In recent years, non-state actors in the Middle East have engaged a new generation of activists through a variety of media strategies. Notable among these is a series of videogame interventions, which have appropriated Western game products to convey political and religious messages through the inversion or complication of the roles of hero and enemy. This article explores a selection of such media, produced by or in support of two non-state groups, Hezbollah and Islamic State (IS). The article takes a discourse theoretical approach to examine the ideologies presented in these media and reflects on the ways in which these game artefacts engage with, and reject, Western narratives of history and of US pre-eminence. It concludes that while these game interventions challenge existing hegemonic (re)presentations of the Middle East and the 'War on Terror', they remove or reduce agency to the extent that those who engage with them can only witness these challenges, rather than instigate their own. While we acknowledge that hegemony can always be challenged, we view this lack of agency as support for Mouffe's proposition that the result of counter-hegemonic resistance is often to maintain and reproduce the hegemonic order.

An Israeli officer watching a Hezbollah filmed operation Hezbollah's filmed operations are one of the key media texts that constitute the group's discourse of resistance and their strategies of representation in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1986 Hezbollah introduced an innovation in their strategies of resistance. Their militants filmed one of their armed operations in the occupied southern Lebanon and broadcast it on television. This film, followed by numerous others, had an impact on the growing popularity of the movement and on the construction of their image in the minds of the public. First broadcast by national media, they are now placed in online archives accessible to anyone at any time through Hezbollah's internet sites. By looking at these two aspects of the film presentation and reception (as event and as archives) this paper analyzes their function that goes beyond simple journalistic value to become part of a narrative of identity and self representation. Stemming from Michel Foucault's and Edward Said's notions of power and knowledge, the paper looks at these films as a strategy of resistance and as an attempt of self

Set within the wider framework of exploring the relationship between mediated representations of war and public understanding and perception of conflict in the Arab region, this paper focuses on Al-Jazeera coverage of the July war in Lebanon. From a broad theoretical viewpoint, it attempts to deconstruct the 'ideological model of war' (Carpentier, 2015) as depicted by Al-Jazeera, through its representation of the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel.

Based on the authors' mapping of citizen-generated footage from Daraa, the city where the Syria uprising started in March 2011, this article looks at the relation between crowd-sourced archives and processes of history making in times of war. It describes the 'migrant journey' of the Daraa archive, from an eyewitness documentation of the early days of the uprising, to a digital archive of the Syrian war. It also assesses the effects of digital technologies for rethinking the ways in which our societies bear witness and remember. By so doing, this article attempts to address the pitfalls attending the representation and narrativisation of an ongoing conflict; from issues of ownership, consent, harm, agency, vulnerability, and objectification, to the broader ethical implications of representing death, trauma and the affective experiences of war. It concludes with a reflection on the changing nature of such archival materials, mainly in the light of rising concerns of the precariousness and disappearance of the digital archives.

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