Scroll down for the Arabic abstract. There is substantial cultural diversity in many societies these days. Consequently, the need for cross-cultural institutions to build and present their ethical values and cultural identity within different systems and societies has grown. Most higher education institutions face the challenge of applying their own …
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Infantilizing Arab politics: A quick reading of the viral Ramadan 2018 Zain telecom ad
Since 2011, the Kuwaiti telecom company Zain Group, one of the largest in the Middle East, has produced a series of popular ads broadcast annually during Ramadan. The ads are songs, usually featuring celebrities singing and dancing with children. Since 2015, the ads have become noticeably more political. In 2016, …
Read More »The Qatari Crisis and Al Jazeera’s Coverage of the War in Yemen
Abstract This study examines the coverage of the Yemeni crisis, before and after the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, by Al-Jazeera English news websites. It aims to identify any existing variation in Al-Jazeera’s news coverage with respect to the Yemeni crisis, thus examining the degree to which Al-Jazeera maintains its …
Read More »How Arab Online News Websites Framed the 2017 Qatar Crisis (Arabic)
Scroll down for the Arabic abstract. This study aims at identifying the impact of the political orientation of Arab countries, (with particular focus on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain) and newspaper ownership with respect to the news frames used in online coverage of the 2017 Qatar …
Read More »Al-Jazeera’s relationship with Qatar before and after Arab Spring: Effective public diplomacy or blatant propaganda?
Abstract Since its foundation in 1996 until the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, the Qatar-based and funded channel, Al-Jazeera, was considered by many media and politics scholars as a major element of a “pan-Arab public diplomacy” and even a “virtual state.” The main reasons behind Al-Jazeera’s success as an effective …
Read More »COLUMN | Qatar’s Costly Miscalculations
Tensions between Qatar and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council and other Arab countries resurfaced with a vengeance in May 2017. The latest escalation came in response to statements allegedly made by Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in support of Iran as the region's power broker, and …
Read More »Nuqat’s “The Seventh Sense: Powering the Creative Economy”
Mention art, culture, and creativity and you’ve got Kuwait-based Nuqat’s seventh conference boosting innovation, promoting entrepreneurship, uncovering censorship, and serving as a teaching platform. This year’s three-day conference entitled “The Seventh Sense: Powering the Creative Economy,” delved into the capacity of the brain to come up with new ideas through discussions …
Read More »Good Neighbors, Fragile Borders
Protect your borders – one critical lesson of the Syrian war that Saudi Arabia is taking close to heart. The Syrian regime proved lethally effective in the art of crushing internal dissent. Its use of informal militias among multiple agencies of security and military, its Arab nationalist propaganda, the projection …
Read More »Civil Society and Web 2.0 Technology: Social Media in Bahrain
Magdalena Maria Karolak looks at the output of Bahraini bloggers and concludes that although the bloggers initially contributed to civil society activism, the polarization of Bahrain society has since penetrated the blogosphere itself.
Read More »Alternate Viewpoints: Counter-hegemony in the Transnational Age
Evelyn Thai discusses whether Al Jazeera meets the criteria to qualify as 'alternative media' and finds that the Qatar-based channels are arguably unique. “But as transnational news networks proliferate, a theory that accounts for the alterity of transnational media would contribute greatly to an understanding of how mass media continues to evolve.”
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