Thanassis Cambanis’s Great U-Turn: From “The Arab Spring Killed Hezbollah” (2012) to Hezbollah is a “decisive regional player” (2017) | The Mideastwire Blog
▻https://mideastwire.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/thanassis-cambaniss-great-u-turn-from-the-arab-spring-killed-
Unfortunately, Thanassis – a good journalist who has bravely and ably covered US-led interventions in the region, but who has more recently morphed into an analyst – has proceeded down both deeply problematic paths over the last seven years or so, propounding bold analytical predictions that turn out to be wrong and periodically recommending military “solutions” (always described as “limited”) for which he has no formal training.
This is a reminder, in my view, of several rules that foreigners to the Middle East (like myself) should follow when they want to report and/or provide certain types of analyses. These are points that I usually stress to our research delegations, especially for Undergrads and MA students who join us in our structured engagement sessions:
Academic Training – If you want to move from being a journalist to an analyst as a foreigner (we can debate this point for people that are born in the region, study here and then live and work deeply in the societies they want to explain and help), you need to take the time to undergo formal academic training at least concerning the Middle East, international politics/history and grand strategy (again, at a bare minimum). And, crucially, if you want to put forward military-related policies that could wrack great, sometimes unintended, destruction and violence on a society that is not your own, you must have training and experience in the tactics, strategy and history of the military.
Language Skills and Wide Engagement – If you are going to purport to cover and/or analyze a society or political formations deeply, and continually purport to say broadly what “Arab’s think,” or what “the street” thinks, or what “most observers in (add Arab country) believe, then you simply must have a high degree of language ability as well as deep and continual interactions with different stratas of society in their own language(s).
“#experts”