Tracing War Correspondents' Stories on Syria: Expertise for Whom?

This article investigates how have various (local) (war) correspondents framed the Syrian conflict and what is their claim to expertise. The aim is to trace their stories and study the ways in which they have made sense of the conflict, the issues they have encountered (e.g., about access, the ethics of approaching people who are in the midst of a war, the reliability of sources, dealings with citizen journalism on the ground). This is one of the crucial steps on the road to unearthing the various frames that attempt (sometimes assert) to make sense of what happened, what is going on – from dominant frames to voices in the margins and everything that remains in-between. The investigation of the dynamics and substance of the local war correspondents’ work might just offer a piece to the puzzle of the politics of conflict knowledge in Syria. Especially when many locals in the beginning of the revolution (a word rarely used by outside experts) rushed to tell their story to the world with an expectation for help and support but soon grew wary as the ‘world’ continued to ignore this story and instead opted for a more ‘comfortable’ narrative that took the emphasis away from Syrians’ experience and started the story with Eurocentrism at its heart, i.e., the experience of ‘the West’ (Joumaa & Ramadan 2018), and in many instances thus renaming the Syrian predicament as the European refugee crisis and/or fighting terrorism. This paper not only brings to light the on-the-ground knowledge of these correspondents about Syria but it also explores the currency this knowledge could have for the policy-making realm. As a result it discusses the value and politics that this kind of expertise brings to the table and why it should be considered critical in the context of Syrian conflict.