohja Kahf, professor at the University of Arkansas, seeks to understand how these campaigns put women back at the forefront of civil disobedience, stumped the regime, and rallied the values of the original protest movement of Syria.


Women Rising ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 354-362
Author(s):  
Layla Saleh

Giving a personal voice to the role of women in the Syrian revolution, Layla Saleh places the account of one Syrian woman, Um Ibrahim, exiled in the second year of the uprising, in the larger context of women’s participation in the revolutionary popular mobilization, after the Assad regime’s “women’s rights” proved unsatisfactory and insufficient. The narrative culminates in Um Ibrahim’s own participation in the protests in Damascus before the full-fledged war took hold. Um Ibrahim recounts how women took on a central role in the Syrian revolution, hiding protesters, cooking, delivering food and weapons, and serving in the political and armed opposition. However, they have been victimized by the war, their activist role has been diminished, and their security and physical well-being have become precarious as the country is bloodily entrenched in civil and proxy warfare.


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