Abstract:
This thesis develops a critical analysis of the leftist alternative discourse offered by Al-
Akhbar. Al-Akhbar was launched based on the alliance between a major leftist voice in
Lebanon which is the Lebanese Communist Party, and the allegedly resistance sectarian
party Hizbullah. Back then, this alliance was built to challenge Hariri’s capitalism and
USA’s imperialism and project in the Middle East. However, after 14 years since its
launch, this newspaper, that established a leftist-parlance and championed a left leaning
narrative in Lebanon and the Arab world, stopped offering an alternative to the status quo
and became enlisted in the Lebanese sectarian power sharing system. As my thesis will
show, the newspaper’s discourse could not echo people’s demands during the Lebanese
October uprising and could not offer alternatives that transcended the current power
alliances in Lebanon. It was instead supportive of Hizbullah’s resistance and the Chineseled
global system as the only leftist alternative that would champion people’s rights and
build their welfare state. In my thesis, I will unpack how the outlet defines people as a
socio-economic category and capitalizes on the elites/poor binary to legitimize the
Chinese-led camp’s alternative to the US-Israeli neoliberalism. I show that this alternative
turns out to reproduce the same power structures it aims to dismantle because it focuses
on identity politics and an a priori defined social agents and relationships between them,
and it eliminates the heterogeneity of demands and their uniqueness.
