UNIVERSITY OF BELGRADE FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCES GRADUATE ACADEMIC STUDIES Regional Master’s Program in Peace Studies MASTER THESIS Deconstructing the Coverage of the Syrian Conflict in Western Media Case Study: The Economist ACADEMIC SUPERVISOR: STUDENT: Prof. dr Radmila Nakarada Uroš Mamić Enrollment No. 22/2015 Belgrade, 2018 1 DECLARATION OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY I hereby declare that the study presented is based on my own research and no other sources than the ones indicated. All thoughts taken directly or indirectly from other sources are properly denoted as such. Belgrade, 31 August 2018 Uroš Mamić (Signature) 2 Content 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………..3 1.1. Statement of Problem ……………………………………………………………………… 3 1.2. Research Topic ………………………………………….........……………………..............4 1.3. Research Goals and Objectives ………………………………….………………….............6 1.4. Hypotheses ………………………………………………………..…………………………7 1.4.1. General Hypothesis ………………………………………………..………………………...7 1.4.2. Specific Hypotheses …………………………………………………………………………7 1.5. Research Methodology ………………………………………………………………….......8 1.6. Research Structure – Chapter Outline ……………………………………………………...10 2. Major Themes of the Syrian Conflict in The Economist ……………………………….12 2.1. Roots of the Conflict ……………………………………………………………………….13 2.2. Beginning of the Conflict – Protests and Early Armed Insurgency …………….................23 2.3. Local Actors …………………………………………………………………………….......36 2.3.1. Syrian Government Forces …………………………………………………………………37 2.3.2. Syrian Opposition ……………………………………………………………………….......41 2.3.3. ISIS …………………………………………………………………………………………..50 2.3.4. Kurds ………………………………………………………………………………………...60 2.4. External Actors ………………………………………………………………………............66 2.4.1. Regional Actors ……………………………………………………………………………...67 2.4.2. Global Actors ………………………………………………………………………………..72 2.5. Battle of Aleppo ……………………………………………………………………………..85 2.6. Peace Efforts ………………………………………………………………………................90 3. Peace Journalism or War Journalism? …………………………………...………………98 4. The Economist’s Narrative of the Syrian Conflict – Deconstructed ………..……….....111 4.1. Fight for Freedom and Democracy against a Brutal Regime ...…………………………...111 4.2. Absence of Critical Refection ………………………………………………………………112 4.3. Stereotypes, Historical Analogies and Manipulations of Facts and Figures ……………....113 4.4. Lack of Legal and Historical Background …………………………...…………………….115 4.5. Orientalism …………………………………………………………………………………..116 5. Conclusion – General Hypothesis and Basis for Generalization ……………………….120 6. References …………………………………………………………………………………...122 3 1. Introduction 1.1. Statement of Problem What began as a protest against the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2011, as one within a wave of popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring, has transformed in a long and deadly conflict. The Syrian civil war has taken several hundred thousand casualties with many more wounded and displaced; it has devastated Syria and drawn in regional and global powers. According to an article from The Guardian and the statistics from the Syrian Centre for Policy Research from February 2016 – the conflict has taken 470 000 lives, with almost 45% of the total Syrian population displaced.1 The article emphasizes that this amounts to about 11,5% of population either killed or injured, with the number of wounded put at 1,9 million people.2 Besides the fatalities, the conflict has destroyed a large part of the infrastructure and left the people living in conditions that add up to a humanitarian crisis. The conflict in Syria has drawn a lot of media attention. TV channels, print and online media outlets, in Europe as elsewhere, have devoted much media space to the conflict. This is due to several different factors, among which the relentlessness and the share of violence are just first among them. The proximity of the conflict to the EU borders is just one among many causes behind the Western media focus on Syria – but an important one nevertheless. One of the related consequences of this proximity was the refugee crisis in Europe – as displacement of the Syrian population resulted in larger numbers of refugees heading towards the European Union member states’ borders, more media attention has been turning to the Syrian war. Additionally, the involvement of the Islamic State in the conflict and the increasing number of terrorist attacks in Europe linked to this terrorist organization has reinforced this attention. Given the strong interest of different types of media in this conflict unfolding at the Middle East, the research topic of this study is around the content of the coverage. One of the defining characteristics of this conflict which journalists have had to deal with while creating news - is its overwhelming complexity. Analyzes of the causes of the conflict, the character of the conflict and the actors involved reflect that complexity. The conflict has only become ever more complex in the seven years since its outbreak. In an article for the Council of Foreign Relations webpage, Zachary Laub analyzes the actors involved the conflict saying how “war is being fought on multiple fronts by an array of combatants whose alliances, capabilities, and in some cases motives 1 Black, Ian; Report on Syria conflict finds 11.5% of population killed or injured; in The Guardian; 11/2/2016; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/11/report-on-syria-conflict-finds-115-of-population-killed-or-injured 2 Ibid 4 have been in flux.”3 Variety of actors ranging from local social groups over regional states to global superpowers such as the US and Russia uncovers several layers of complexity in a conflict whose dimensions intersect on a complicated battlefield. The war in Syria shows dimensions of an intrastate, civil war as well as of a regional sectarian conflict and a proxy conflict among big superpowers. The approach of this thesis is to problematize the coverage of the Syrian conflict by the Western media. For the reasons mentioned before, the Syrian conflict has been taking a substantial amount of media space in Western Europe and the US. Media have been crucial in formulating public opinion and general knowledge on this conflict – which by default involved grasping the complexity of the Syrian war. To this point, media have been central in framing the civil war in Syria, which refers to a systematic process in which they have highlighted and been giving meaning to certain events and processes while communicating them to the wider Western public. That has consequently affected how the public perceives and interprets events and processes in these countries. Following this line of argumentation, media thus have an important role in their governments’ respective foreign and security policies as they shape the environment in which they operate and manage expectations of the political actors. All of this makes the problematization of Western media’s place in the Syrian conflict worthwhile. 1.2. Research Topic Public understanding of events taking place in remote parts of the globe hit by ongoing conflicts relies on media coverage. As stated above, public understanding of conflicts is important because it feeds into official foreign and security policies of governments and affects international politics. The topic of this study will be the coverage of the Syrian conflict in the British newspaper The Economist as a selected representative of the Western mass media.4 The choice of The Economist as a representative Western media means this magazine would be used, on the one hand, as a source of information and, on the other hand, as a research topic and to reach conclusion on the media content about the Syrian war in more general terms. This is thought to be justified principally because of its 3 Laub, Zachary; Who’s Who in Syria’s Civil War; on Council on Foreign Relations; 28/4/2017; https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/whos-who-syrias-civil-war 4 Western media are used as a term to depict the mass media in a US-led group of countries in Western Europe and North America. The designation of the West and the Western media as monolithic entities in this paper is based on the unified US-led effort in the Syrian conflict of countries such as the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Canada, Denmark, Belgium and Australia. The United States and its allies have taken part in the conflict and supported both the rebel forces and the Kurds with a high level of consistency. Moreover, the Western media designation as if the media in the Western countries were a monolithic entity is thought justified due to their often used description as free press, as well as their highly uniform media content on this particular topic. 5 circulation statistics – average circulation of The Economist issue worldwide (including both print and digital editions) amounts to 1 444 936 readers, while the monthly average of unique browsers for economist.com is 11 372 596 – both during the period between January and June 2017.5 While being a British media, more than a half of its average weekly circulation is sold in the US and Canada, having a large base of readers in the rest of Europe.6 Furthermore, it is one of the most widely recognized publications on current affairs – and can generally be depicted as a mainstream media. According to the Audited Bureau of Circulation report, “it provides a global perspective and rigorous analysis of world affairs,”7 which, adding to its public outreach, makes it a representative media outlet and ultimately possible to make conclusions