A year after the warlords’ agreement in Taif, Saudi Arabia, the Lebanese civil war officially ended in 1990, with the Syrian regime seizing control of the presidential palace in Baabda and General Michel Aoun fleeing to his exile in France.   This is what we have read in newspapers and books, and what we have been seeing on television shows and documentaries. In reality, however, and more than twenty-eight years after its cessation, civil strife has continued to be at the core of public attention in Lebanon.   As is well known, Lebanon has not enjoyed real stability since 1990. It has been escaping... more

  Sarjeila, a village in Syria’s Idleb governorate, Sarjeila died when its inhabitants abandoned it 1,300 years ago, leaving to posterity their solid stone dwellings, an olive press, and graves. Then suddenly, life returned with the arrival of new residents who fled war and death, to live like ghosts in houses abandoned centuries before.   The film follows the lives of three families who came to the village to build new homes there, and records their relationship with the place and how the place itself is changing. It is a journal of people forced a thousand years back into the past, their lives destroyed... more

  Since the start of the Syrian revolution, debate has raged over the importance of the image, its potency and the different ways by which one can engage with it. In this article, we attempt to participate in this debate from a different angle: dealing with the power of the image, its aims, its audience and the ease (or difficulty) of accessing it, by reference to what is technically known as “hors champ” or “out of frame”—a concept that incorporates both the problem at hand and a means to solve it.     The power of the image   History tells us, unfortunately, that in wartime... more