Vem har rätt till våldet? : En komparativ diskursanalys av rapporteringen om det syriska inbördeskriget

Författare

Jakob Padoan

Summary, in English

This essay examines the different ways in which the Syrian newspaper al-Waṭan and BBC Arabic report and describe the events of the Syrian civil war, specifically which side in the conflict is described as being what I call the righteous perpetrator and the unrighteous perpetrator respectively. Furthermore I compared to which degree the two media sources were one-sided in their respective accounts of the perpetrators. The theoretical bases of the analysis are primarily Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffes’ idea of discursive struggle, and a method for discourse analysis partly derived from Samia Bazzi, who proposes the use Lévi-Strauss’ idea of myths and mythemes for analytical purposes.
I found that al-Waṭan’s account was the most one-sided, since they consistently described the actions of the regime as being the righteous, and the ones of the anti-regime (the term I used for all groups fighting against the regime) as unrighteous. BBC’s account was a bit more nuanced, but still tended to favor the opposite account, i.e. to describe the anti-regime’s actions as righteous and the regime’s actions as unrighteous, since most unrighteous acts were described as being committed by the regime.

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