Khaled Saghieh

Wednesday, 2 November 2016, 5.00 pm - 6.30 pm |
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

Manufacturing Hope and Despair: Print Media in Postwar Lebanon


Khaled Saghieh

(Beirut / EUME Fellow 2016/17)

Chair: Elias Khoury
(Beirut / Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2016/17)

Abstract
The end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 triggered sentiments of hope mixed with suspicion towards the new peace agreement as well as the political and economic vision for postwar Lebanon. This juncture was a fertile ground for the Left that sought to heal its wounds following the collapse of the Soviet Union and repair its fractures after having participated in the civil war. The lack of partisan institutions able to uphold a postwar leftist project and the demise of most leftist thinkers either by assassination or disillusionment, prompted journalists to take on the task of reinventing the Left in Lebanon. They defended secular democracy, championed a class-based discourse, and raised the anti-colonial/imperial banner. It took less than a decade, however, for the contradictions in such an agenda to emerge before finally imploding in the wake of the Arab uprisings. This lecture probes the complexity of inhabiting a leftist position by examining the writings and legacies of four leftist journalists whose individual tragedies point to the tragic fate of their self-assigned mission.

Khaled Saghieh began his career as a journalist in 1998 at the Lebanese daily al-Safir. Until 2011, he was the deputy editor-in-chief of the daily al-Akhbar. Between 2012 and 2015, Saghieh worked as editor-in-chief of the news department at the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International (LBCI). He also earned an MA in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.