In the aftermath of Israel’s 33-day war on Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah issued a controversial nation-wide media campaign claiming a ‘Divine Victory’. The campaign, executed in three different languages on billboards that lined highways across Lebanon, addressed an audience beyond the confines of Hizbullah’s Shiite constituency. The signs and aesthetics, put to use in this campaign, did not resort to the typical repertoire of politico-religious symbolism that the party had repeatedly utilized in posters during its formative years (1985–90). The latter posters, modeled after the example of Iranian post-revolution propaganda, coupled the iconography and aesthetics of revolutionary struggle with Shiite symbolism pertaining to jihad and martyrdom. In comparison, the visual rhetoric of the ‘Divine Victory’ campaign clearly departs from the earlier radical and religiously inscribed model and embraces instead a softened visual rhetoric centered on nationalism. The campaign articulates Lebanese national symbols with signs of disciplined military force while being aesthetically comparable to modern mainstream commodity advertisement. In as much as this campaign presents a politically conscious transformation in the media strategies of Hizbullah, it does not constitute a sudden shift from the party’s previous media activities. Seen from the purview of Hizbullah’s short yet industrious history of political propaganda, the current campaign reveals to be at the end of a continuum of gradual changes that began to take shape in the early 1990s. These changes are equally manifest at the level of discourse, visual rhetoric and resources of public expression. This paper traces the transformations of Hizbullah’s political posters from 1985 to present. It analyses the changing signs and discourses, in their textual, visual and aesthetic materializations, and in relation to the corresponding modes of production and dissemination. The paper presents a comparative study of the posters according to three major stages in the political development of the party: starting with the formative years of Hizbullah’s Islamic Resistance (mid-1980s–90); moving to the ‘Lebanonisation’ of its party politics in post-war Lebanon leading up to the liberation of the south from Israeli occupation (1990–2000); and ending with the current rise of Hizbullah’s political power in Lebanon, in the aftermath of the 2006 war with Israel and amidst heightened internal conflicts. The posters used in this study have been collected between 2005 and 2008, along with interviews conducted with former and current Hizbullah media officials.

This paper examines the extent to which participatory media functions as a tool for youth expression, empowerment, activism, and advocacy in Palestine. I begin by identifying the diverse approaches to youth media emerging in the Occupied Territories, then examine the influence of youth media at the individual, community, regional, and international levels, focusing on the process of youth media production at the individual and community levels, and the influence of youth media products at the regional and international levels. I also examine some of the limitations of youth media initiatives, and some of the challenges faced by project coordinators. First I investigate how youth media projects contribute to the development of individual agency and empowerment of refugee youth in particular through the process of self-expression and identity exploration. Next, I examine how participatory media initiatives create and (re)define community spaces by exploring collective identities, enhancing social cohesion, and facilitating community conversations, events, and forums. I also explore how youth media projects function as tools for activism and advocacy at the regional and international levels. At these levels, participatory media communicates stories across borders that raise awareness about local issues and advocate for action. In the case of Palestine, youth media projects reflect different aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than often portrayed in the mainstream media, communicated through the lived realities of youth participants. This emerging narrative challenges dominant discourses regarding the dynamics of the conflict, and also challenges common perceptions of Palestinian youth as perpetrators of violence. I conclude that youth media provides opportunities for creative expression and civic engagement in spaces in which youth participation is often marginalized. In addition, youth media offers an alternative information source to potentially challenge dominant discourses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally and the roles of Palestinian youth specifically. However, youth media practitioners, especially those from outside the community, often face the challenge of preserving the very youth agency that they aim to promote. It is thus necessary to be aware of the power dynamics implicit in such projects, even when adopting a pluralist approach. The findings are based on fieldwork conducted in the West Bank from 2006 to 2008, including interviews surveys, program evaluations, and participant-observation.

Graffiti serve many purposes and encompass myriad qualities: they have been considered art, communication, an expression of alienation, a site of resistance, and thinking ‘out loud’. During the first Palestinian intifada against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinians and Palestinian land in the Gaza strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Palestinians used graffiti as “an intervention in a relationship of power.” Faced with heavily censored media, and newspapers controlled by an older and more conservative and cautious elite, the writings on the walls quickly came to be used as a reliable form of communication. One of the major tasks of the graffitists in those days was to inform and mobilize the public at large. Palestinian graffiti challenged Israel’s claims to surveillance, demonstrating the Jewish state’s inability to control and observe every space, and were part of the Palestinians’ acts of civil disobedience. They were an act of resistance. Over a decade later, the conditions of occupation and the subsequent reliance on graffiti have hardly changed. It was in this environment that British artist Banksy, the guerrilla graffiti artist famous for reclaiming public spaces for “public imagination and enlightenment where they have become propagandistic barriers to thought and awareness,” traveled to the Occupied Territories in the fall of 2005 to paint nine graffiti on various parts of the separation Wall. All nine graffiti are images of escape that serve to highlight the imprisonment of the Palestinians caused by the separation Wall. The graffiti represent a form of expression grounded in the complex of Palestinian-Israeli power relations. They are the Palestinians’ “presence” imprinted on Israel’s Wall. This paper addresses the use of political graffiti as an alternative form of communication (media) and how the Palestinians have used this form of cultural production as a tool of resistance since the beginning of the first intifada in the early 1990s. It also provides a textual analysis of Banksy’s graffiti on the Wall, with a discussion of the levels of meaning (denotative, connotative) on which they function, and the myths they serve to both contest and reinforce.

Based on a theoretical exploration of issues of ‘media activism,’ ‘alternative media’ and ‘sites of resistance,’ this paper explores forms of alternative public political expression in the contemporary Arab world, specifically in Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. First, by drawing on political science and media/cultural studies theories, the paper explores what is meant by ‘alternative media’ and ‘media resistance.’ The paper traces the theoretical roots of activism, especially as it pertains to expressions in public platforms, including a range of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media such as print, broadcasting, film and the internet, and less formal media such as graffiti, political posters, cartoons, blogs, and Facebook. There are two generally accepted definitions of ‘media activism’: one, the use of media by activists, and two, collective/individual activism targeted at media change. The paper fleshes out the difference between the two, and problematizes the appropriation of mainly Western theories onto the landscape of the Arab world, whose political and media make-up is unique, and in certain respects, relatively new. Looking at the Arab world, it is the former form of ‘media activism’ that is burgeoning, due to the political economic and legal structures of media, as will be described through the use of specific examples. Second, the paper explores what kinds of forms ‘media resistance’ take, based on the recognition that (alternative) political action is absorbed in the organization, transformation, erasure and subversion of physical and virtual ‘space.’ Here, the paper addresses empirical questions: what kinds of physical and virtual spaces are necessary for alternative expression? What are the historical and spatial roots of such forms? How effective are these expressions? And how would we begin to ‘measure’ such effectiveness: widespread recognition, political/social change, challenging hegemonic mechanisms of control, or otherwise? Third, based on contemporary examples drawn from Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt, the paper critiques various forms of expression and what it is that they seek to challenge, questioning the extent to which the media platforms determine and/or undermine those goals. This last part provides an analysis of the players, the messages’ reach, their intended and unintended audiences, and most importantly, what their relationship is to political change. Finally, the paper connects these examples of ‘media activism’ and alternative expressions to larger understandings of a new and vibrant Arab ‘political media.’