In the summer of 2006, CBS Evening News ran a two-minute report on the ongoing war in Lebanon. This brief report was immediately followed by a story on diet pills. I remember this news segment clearly because I had watched it only a few days after my family and I had evacuated from Lebanon. Watching the brief mention of a conflict I had just escaped followed by a human-interest story, I was struck by the dichotomy between my own experience of war and the way it was represented in the international news media.

At the time, I was an international politics student at Georgetown University’s branch campus in Qatar, the country where I was born and raised. My interests in politics stemmed from my identity as an expatriate, an outsider, with a curiosity about the way in which our diverse world works. I studied in British schools with others who, like me, hailed from different parts of the world and found a home in Qatar. With a diverse group of friends, an international education, and a life in a country that was not my own, I grew up with a worldview that transcended national boundaries and identities. As the quintessential global citizen, slipping in and out of different languages and cultures has always been second nature to me. 

I had never really been able to affiliate with my Lebanese identity until that summer when I experienced first-hand the role of conflict in defining identity. That experience became instrumental in driving me to understand the nature of conflict, the way it is driven by ideology often fortified by identity, and its relationship with the news media.