Sari Chreiteh received his MA from Freie Universität Berlin (ISME programme), where his thesis was awarded the Fritz-Steppat-Preis of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) where he is affiliated with the group “State and Society”.

Markets of Future-Authority Predictive Narratives, Prophecy, and the Political Economy of Uncertainty in Lebanon, 2019–2024

In an increasingly unstable world, who is entitled to speak for the future, and what does that authority do to the present?

Sari Chreiteh's dissertation examines the competition to speak authoritatively about the future in Lebanon during moments of acute crisis. Amid protracted economic and political breakdown, televised astrologers, eschatological preachers, leak-trading political insiders, and institutional economists advance rival forecasts within a single, densely connected media ecology. Taking three events as its case studies, it reads the predictions that surfaced around each not as descriptions of what was to come but as bids for authority over an uncertain present. It asks which forms of prediction prevail under which forms of uncertainty, and why a slow-building collapse, a sudden rupture, and a long-dreaded war each summon a different kind of voice to speak for the future.

Situating future-talk within the entangled infrastructures of television, banking, and party politics, this research argues that a prediction's purchase depends little on its accuracy. Predictions matter because they carry established worldviews into action, converting belief into political orientation and, at moments, into political effect. It thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship that treats prediction as a claim to political authority rather than a truth-claim to be judged for accuracy, and that reads eschatological, astrological, and conspiratorial reasoning within the same analytic frame as institutional expertise rather than as its irrational other. This recasts Lebanon's recurrent crises as a contest over who is authorised to narrate what comes next. The dissertation contributes to political anthropology, media studies, and uncertainty studies.

First Supervisor @BGSMCS: Prof. Dr. Ulrike Freitag
Second Supervisor @BGSMCS: Dr. Samuli Schielke