Omar Al‐ghazzi
Biographic Data
| ID | 4900315 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Omar Al‐ghazzi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Omar |
| FAMILY NAME | Al‐ghazzi |
| SIGNATURE | AL GHAZZI O |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9905-409X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Witnessing undone
This article examines the converging roles of legacy news media and official political speech in enabling genocide to take place in Gaza. Drawing on BBC coverage as an example, I explain how dominant Western media relied on a cacophony of silence and noise to amplify state narratives. This repertoire is characterized by selective omission of context from coverage, the policing of words, mainly the word genocide, and the inflation of a “war on ter…
Keywords in Contemporary Syrian Media, Culture and Politics
Transnational Feelings
This panel examines the role of affect in transnational digital media, offering fine-grained analyses of online communities and media artifacts which contend with and carve out contested futures. In doing so, it offers digital affect as an analytic for contending with interdependent realities. Through qualitative interviews, close readings, and textual analyses, these projects engage in a range of approaches to trace the digital affects which cir…
We will be great again
This article explores historical victimhood as a feature of contemporary populist discourse. It is about how populist leaders invoke meta-history to make self-victimising claims as a means for consolidating power. I argue that historical victimhood propagates a forked historical consciousness – a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil – that enables the projection of alleged victimhood into the past and the future, while …
Forced to report
Based on interviews with Syrian media practitioners, this article uses the notion of affective proximity to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country and community. I argue that the life-risking, and sometimes deadly, media practices of local reporters and witnesses, as well as their emotional labour, often do not feature in understandings of journalism when it is conceived as a purely profess…
Beyond verification
Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism…
Emotion and Authoritarian Rule in Syria
Two authors explore the mixture of violence, ideology, fear, and aspiration that the authoritarian regime has relied on to stay in power for several turbulent decades
Infantilizing Arab politics
Since 2011, the Kuwaiti telecom company Zain Group, one of the largest in the Middle East, has produced a series of popular ads broadcast annually during Ramadan. The ads are songs, usually featuring celebrities singing and dancing with children. Since 2015, the ads have become noticeably more political. In 2016, the ad was shot in a refugee camp and featured Arab celebrities singing about suffering and hope. In 2017, the ad carried an anti-terro…
Grendizer Leaves for Sweden
Exploring the post-March 2011 Syrian online sphere, in this article I focus on nostalgic videos and memes inspired by Arabic-dubbed Japanese anime series originally broadcast on Arab government TV stations in the 1980s. As part of a dissident social media culture, amateur videos that redubbed and edited childhood cartoons have appeared on YouTube since 2011—tackling themes of revolution, war and exile. These videos defied and mocked the Al-Assad …
Networked publics and digital contention
S yria
In post‐2011 Syria a long‐simmering crisis of national identity has imploded into a widespread popular uprising, and then into civil war. The raging conflict exposed how, since the creation of the Syrian state, the system of governance has often exacerbated sectarian and ethnic differences and affiliations to place of origin within Syria. Cross‐cutting cleavages between sect, class, place origin, and ideology have shaped configurations of nationa…
Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising
This article analyzes the term ‘citizen journalism’ against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings in order to show how it overlooks the local context of digital media practices. The first part examines videos emanating from Syria to illustrate how they blur the lines between acts of witnessing, reporting, and lobbying, as well as between professional and amateur productions, and civic and violent intentions. The second part highlights the genealogie…
Neo-Ottoman Cool
In the past decade, Turkish television drama has enjoyed popular success in the Arab world, fueling wide-ranging controversies in the pan-Arab public sphere. Such popularity is at first sight puzzling. After all, Arabs lived under Ottoman rule for 400 years, and for most of the 20th century Turkey's foreign policy neglected Arab interests. Why, then, would Turkish drama be popular with Arab audiences, especially at a time of unprecedented vibranc…
Nation as neighborhood
This article discusses a popular Syrian television drama series, Bab al-Hara (The Neighborhood Gate), which ran for five seasons (2006–10). It is part of a genre of television series called the “Damascene milieu,” which nostalgically dramatizes life in imagined Damascene neighborhoods in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. The narrative of Bab al-Hara focuses on how a Syrian community lived under and resisted French colonial rule and its local…
Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising
This article analyzes the term ‘citizen journalism’ against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings in order to show how it overlooks the local context of digital media practices. The first part examines videos emanating from Syria to illustrate how they blur the lines between acts of witnessing, reporting, and lobbying, as well as between professional and amateur productions, and civic and violent intentions. The second part highlights the genealogie…
We will be great again
This article explores historical victimhood as a feature of contemporary populist discourse. It is about how populist leaders invoke meta-history to make self-victimising claims as a means for consolidating power. I argue that historical victimhood propagates a forked historical consciousness – a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil – that enables the projection of alleged victimhood into the past and the future, while …
Neo-Ottoman Cool
In the past decade, Turkish television drama has enjoyed popular success in the Arab world, fueling wide-ranging controversies in the pan-Arab public sphere. Such popularity is at first sight puzzling. After all, Arabs lived under Ottoman rule for 400 years, and for most of the 20th century Turkey's foreign policy neglected Arab interests. Why, then, would Turkish drama be popular with Arab audiences, especially at a time of unprecedented vibranc…
Forced to report
Based on interviews with Syrian media practitioners, this article uses the notion of affective proximity to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country and community. I argue that the life-risking, and sometimes deadly, media practices of local reporters and witnesses, as well as their emotional labour, often do not feature in understandings of journalism when it is conceived as a purely profess…
Beyond verification
Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism…
Nation as neighborhood
This article discusses a popular Syrian television drama series, Bab al-Hara (The Neighborhood Gate), which ran for five seasons (2006–10). It is part of a genre of television series called the “Damascene milieu,” which nostalgically dramatizes life in imagined Damascene neighborhoods in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. The narrative of Bab al-Hara focuses on how a Syrian community lived under and resisted French colonial rule and its local…
Neo-Ottoman Cool
In the past decade, Turkish television drama has enjoyed popular success in the Arab world, fueling wide-ranging controversies in the pan-Arab public sphere. Such popularity is at first sight puzzling. After all, Arabs lived under Ottoman rule for 400 years, and for most of the 20th century Turkey's foreign policy neglected Arab interests. Why, then, would Turkish drama be popular with Arab audiences, especially at a time of unprecedented vibranc…
Nation as neighborhood
This article discusses a popular Syrian television drama series, Bab al-Hara (The Neighborhood Gate), which ran for five seasons (2006–10). It is part of a genre of television series called the “Damascene milieu,” which nostalgically dramatizes life in imagined Damascene neighborhoods in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. The narrative of Bab al-Hara focuses on how a Syrian community lived under and resisted French colonial rule and its local…
Citizen Journalism” in the Syrian Uprising
This article analyzes the term ‘citizen journalism’ against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings in order to show how it overlooks the local context of digital media practices. The first part examines videos emanating from Syria to illustrate how they blur the lines between acts of witnessing, reporting, and lobbying, as well as between professional and amateur productions, and civic and violent intentions. The second part highlights the genealogie…
S yria
In post‐2011 Syria a long‐simmering crisis of national identity has imploded into a widespread popular uprising, and then into civil war. The raging conflict exposed how, since the creation of the Syrian state, the system of governance has often exacerbated sectarian and ethnic differences and affiliations to place of origin within Syria. Cross‐cutting cleavages between sect, class, place origin, and ideology have shaped configurations of nationa…
Networked publics and digital contention
Infantilizing Arab politics
Since 2011, the Kuwaiti telecom company Zain Group, one of the largest in the Middle East, has produced a series of popular ads broadcast annually during Ramadan. The ads are songs, usually featuring celebrities singing and dancing with children. Since 2015, the ads have become noticeably more political. In 2016, the ad was shot in a refugee camp and featured Arab celebrities singing about suffering and hope. In 2017, the ad carried an anti-terro…
Grendizer Leaves for Sweden
Exploring the post-March 2011 Syrian online sphere, in this article I focus on nostalgic videos and memes inspired by Arabic-dubbed Japanese anime series originally broadcast on Arab government TV stations in the 1980s. As part of a dissident social media culture, amateur videos that redubbed and edited childhood cartoons have appeared on YouTube since 2011—tackling themes of revolution, war and exile. These videos defied and mocked the Al-Assad …
Emotion and Authoritarian Rule in Syria
Two authors explore the mixture of violence, ideology, fear, and aspiration that the authoritarian regime has relied on to stay in power for several turbulent decades
Transnational Feelings
This panel examines the role of affect in transnational digital media, offering fine-grained analyses of online communities and media artifacts which contend with and carve out contested futures. In doing so, it offers digital affect as an analytic for contending with interdependent realities. Through qualitative interviews, close readings, and textual analyses, these projects engage in a range of approaches to trace the digital affects which cir…
We will be great again
This article explores historical victimhood as a feature of contemporary populist discourse. It is about how populist leaders invoke meta-history to make self-victimising claims as a means for consolidating power. I argue that historical victimhood propagates a forked historical consciousness – a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil – that enables the projection of alleged victimhood into the past and the future, while …
Forced to report
Based on interviews with Syrian media practitioners, this article uses the notion of affective proximity to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country and community. I argue that the life-risking, and sometimes deadly, media practices of local reporters and witnesses, as well as their emotional labour, often do not feature in understandings of journalism when it is conceived as a purely profess…
Beyond verification
Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism…
Keywords in Contemporary Syrian Media, Culture and Politics
Witnessing undone
This article examines the converging roles of legacy news media and official political speech in enabling genocide to take place in Gaza. Drawing on BBC coverage as an example, I explain how dominant Western media relied on a cacophony of silence and noise to amplify state narratives. This repertoire is characterized by selective omission of context from coverage, the policing of words, mainly the word genocide, and the inflation of a “war on ter…
Political science (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Media studies (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (6 works)