Empathy and the Lebanese Civil War of 1958 in the USA

Bibliographic Data

ID11660978
AuthorsMaurice Jr Labelle (corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume41
Issue2
Publication date2019-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArab Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0271-3519 • E-ISSN: 2043-6920
PublisherPluto Journals (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.13169/arabstudquar.41.2.0172
OpenAlexW2955791754
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

This article examines the role that empathy played during the US intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1958, also known as Operation Blue Bat. Through deep readings of public texts, it explores how a minority of Americans empathized with Lebanese opponents of President Camille Chamoun. After the arrival of US forces, Lebanese anti-Chamounists made their voices heard and feeling felt in the USA via global information providers, enacting cultural interventions. Lebanese dissent was headline news, engendering empathetic processes that reoriented US ways of feeling, thinking, and acting. By using empathy as a point of entry into historical intercultural relations, this article unearths how genuine transnational understandings were socially formed during a moment of conflict. Ultimately, it argues that a focus on empathy gives foreign relations scholars an avenue that eschews nefarious Orientalist binaries and their powers in the process

Complicity · Dissent · Empathy · Feeling · Media studies · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Middle East Politics and Society · Psychology · Social Psychology

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Open DOIOpen Access