Narrating Conflict in the Middle East — Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine

The term conflict has often been used broadly and uncritically to talk about diverse situations ranging from street protests to war, though the many factors that give rise to any conflict and its continuation over a period of time vary greatly.

The starting point of this innovative book is that it is unsatisfactory either to consider conflict within a singular concept or alternatively to consider each conflict as entirely distinct and unique; Narrating Conflict in the Middle East explores another path to addressing long-term conflict. The contributors set out to examine the ways in which such conflicts in Palestine and Lebanon have been and are narrated, imagined and remembered in diverse spaces, including that of the media. They examine discourses and representations of the conflicts as well as practices of memory and performance in narratives of suffering and conflict, all of which suggest an embodied investment in narrating or communicating conflict. In so doing, they engage with local, global, and regional realities in Lebanon and in Palestine and they respond dynamically to these realities.

Dina Matar is Senior Lecturer in Arab media and International Political Communication at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. A former foreign correspondent in the Middle East and elsewhere, she is author of What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (I.B.Tauris, 2010), and co-editor/founder of the 'Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication'.

Zahera Harb is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Journalism, City University, London, UK. A former broadcast journalist in Lebanon working for Lebanese and international media organizations, she is the author of Channels of Resistance in Lebanon, Liberation Propaganda, Hezbollah and the Media (I.B.Tauris, 2011).