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Hezbollah’s Framing of the Two-front Resistance: A Quantitative Analysis of Hasan Nasrallah’s Speeches
Abstract
This paper aims to explore the dynamics of Hezbollah’s framing of “resistance” after the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in spring 2011 through quantitative text analysis of Arabic speeches of the secretary-general, Hasan Nasrallah. While Hezbollah repeatedly addresses that “resistance (muqawama)” is their raison d'être, the leadership has been trying to re-define its meaning through various framings, the so-called "resistance society" for example. As the Syrian conflict broke out, Hezbollah started their direct involvement in it and claimed that their resistance mission is to eliminate threats of Syrian jihadists as well as Israeli Zionist to justify their cross-border operations. Thus, Hezbollah’s armed resistance virtually became two-front. This paper is designed to conduct empirical research on the question of how Hezbollah’s discourse of the two-front resistance emerged and changed between the pre- and post-Syrian conflict periods. Most of the existing studies on Nasrallah’s speeches employed qualitative analyses, which is not able to seize the overall trend of Hezbollah's discourse dynamics. And also these studies tend to use English translations of the original Arabic speeches, raising questions of analytical accuracy. Taking them into consideration, the advantages of this study are not only to employ quantitative text analysis methods but to use primary sources in Arabic, which can be expected to present the method, result, and significance in the field of Hezbollah and Islamism studies.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Terrorism