Conflict Reporting in the Middle East: My Experience at Mercy Corps’ Humanitarian Access Team (HAT)

Abstract

In this project, I will narrate some of my experiences while working for the HAT team in Beirut, and analyse it as a facet of the broader organisation, which is Mercy Corps. I will also look at the available literature hoping it will shed some light onto the different ways, formats, and channels through which crisis, and in this case, the Syrian civil war, can be represented to different audiences. My interest lies precisely in analysing how these different channels of representation themselves contribute in delineating what is ‘crisis’ according to its terms. Alternatively, as is the case here, I will look into the different layers of ‘crisis’ within the context of a major Middle Eastern civil war with dire implications for the region and the rest of the world. In other words, I want to use my experience at Mercy Corps to reflect upon how groups of self-labelled “international experts” decide on what problems are there to solve and how to solve them. As Kosmatopoulos (2014) drew attention to in his work, I seek to focus on the associations, inventions, and other aspects, that allow Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), think-tanks, and other institutionalised groups of experts “to present [themselves] as an adequate institutional response to a particular problem or question" (p.601).