Afterword. The Birth of a New Syria?
p. 339-368
Note de l’auteur
I am grateful to Inga Brandell and Élisabeth Longuenesse for the suggestions they made after reading the first version of this text.
Texte intégral
1At a time when revolts, oppression, and wars had been ongoing in Syria for more than thirteen years, it was impossible to offer a conclusion on the studies brought together in this work. Still less possible was it to predict the future of this country that has become “a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night” (Arnold 1867: 114).
2Our Amman conference was nonetheless necessary, as it allowed us to share our knowledge—however partial and fragile—with one another and to present both unique and representative experiences. Each of us “discovered” an aspect of the crisis that we had not previously been acquainted with, in the process testing and refining the hypotheses our own research had allowed us to put forward. Although the Syria puzzle remained incomplete, the presentation of original field investigations and the opportunity to freely discuss them enabled us to uncover ongoing transformations and analyse the political and social processes at work.
3The texts assembled within this volume are therefore both scattered and dense, factual and tragic, much like the wreckage of this country in dire need of rebuilding. They should be read as testimonies to a reality that remains poorly understood because it is often obscured by fleeting, sensationalised information that is wielded as a weapon of war. They represent promising advances for social science research on Syria and may provide food for thought for the actors involved.
4This excellent collective work organised by Myriam Ababsa and Valentina Napolitano has taught me three valuable lessons. First, it has invited me to examine critically, though with neither guilt nor apology, my research on and knowledge of Ba’athist Syria as it was prior to 2011. Second, it has encouraged me to view present-day Syria less as the territory of a state than as a society with undefined borders. Finally, it has taught me to adopt the term “revolutionary moment” rather than “revolt” or “uprising” to describe the tragic events of the past decade, so as to not underplay the powerful and enduring nature of the events and to remain alert to the long and profound transformations to come.1
An exercise in reflexivity
5In offering some final remarks on this collective publication, I feel it is necessary to begin by reflecting on the research I conducted on Syria in the decades preceding the popular uprising of 2011. This task offers an opportunity to review the progress of political science research, and of social science research more broadly, pertaining to Syria over the span of half a century (1960–2010). The purpose is not to point out past mistakes but to understand how this research was constructed and the paths its authors took. This text aims to contribute to the efforts of today’s researchers in positioning themselves both theoretically and in response to ethical questions. How can we reconcile what we previously knew about Syrians and Syria with the breakdown and brutality observed throughout the 2010s, a decade of uprising, repression, and war? And how might we do this, not to break with the past but to piece it back together in order better to understand what is at stake today and what may unfold tomorrow?
From developmentalist paradigms to ultraliberal excesses
6On obtaining independence in 1946, Syria faced the urgent task of “catching up,” particularly socially and economically, with the development levels of the states that had dominated the Middle East up until the Second World War. The mantra of “development” was continuously stressed by its leaders, from members of the liberal governments up until 1958 to the leaders of the Baʿth Party from 1963 onwards (Longuenesse and Roussel 2014). Of course, during the Cold War, “development” was interpreted according to competing paradigms. In the Western world, the theory of modernisation was considered a panacea for local change and for ushering in democracy, in line with the model popularised by Daniel Lerner (education, secularisation, urbanisation, and industrialisation) (Lerner 1958). In the Communist world, theories combined political independence (decolonisation) with economic take-off (growth) according to state-planning models. There was scant room for homegrown thinking on development—a “third way”—because newly independent states lacked the intellectual resources and financial means to invest in their own development projects. Despite the enthusiasm for third-worldism whipped up by charismatic leaders of the Global South, the various ideologies that inspired them and that they drew upon to think about development in all its dimensions had one thing in common: they were all produced abroad, by intellectuals from the Global North, and in a foreign historical context.
7From the 1950s to the 1980s, social science research on Syria was a new frontier, developing long after classical and historical studies had emerged. Although this research was based on field observations (Raymond 1980), it was influenced by ideological systems produced abroad, and not on the basis of these observations themselves. These systems imposed norms, analytical frameworks, and scales of comparison that were supposedly “universal” and implicitly superior to those of the local society.
8Moreover, the international context of the time exerted a strong influence on research, dictating its boundaries and directions. At the same time as the divisions of the Cold War encouraged everyone to “pick a side,” the conflicts of decolonisation, notably the Vietnam War and the Algerian War, as well as the struggle between anti-Communists and anti-imperialists, disproportionately shaped analyses. In the Middle East, there was an aggravating factor: regaining independence became a top priority for Syria, where the government and the population experienced the loss of Palestine as a national Arab defeat.
9In this period, the focus of social science researchers was justifiably drawn to the enormity of both societal needs within Syria and the disparity in living standards between the nation’s elite and its subjugated masses. As a result, researchers prioritised studying the development policies that had been debated since Syria’s independence, passed in 1948 and implemented over an extended period from 1958, when the United Arab Republic was formed. In areas such as public administration, education, health, infrastructure, agrarian reform, and industrialisation, these policies that were clearly needed and had significant impacts remained part of the public debate long after they had been stripped of their substance and the Baʿth Party, which orchestrated them from 1963, had become a clientelist machine and an apparatus for social control.
10Western modernisers and Marxist revolutionaries alike took the pre-eminence of the authoritarian leader in the development process for granted. This was rooted in a still-vivid colonial legacy and was fuelled by American political science’s interest in “the man on horseback”—a military leader taking charge of his country’s destiny. Amid nationalist ideals, the personal ambitions of young officers, and manipulation by foreign secret services, it was not easy at the time to disentangle the processes underway (Picard 1989), all the more so because the leaders’ authoritarianism was accompanied by the use of censorship and the dissemination of a robust official discourse.
11Without knowing all the details, researchers were aware of the security apparatus’s growing control over the Syrian government. They often downplayed the effects of all this, either out of optimism or because they saw it as peripheral in comparison to development problems.2 However, their analyses became dubious once they failed to perceive (or did not wish to condemn) breaches of the “social contract” binding Syria’s population to its authoritarian leaders—a contract that promised upward mobility in exchange for loyalty. The issue became particularly pronounced after Hafez al-Assad’s “rectification” of the Baʿthisist regime in 1970, when economic recovery was accompanied by a bureaucratic centralisation that accelerated disparities between the centre and the peripheries, between the rich and poor, and between the ruling circles and the majority of the population in terms of how they were treated.
12The paradigms of national liberation and development were turning into an outdated and clichéd discourse, but they still remained a central concern of social science research—so much so that some argued that the mobilisation of religion and ethnicity to criticise the decisions and methods of the Syrian regime was merely political engineering, and that the emergence of identity-based discourses and of emancipatory demands within local societies was the product of manipulations aimed at weakening class mobilisations (Picard 1980). In the preface to the 1983 edition of his masterful Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Albert Hourani points out the shortcomings of such analyses within historians’ work (Hourani 1983). His remarks are applicable to political scientists, too. In the second half of the twentieth century, this discipline, dominated by North Americans, concentrated mainly, if not exclusively, on state institutions, decision-makers, and their modes of government. It ignored the hopes and imaginaries of local populations and disregarded history “from below,” as experienced by subaltern groups. It sought to relegate cultural heritage and traditional beliefs to the private realm, investing its hopes and energy in the technological progress and secularisation feted by the modernising elites (Bardawil 2018).
13In the late 1970s, the scant attention paid by political scientists in both the West and East to the trade union, university, and professional mobilisations occurring within the Syrian public space illustrated a bias within the discipline.3 Scholars’ subsequent scepticism towards the programmatic agreements reached among a broad spectrum of opponents (from liberals to Marxists and Islamists) indicated their limited understanding of Syrian society. Scholars’ stunned silence during the collective massacres perpetrated by the regime’s armed forces—the Ḥamā massacre of 1982 being the most notorious and symbolic of these—was followed up by awkward debates about the possibility of “transporting” to predominantly Muslim societies the values, norms, and tools that had accompanied democratic transitions in Latin America.
14In the last decade of Hafez al-Assad’s long reign (1990–2000), which saw the rise to power of his younger son, Bashar, and in the first decade of Bashar’s presidency (2000–2010), researchers were able to resume field investigations and reopen lines of inquiry that had previously been suppressed.4 However, they did not always make the necessary distinction between political liberalism, this the philosophical ideal of democracies, and economic liberalism, the doxa of international financial institutions at the time. The fact that the regime in Damascus signed up for predatory neoliberalism and the opening up (albeit on a limited basis) of the Syrian market to international economic actors was often interpreted as a pledge of adherence to Western values, or even as a precursor to future strategic cooperation in the Middle East.
15In reality, the new financial legislation adopted following the notorious Law 10 of 1991 on investment, coupled with the free rein given to regime-connected entrepreneurs to engage in unscrupulous business practices, further exacerbated Syria’s fatal social divide between a privileged minority and an increasingly impoverished majority. Both World Bank macro indicators and UNDP data pointed to escalating inequalities, alongside year-on-year deteriorations in the employment, education, health, and social situations in Syria (Hallaj 2021). Contrary to some idealistic views, the proliferation of charitable, cultural, or development NGOs was a phenomenon that both facilitated and obscured the state’s cynical abdication of its responsibilities towards society.
16Subsequently, month after month, the press, rumours, and field observations reported a rise in tensions between religious groups, and between local communities. These tensions were linked to water, land, and housing shortages, as well as to the public authorities’ discriminatory treatment of certain social groups. Although systematic studies on these topics were lacking, increases in petty crime, the magnitude of rural exodus to unsanitary suburbs, and the involvement of hundreds of young Syrians in armed factions in Iraq were all signs that should have been further explored.
17On top of all this was the failure of the modest democratic opening that dissident intellectuals had hoped to obtain from Bashar al-Assad between 1999 and 2001, and which they had demanded again, in vain, in 2005. Researchers focusing on this subject, which was more accessible to outside observers, particularly through the Lebanese press, could not ignore the censorship, unfair trials, and arbitrary arrests that activists, artists, and lawyers faced, or the reimprisonment and forced disappearances of dozens of protesters. In 2007, the mafia-style electoral campaigns and the assiduously rigged legislative and presidential election results further confirmed the regime’s vice-like grip on the political system.
18Did the popular uprising of 2011 tear away the veil that had obscured the vision of many intellectuals and analysts during the first decade of Bashar al-Assad’s rule? Shortly before, in 2005, I had concluded a sociopolitical reflection on this first decade with a pessimistic note: “The secular components of civil society are too marginal, too divided, too far from the daily concerns of the population to constitute a social movement capable of making the Syrian authorities commit to comprehensive reform. […] There seem to be no alternative forces capable of proposing solutions to the present crisis” (Picard 2005: 764). Although I condemned the deterioration in social conditions and the increased political restrictions in Syria, I also envisaged that this situation would persist. At a time when neighbouring Iraq was collapsing due to American intervention, I even suggested that there was no hope of change being initiated from within Syria itself. Such an analysis must be placed in its context.
Research under constraints
19Three key elements make it possible to understand the historical and ideological framework within which social science research on Syria was carried out prior to 2011, as well as the constraints, both objective and internalised, faced by political scientists. These constraints took three forms: being caught in the double bind of one’s outsider status; operating under the regime’s scrutiny; and being restricted in terms of interactions with local peers.
20The historical knowledge and humanistic values of Western researchers working on Syria from the 1970s to the 2000s were instilled by their European or North American university education. These researchers were aware of the legacy of colonialism and the struggles for national liberation. Among other things, they were interested in the issue of underdevelopment in the rural world and the upheavals caused by the transition from a craft economy to an industrial one. They inquired into who was responsible, domestically and externally, for underdevelopment. At the same time, however, these researchers were rooted in their own culture, informed by a more or less conscious sense of superiority and attached to their country’s interests and their inherited privileges. Regardless of their intentions, researchers are shaped by their time and their place of origin. Caught in a web of conflicting messages, some adopted radical positions. Others remained reserved, since criticising choices and initiatives equated to conceding points to others in terms of development ideologies. In doing so, they perpetuated ambiguity.
21Moreover, the regime placed direct, sweeping constraints on social science research. The state bureaucracy assailed researchers with a flood of fabricated descriptions and statistics, along with opaque official texts on subjects that a compliant press embellished. The friendly receptiveness of official interlocutors barely concealed their cynicism and disillusionment. In the ostensibly “socialist” and “secular” Syria of the late twentieth century, Arab nationalism and the Palestinian cause, progressivism, and the defence of “workers” had an implicit censorship function, with a high price potentially to be paid for crossing lines.
22The Assad regime was a dictatorial regime that disregarded the rule of law—particularly the right to freedom of expression—and governed through fear (Ismail 2018). There was a sometimes absurd level of uncertainty surrounding the research topics that were permitted, the places researchers were allowed to visit, and the people with whom they were allowed to associate. Research opportunities and limitations remained vague and subject to arbitrariness, especially in the social sciences, which the regime considered a breeding ground for dissent. On many occasions, foreign academics witnessed acts of violence committed by armed men in the public space. They also heard their Syrian colleagues and friends talk about arrests, imprisonment, torture, and disappearances. In these circumstances, it took a strong moral conviction for researchers to choose to speak out rather than opt for submission or avoidance.
23Finally, the relationship between Western researchers and their Syrian peers and academic institutions must also be considered. As Ayman Aldassouky and Thomas Pierret point out, the Syrian authorities have “traditionally put up barriers […] to the development of political studies” (2021: 87)—and, one might add, to social science studies as well—despite the existence of teaching programmes featuring this term at Damascus University since the Mandate era. The few researchers with institutional affiliations operated under the auspices of the Baʿth Party or its satellite parties (the Communist parties and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party). Critical researchers were less visible, and dialogue was weakened by the threat of reprisals or by a lack of trust, particularly in the case of left-wing dissidents and Islamist opposition. Additionally, exchanges were marked by inequality: Syrian researchers were ill-equipped to make observations in the field, but they were intrigued by the epistemology of Western social sciences, which would supposedly provide them with the keys needed to analyse reality. And any reporting of the information these researchers had managed to pass on was hampered by the risk that doing so would put them in danger. Their knowledge, their critical work, and their generosity had to be hushed up rather than acknowledged. From 2000 onwards, the promises of political openness made by the young President Assad and the cosmetic measures adopted in the field of social science analysis could not allay researchers’ disillusionment. The affiliation of the Institute of Political Studies, associated with the Baʿth Party, to Damascus University in 2003 and the foundation of the Markaz al-Sharq think tank in 2007, with which French political scientists were asked to interact, justifiably aroused distrust because of the “protection” the intelligence services provided to these unofficial regime institutions. The Syrian intellectual field was strictly controlled, particularly in the case of the social sciences, and cooperation with local colleagues remained problematic.
Towards an epistemic turn?
24The 2011 uprising and the subsequent war unexpectedly had a revelatory effect due to both the disorganisation of the regime’s services and the revolutionaries’ boldness in using new information and communication tools. As early as February, a video of the demonstration in al-Ḥariqa market district of Damascus circulated on social media, providing near-live footage of the anger that was rising there against the regime and the police’s inability to calm it. In the weeks and months that followed, researchers were able to observe individual and collective dynamics, behaviours, and trajectories. Syrian society, previously described as weary and subjugated, was visibly “becoming revolutionary” (Allal & Pierret 2015) before their eyes.
25Social science research experienced a remarkable boom, particularly among Syrians themselves. However, research conducted by exiles—for whom Syria has virtually become a foreign country—differs greatly from research conducted inside Syria, which is heavily dependent on local political and military powers. The quantitative growth in research has been accompanied by a theoretical investment in a comparative perspective and a critique of the assumed relationship between uprisings/revolutions and democratisation processes (Dot-Pouillard 2015). In this domain, at least, this theoretical and analytical break from isolation has put an end to the notion of the “Syrian exception.”
26To what extent does this academic revolution call into question the research conducted by previous generations? Is it necessary to revise their conceptual reference points from the past half-century (Valbjørn 2015)?5 As we have seen, understanding the context of their work explains the limitations of their knowledge and how they framed their interpretations. It is not clear that their writings have contributed anything to the understanding of the uprising and the war among observers today, who are often fascinated by the immediacy of inquiry in context and the theoretical inventiveness it inspires (Baczko, Dorronsoro, & Quesnay 2021). At the very least, previous generations of researchers have provided some material for today’s researchers interested in the processes by which present situations emerged, and in the formation of a political culture produced by a long, slow, and hidden history.6
Syria today: From territory to social space
27The landmark historical studies on contemporary Syria have long emphasised the territorial formation of the modern state, which occurred with the dismantling of the Ottoman Bilād al-Shām and the colonial partitions. This viewpoint, which might be characterised as external or even top-down, became prevalent throughout the twentieth century amid interstate rivalries and wars, within which the Syrian state was treated as both an object and a battlefield.
28Although foreign interventions in Syria during the terrible 2010s were numerous, violent, and decisive, understanding Syria today may require this traditional perspective to be turned on its head. Several contributions at the Amman conference did just that, demonstrating that the Syrian question is not so much one of territorial sovereignty as it is a societal question: that of the formation (or reconfiguration) of the nation. However, as we will see in the second subsection below, fragmentation and fluidity have nonetheless become dominant issues for Syrian society as the country emerges from war and begins reconstruction, spilling over official state borders to engage exile communities in neighbouring countries and distant diasporas. This new question, also present in the debates at the conference, broadens our reflections on Syria today from a comparative perspective, which I will discuss in the third subsection.
The territorial illusion
29Working on the crisis-beset decade of the 2010s has prompted many of us to rescrutinise a primarily territorial approach to the Syrian question, one that has long been regarded as both paradigmatic and exceptional.
30It is true that the construction of the Syrian state was carried out through successive adjustments, readjustments, and amputations of its territory since the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire—so much so that Ghassan Salamé has described Syria as an “ever-diminishing state” (1987: 59). Even in recent years, border conflagrations with Turkey have coincided with the resurgence of the Kurdish question. Syria’s borders with Iraq and Jordan, characterised by the continuity of human groups that straddle neighbouring states, are zones of instability rather than clear lines of demarcation. As for the establishment of the state of Lebanon, it triggered irredentist sentiments that have been fuelling unresolved border disputes for a century. Meanwhile, the loss of the Sanjak of Alexandretta to Turkey in 1939 was not truly resolved by the Syrian-Turkish Adana agreements in 1998. Lastly, despite official Syrian denials, Israel has continued its colonisation and annexation of the Golan Heights (part of the Quneitra Governorate), which it has occupied since 1967.
31Contrary to the emphasis on a potential Syrian “exceptionalism,” we should remember that territorial uncertainty is inherent to the formation of most new states, particularly in the Middle East. In this region, besides the unresolved conflict between Israel and Palestine, Lebanon lost sovereignty over a fifth of its southern territory for more than twenty years between 1978 and 2000. A century on from its formation, Iraq is still questioning the federalist option, even after the American withdrawal in 2021. Meanwhile, Jordan remains haunted by the vicissitudes of its management of the Palestinian territories since 1948.
32We must also be careful not to allow reflection on the territoriality of the state to supplant the study of Syrian political and social realities. Indeed, since the beginning of the twentieth century, this theme has remained omnipresent in the realms of memory (remembering lost territories) and ideology (Baʿthist arguments’ reliance on the Arab and Palestinian national cause). However, emphasis on it has increasingly become more of a mantra, with the production of national territory, both concretely and symbolically, having come to involve a different process. It has primarily been a matter (and it continues to be today) of the modalities of public action within the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic (SAR) and the relationship between the state and society. In other words, it is about governmentality.
33In the revolutions and wars of the 2010s, the question of territoriality in Syria came up against a major paradox. Both the Assad regime and the “insurgent” and “loyalist” components of Syrian society converged around the theme of support for national unity. They even engaged in a rhetorical competition around this theme, the performative power of which should not be underestimated. All these sides shared and claimed the memory of the traumas of losing Alexandretta and the Golan Heights. They similarly rejected any prospect of a division or fragmentation of the territory of the SAR. Both the regime and the various opposition groups asserted a refusal to relinquish any part of national territory. Bashar al-Assad condemned references to a “useful Syria” that could be contrasted with territories the regime would accept losing. Instead, he asserted that he was determined to re-establish and then preserve the state’s sovereignty over “all of Syria.”7
34The opposition groups (with the exception of Islamic State, which is not exclusively Syrian and does not tie its political project to a defined territory), meanwhile, have sought to avoid being seen as disloyal to the nation. They could not betray the slogan that caught on at demonstrations: “One, one, one! The Syrian people are one!” (waḥed waḥed, waḥed, al-shaʿb al-sūrī waḥed). To turn Benedict Anderson’s concept on its head, this community imaginary exalted in the first months of the uprising allowed the opposition to reclaim the original Baʿthist doxa by denouncing the divisive practices of a regime that adapted its fiscal, administrative, security, educational, and other policies for each part of the country.
35Of course, collective emotions and political rationality must be factored into this patriotic unanimity. As Asef Bayat suggests in the case of demonstrators in Cairo, it is not certain that the Syrian insurgents claiming national unity were aware that they were taking part in a social revolution supported by a national political project. Their mobilisation often fell into Bayat’s category of “street politics,” with its connotations of fragility and ephemerality (Bayat 2018). Nevertheless, in Syria, popular aspirations paradoxically converged with the regime’s discourse in a zero-sum game, with the president responding that, to be “one,” as the protesters were demanding, citizens would have to remain subject to the power of a single leader.
36Moreover, at the start of the revolutionary moment, unity- and unanimity-based Syrian discourses were bolstered by international exhortations that emphasised state-building processes and the legitimacy of borders between states and urged these to be strengthened. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these calls even led to concrete policies, with Western states increasing their security cooperation with the Middle East’s official leaders. When faced with the Syrian crisis, these states set about defending the Syrian-Lebanese border through the government in Beirut and the Syrian-Jordanian border through the Jordanian monarchy. Meanwhile, Erdoğan’s Turkey began erecting a protective barrier along its southern border to counter Kurdish armed movements. The Assad regime even cooperated with the US military after 2005 in an attempt to secure the Syrian-Iraqi border at a time when Islamists were gaining power in Iraq.
37The implementation of these security policies at the state level has gone hand in hand with the international community’s inertia and lack of resolve in the face of the domestic crisis in Syria. Throughout the decade of uprising, repression, and wars, UN institutions failed to enact and enforce the law (especially humanitarian law and the laws of war) in response to the Syrian regime’s invocation of its national sovereignty. Not only have UN institutions failed to establish a no-fly zone over the SAR’s territory, but humanitarian agencies such as the World Food Programme and the Red Cross have given in to the Syrian regime’s insistence on being treated as a legitimate and essential negotiating partner, despite the UN General Assembly’s July 2014 vote in favour of providing direct cross-border humanitarian aid to Syrian populations. Since 2019, this same international community, paralysed by its own disagreements, has allowed the Assad regime to rejoin several global security bodies, such as Interpol. Three years later, provision of humanitarian aid to the 3 to 4 million Syrians confined to the Idlib pocket is still dependent on the international rivalry between Moscow and Washington, as well as on Erdoğan’s ambitions for Turkey (Pierret 2021: 223).8
38On the other hand—and this is the paradox—the rhetoric about a fictitiously unified Syrian state with sovereignty over an indivisible territory has always been accompanied by the discriminatory practices of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and even those of certain opponents. There is no need to dwell on the topic, recurring since the late 1970s, of the special treatment reserved for the coastal region, which has stoked immense frustration in the rest of the country, especially as it was fuelled by a policy of local development and preferential recruitment into the regime’s security apparatuses. There was therefore nothing surprising about the speculation that flared up in the early years of the uprising about a possible secession of the “Alawite bastion” in response to the rise of opposition to the regime between 2011 and 2014. Similarly (though with an inverted logic), the PYD’s popular mobilisation in Kurdish zones and the declaration of Rojava’s autonomy in March 2016 sparked speculation about a possible secession in northeast Syria. However, this possibility was equally fragile, as the chaotic trajectory of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region since 1991 suggests. Furthermore, Islamic State’s deadly foray into Syrian territory (2013–2017) and the de facto protectorate exercised by Turkey over the northwest region and the north of Aleppo Governorate have fuelled retrospective scepticism about Syrian nation building since the First World War. Some have reinterpreted the history of the Syrian territories during the Ottoman and Mandate periods in order to highlight the ecological, cultural, and socioeconomic disparities between four or five (depending on the situation and viewpoint) major “regions” of Syria, a state apparently destined to break up. A century after the foundation of a state order in the Middle East, often referred to (inaccurately) as the “Sykes-Picot order,” the possibility of the balkanisation of Syria has led to speculation about the creation of new states out of its partition and the adoption of new state borders in the Middle East under the aegis of the omnipresent international sponsors.
39Despite this, several chapters in this volume, as well as other work, such as that of the “Wartime and Post-Conflict in Syria” team at the European University Institute in Florence, show that the main risk in Syria during the devastating 2010s was not the “balkanisation” of the country but rather the rupture of the bond between the rulers and the people, between the state and society. The idea of radical fractures at the regional level is unconvincing in many cases. In the early years of the uprising, the predominantly Alawite coastal region saw a massive influx of people from Aleppo, both Sunnis and Christians, many of whom belonged to the entrepreneurial social categories, and who integrated into the local economic fabric. The central government continued to maintain public services, especially security services, in al-Ḥasaka and several towns in Jazīra—territories the regime considered “lost” from the first months of the uprising. It also maintained a foothold in Dayr al-Zūr, even during the occupation of the Euphrates region by Islamic State. Subsequently, the regime persisted there in an uneasy and sometimes violent co-existence with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. In the southern regions of Ḥawrān and Jabal Druze, clashes fought between regime forces and local rebels led by tribal and religious leaders in the name of national legitimacy have continued into the 2020s.
40Rather than a process of territorial reconfiguration based on regional variables implicitly charged with ethnic, religious, and sectarian aspects, Syria has experienced a degradation in the relationship between state leaders and local society. The social contract imposed by the Baʿthist leadership over more than three decades had entailed loyalty to military and political leaders in return for a system of co-optation and reward controlled by those leaders (Sulz 2018). The collapse of the productive economy, extensive forced displacements, and the scattering of populations (Vignal 2016) tore up this contract and sparked radical and unstable social and political reconfigurations at the local level.
Fragmentation and localism
41When it comes to understanding the Syrian national question today, the approach proposed by Myriam Ababsa and Valentina Napolitano in this book offers a fruitful alternative to the top-down territorial perspective. Instead of basing analyses on large ecological-political constructions that are often more theoretical than concrete, most of the contributions they have brought together in this volume scrutinise space and social dynamics at the local level, or even at microlocal scales as small as the household. The chapters—take those by Charlotte al-Khalili and Valentina Napolitano, for instance—reveal the depth of the upheavals taking place at the very heart of families. They consider the fragmentation of social ties and the dispersion of human trajectories as major effects of the revolution and the war. Attesting to this is Aurora Sottimano’s well-documented presentation of a Syria transformed by war into a patchwork of microeconomies. This is what Omar Hallaj describes as the “archipelisation” of more or less autonomous localities whose survival hinges on a mainly informal economy and whose social order is structured by local solidarities (Hallaj 2021). Several studies conducted at the European University Institute in Florence confirm this analysis, revealing the reactivation of old family and tribal ties in the reconfiguration of local leaderships, independent of or even counter to the broader regional context (Favier & Kostrz 2019; Nofal 2020; Aldassouky 2021). A crucial dimension of the social, political, and economic transformations taking place in Syria over the last decade has been the new ways in which local structures and central apparatuses of domination fit together. This raises important questions that warrant further investigation.
42First, in line with Sana Yazigi’s hypothesis at the Amman conference, could territorial and social fragmentation, rather than dealing a final blow to Syria’s precarious formation as a nation, offer local actors a medium- or long-term opportunity to reappropriate national sovereignty and civic responsibility? The persistence, or indeed reinvention, of intra- and inter-family and intra- and trans-community exchanges and cooperation would need to be substantiated beyond anecdotal evidence, by observing how some of the novel initiatives from the beginning of the revolutionary period unfolded. What remains, ten years later, of the local coordination committees (lijān al-tansīq al-maḥalliya) set up in insurgent regions to ensure the functioning of public institutions—education, health, provisions, and even core state functions such as the courts and police—that the Damascus government abandoned and sometimes even actively fought against? In many places, horizontal solidarity (tansīq) soon came under threat, not only from war entrepreneurs but also from the emergence of violence between civilian communities facing shortages and fear. Anna Poujeau’s chapter in this book provides a thoroughly documented illustration of this. In some cases, local communities fell under the control of a foreign power, whether a state (such as Turkey) or militias (especially pro-Iranian militias), and more often still, under the sway of a local armed clan such as the Berris (Awad 2022: 7) on the outskirts of Aleppo. Whether in zones controlled by dissidents, zones held or reconquered by the government, or “grey zones” characterised by threatening uncertainties, economic and security tensions have deepened the divide between in-groups and out-groups, leading to polarisation and withdrawal into narrow spaces of solidarity.
43These social processes have taken root at the most local of levels. In each village and each neighbourhood, confrontations and displacements have led to the rise of new leaderships, in which war entrepreneurs usually dominate. These have co-opted members of the former local elites (important public figures, tribal leaders, and religious leaders, for instance) to take control of an informal, often mafia-like economy that operates outside public law and the official bureaucracy.9 In this war economy characterised by shortages of all kinds, their main sources of income involve preying upon the microsocieties that they hold to ransom and charging “customs” at the borders of the microterritories they occupy, in collaboration with militias from neighbouring areas (Aldassouky and Hatahet 2022). More so than territory, it is Syrian society itself, corrupted or punished with exclusion, that has been violently dispersed and divided up. In a tragicomic literary metaphor, the Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa (2019) depicts a family’s endless journey to bring their father’s remains back to his home village, which is only a few hours’ drive from Damascus. From front to border, from barricade to checkpoint, from inspection to detention, the reader sees how Khalifa’s hero loses everything: his savings, of course, but also his dignity and self-esteem, and even the intimate bond of family solidarity.
44It is also necessary to consider the new ways in which the relationship between the central power and local communities operated—the issues at stake, the physical or symbolic distances, the supports mobilised, and the methods employed—and to identify key stakeholders along the transmission chains. In a bold article that examines mapped documents in order to measure the uneven penetration of the regime’s networks within the country’s Sunni areas, Kevin Mazur (2019) seeks to identify the intermediaries, institutional and informal, traditional and novel, that are capable of instilling meaning into this relationship: civil and military officials; entrepreneurs and other economic actors (especially middlemen and smugglers); those who have control, whether sanctioned or self-proclaimed, over violence; tribal and religious leaders; and, finally, political actors—members of the Ba’ath Party and local, regional, and parliamentary elected representatives. Mazur demonstrates how the webs woven between the state and society cross identity borders. Positing that they adapt to local and microlocal social and economic structures, he suggests studying them at a “granular” scale that is finer than that of the community space or regional identity.
45Finally, since the exercise of physical and symbolic violence had become the ultimate tool in regulating the state-society relationship, it is essential to situate the regime’s strategy, which combined social neglect, economic predation, and subjugation to the security apparatus,10 within the history of the Ba’athist policies of “decentralisation” pursued since the late 1990s. At the beginning of his presidency, Bashar al-Assad repeatedly emphasised decentralisation as a panacea, even when on top of the underdevelopment of the country’s peripheral areas (Jazīra, Haurān, Idlib) there was the divide between commercial cities and rural areas. Even today, some claim that decentralisation would be the remedy for Syria’s extreme polarisation between “loyal” and “insurgent” zones. However, genuine decentralisation would be required, not the central government’s tightly controlled deconcentration of power that has prevailed thus far. Between localist fragmentation and chains of domination, the primary challenge in emerging from the conflict is indeed to restore the role of societal dynamics.
The “sprawl” of the Syrian question
46For the contributors to this volume, the need to study the processes of fragmentation and archipelisation of Syrian society beyond the SAR’s international borders was clear—not solely due to the challenges of accessing the domestic space, but also, and above all, because these processes have spilled over into neighbouring and distant countries, impacting over a third of Syrians. The exile, breakdown, and reconfiguration of its populations made Syria the tragic, emblematic example of twenty-first-century wars, a fate that Ukraine would soon share. This is why several of the studies presented here justifiably rely on surveys conducted outside the SAR, in refugee camps and emigrant communities. These aim to account for processes that apply to all Syrians but are challenging to document under current circumstances.
47Rather than understanding Syria today through the lens of its international borders and perpetuating the representation of a “cut-off,” if not isolated, Syria, detached from its Arab environment and from the “international community,” this volume’s contributions highlight the plurality and diversity as well as the permeability of the international and internal borders that segment the country’s human landscape. Throughout the terrible 2010s, the corollary of this dispersion of society was the deployment of powerful material and symbolic flows through horizontal capillaries within what Leïla Vignal aptly describes as a “transnational” space (Vignal 2019).
48First, complex and dense exchanges of all sorts of material goods became indispensable, since devastation in agricultural zones and the systematic destruction of industrial infrastructure reduced the local productive economy by two-thirds, leading to the rise of a medium- and long-distance commercial and financial economy, as Joseph Daher and Aurora Sottimano respectively demonstrate.
49Second, and above all, these circulations have entailed massive human displacements, the wars in Syria having caused an exceptionally high proportion of the population to migrate. It is impossible to claim, after those years, that these repeated exoduses have ceased, or to anticipate that the few observed returns offer any promise of lasting. Syrians subjected to various military and political orders within the SAR, Syrians in immediate and indefinite exile in neighbouring countries, and Syrians embroiled in protracted adaptation processes: all are involved in networked exchanges, both technical (tangible and intangible means of communication) and social (instituted both by inherited attachments and by secondary socialisations). Various contributions to this volume—for instance, Mathilde Gingembre’s demonstration of how the experience of shepherds from southern Syria is valued in livestock farming around Amman—thus prompt us to engage in a cross-cutting, dynamic re-evaluation of our classical understanding of the Syrian question, as Jalal Al Husseini did at the conference when he suggested we also see Syrians’ exile as an opportunity for them to develop their individual capabilities (agency).
50Finally, some cross-border processes are more difficult to grasp than the movement of material goods and people insofar as they involve symbolic flows, in particular the representations and ideologies at work in the reconfiguration of Syria’s future. A prime example of the delocalised and dematerialised initiatives born out of Syrian society in exile is the “Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution” project, which aims to restore and reconstruct forms of cross-border and transhistorical coherence that were made unrecognisable by the violence. In the legal domain, Leïla Drif documents how state authorities (Syrian and Lebanese alike), flouting international law, humanitarian law, and state laws, have treated international and domestic borders indiscriminately. As the displaced individuals/refugees who recounted their life stories to Drif have moved around within Syria or in exile in Lebanon, they have lived in clandestinity and searched for a protector (kafīl) in a bid to avoid being extorted by militias of all allegiances. Consequently, a new understanding of Syria is already prevailing. It sees Syria not as the officially recognised territory of the SAR, but as a space with uncertain boundaries that extends beyond that territory into neighbouring states and even further beyond, to wherever Syrian society is dispersed, exiled, paralysed, and brutalised.
51Therefore, it is pertinent to consider the Syrian case in the light of studies on international migrations, particularly those focusing on diasporas. Many comparisons spring to mind: with the Palestinians and Lebanese, of course, whose emotional and material attachment to their village of origin has been studied by the anthropologist Ghassan al-Hage (2004); with the Armenians; and with the Taiwanese Chinese, whose subtle calculations when making investments on the mainland have been demonstrated by the political scientist Françoise Mengin (2015). But diachronic comparisons could also be drawn with the First World War period and with the illustrious era of the Shawām in Egypt (Philipp 1985). For better or worse, the recent bleak decade has positioned Syria and Syrians at the heart of ultraliberal globalisation processes.
Imagining the Syria of tomorrow
52The contributions to this book offer many clues and avenues for contemplating Syria’s future. However, they also confirm the complexity and uncertainty of the processes at work over the past decade, meaning any attempt to make predictions would be presumptuous. This is for the best. As the stimulating introduction to the 2015 REMMM special issue on the Arab revolutions (Catusse, Signoles, & Siino 2015) reminds us, prediction is not the mission of the social sciences, which are ill-equipped for this purpose.
53While social science researchers, particularly historians, can construct fruitful hypotheses about the genesis of a crisis or revolution and shed light on an event-driven break with the past, it is difficult for them to project this crisis or revolution into the future. By proposing an institutional “end” date for a revolutionary moment, researchers risk obscuring the frustrations and mobilisations that persist beyond this point, often subtly so. They may be misled by the victor’s discourse at a time when counterrevolution appears to be triumphing (Haugbølle and Bandak 2017). The case of neighbouring Lebanon offers an illuminating example of such uncertainty. Did the civil war of 1975–1990, which officially ended with the Taif Agreement of October 1989, continue in the following decades as a “cold civil war,” as the political scientist Joseph Bahout believes?11 Moreover, in Lebanon, does the October 2019 thawra not represent a continuation, thirty years later, of an unfinished war, just as Algeria’s Hirak might be a resurgence of the aborted revolution of 1988?
54As the events unfold, the Syrian revolution, repression, and wars involve processes that are instigating and accompanying long-term transformations of the actors involved, their intentions, and the meaning they give to their social and/or political engagement (Allal 2012). To envisage the future, we must consider observable experiences and trajectories, as, for example, the sociologist Elisabeth Wood (2008) does. We must also be attentive to revolutions’ subtle effects on societies, as the historian Federico Tarragoni is (2018). In her article “The Social Processes of Civil War: The Wartime Transformation of Social Networks,” Wood synthesises her research on insurrectional processes and their repression in Latin America, Sri Lanka, and Sierra Leone. She suggests that these processes lead to profound social changes, such as the adoption of new gender and generational norms and practices in both the domestic and the public space. She also emphasises the militarisation of social hierarchies and political mobilisations (2018: 546–547), a phenomenon she describes as irreversible. These are two themes that have captured the attention of the contributors to this book, and they ought to be kept in mind. Tarragoni, for his part, has engaged in critical reflection on the long-term effects of revolutions. He calls on us to reject a teleological perspective “that leads us to ignore the transformative effects, beyond purely institutional changes, of revolutions” (2018: 78). He observes the liberation of public expression during revolutionary periods, particularly among subaltern groups, and he hypothesises that revolutions “repoliticise the social spaces in which they occur” (2018: 74–75).
55It is these profound changes, which are often microscopic to begin with but become larger over the long term, that I address in this section, before concluding with a necessary reversal of perspective: the observable dynamics need to be looked at in light of the dictatorial regime’s resources.12
Slow and profound changes
56It has been challenging, even for those who have been able to move about in Syria in the 2020s, to truly appreciate and report on the upheaval in human landscapes and social relations since 2010. The destruction, impoverishment, militarisation, displacement, temporary encampments, and exile can be observed and quantified in various ways, even in areas held by the Assad regime until 2024. Amid the fog of violence, their social and cultural effects have occurred in a disjointed, concealed, and potentially reversible way. Nevertheless, they have given rise to new categories of actors, new practices in the public space, and perhaps even a “cultural revolution.”13
57For one thing, Syria is undergoing a radical demographic shift, not only in terms of its scale but also because of the imbalances caused by the disappearance or exile of many young men aged between 15 and 30 during the decade of war. The full extent of the social transformations brought about by these demographic shifts remains unclear. However, the anthropological surveys presented in the chapters of this book, whether they were conducted within families in exile, with expatriate farmers, or within refugee camps, highlight the role of autonomous female figures who have acted as agents of microchange and have been capable of making up for the absence of fathers, brothers, or husbands. While a comparison with the tumultuous history of the Algerian revolution would urge us not to overlook the potentially reversible nature of this feminisation of familial and professional responsibilities (Oussedik 2011), Syrian women have likely set off a chain of innovations that are a prelude to a restructuring of the social sphere and, potentially, of the political sphere.
58More importantly still, the entry into the public sphere of a younger generation that has lived through thirteen years of political and economic upheaval will surely trigger a decisive break with various kinds of hierarchies (family and clan, religious, security, and so on) that were previously established according to a patriarchal mode of domination. This can already be observed across all sectors of society, but it is especially significant among groups opposed to the Assad regime, which have been destabilised by misunderstandings and disputes between, on the one hand, an older generation of intellectuals and activists long confined to a dissenting stance14 and, on the other, the pragmatic and disillusioned ascendant generation which has been offered radical options such as armed struggle.
59These two prominent characteristics—women’s empowerment and young people’s assumption of leadership—should not, however, be caricatured. In particular, they must not obscure the variety and inventiveness of future actors, notably in the domains of solidarity and reconstruction, as well as in sociological analysis and political engagement.
New framings and new practices
60The future of Syrian society is rooted in experiences of revolution and war, which although often traumatic have nevertheless been constructive.15 It is also subject to the operational logics of protagonists who, per Tarragoni’s analysis (2018: 74), are constantly reconfiguring their cognitive framework and broadening their repertoire of action.
61New objectives, new adversaries, and new allies have come and gone as events and circumstances have unfolded. Identifying steady projects, even in the medium term, would be presumptuous, as would claiming to discern progress made by one adversary or another. However, even if their rhetoric has become tired, throughout the trials they have faced their repertoires of action have been enriched with knowledge and practices that indicate powerful underlying changes.
62For instance, swift progress can be observed on the technological front. Access has been obtained to cutting-edge military, financial, and communication tools, which pre-2011 Syria struggled to acquire and master, even under the “modernising” rule of Bashar al-Assad and his wife. And previously subaltern and peripheral actors have learned how to use these tools, having received swift training in ballistics, computing, and communications (Sarkis 2021). A challenge for Syrian society in the future will be managing its head-first dive into technological postmodernity at a time when it is facing a catastrophic downgrading of its Human Development Index (HDI).16
63Transformations in knowledge and practices are extending far beyond the field of technology; they are affecting modes of production, particularly in agriculture, and the hierarchy of economic actors, which is now dominated by finance and armed violence. These changes concern the most diverse strata of society, including groups that were previously invisible or marginal as far as the shifts prescribed and driven by the regime were concerned. Conversely, they are also affecting groups that previously seemed entrenched in their privileges. Yassin al-Haj Saleh (2021) notes that individuals who were previously absent from the public space have emerged as actors in their own lives; they have become local leaders in the security, religious, or charitable spheres, and even political decision-makers. The unexpected and valuable effects of their transformation through the trials they have endured can be seen throughout the chapters in this book: individual transgression and emancipation, assumption of a public voice, heroic generosity, and the acquisition of medical, linguistic, managerial, and legal skills. All this is contrary to what might have been feared given the abandonment of education, the urgency of daily life, and the fear of danger. After decades of apathy and fatigue, these are fleeting but encouraging signs of a capacity for mobilisation that local memories can draw on.
A cultural revolution?
64To speak of a cultural revolution in the all-encompassing sense afforded to May 1968 or to the Maoist revolution in China, as Richard Jacquemond does when discussing Egypt,17 therefore does not seem outrageous to researchers examining the Syrian cultural space, from neighbourhoods where improvised protest songs ring out to Western cinemas showing hard-hitting documentaries produced in exile. For decades, Syrian artistic production, made by and for an urban or émigré elite who were forbidden to take part in direct critical debate, had little influence or audience. However, rather than causing it to wither, the uprising and wars seem to have unleashed abundant free artistic expression, as can be seen in the boom in fictional literature, which has been supported by publishers in Beirut (Mardam-Bey 2015). The new actors and new collective practices in the public space and even in the domestic sphere are responding to a dynamic conception of the relationship between state and society, one liberated from the straitjacket imposed by the authorities.18
65This revolution is particularly noticeable in the historical field, which Syrian society has reclaimed by renewing its research tools and reviving its political dimension. From the very first days of the uprising, “ordinary” Syrians began amassing a systematic body of documentation, from filming local demonstrations on WhatsApp to digitally cataloguing land law,19 with rigorous efforts having been made to archive and disseminate it outside the country.20 As a result, no Syrian leader will now be able to impose silence or claim ignorance about the reality of the revolution and the repression. And this rigorous cataloguing and publicisation is extending to other fields such as criminal law, thanks to the work being carried out within diaspora communities.
66We can indeed speak of a cultural revolution in the sense that this revolution engaged Syrian society in the memory work that is essential for the reclaiming of its national history. The revolt and the clashes of the 2010s have unquestionably triggered a process of unearthing the remnants and remembering the uprising that took place between 1979 and 1982, as well as its repression by the regime of Hafez al-Assad—a repression that, beyond merely muzzling dissent, inflicted society-wide amnesia, halting a critical interpretation of these traumatic events (Ismail 2018: 131–158).
67By contrast, placing the Syrian revolution and civil war of the 2010s within a long-term memory stretching back to before the dictatorship may have opened Syrians’ eyes to new horizons of expectation—in particular, the expectation of taking part in political life, understood as the “production of the common” (Dakhli 2020: 101). Since 2011, protesters and opponents have been trying to “reimagine” a horizontal and inclusive Syrian nation, engaging society in patriotic behaviours (Chevée 2021).
68However, the studies gathered in this volume tell, without pathos but also without illusions, a different story, one that portends a bleak future. They do so, first of all, by being attentive to the failures and betrayals of revolutionary hopes, and to the deleterious effects of extreme violence. Second, even if this was not the conference’s central focus, they point out whenever necessary the exorbitant resources that the Syrian regime had at its disposal to contain Syrian society’s march towards greater freedom. Finally, and most importantly, the illiberal global context is normalising the Assad regime’s authoritarianism and the growing division within Syrian society.
69Whether in the interior regions, which have been conquered, lost, and reconquered by opposing armed forces, in the refugee camps in bordering nations, or among far-flung emigrants, bonds of solidarity have been worn down over the years as a result of precarious living conditions. Collective mobilisations have been hindered by private interests. Enthusiasm has been dampened by disappointments. Local societies’ weariness, a concern expressed by Hamit Bozarslan (2011: 107–108), is particularly evident in the difficulty of conceiving a political project and the prevalence of disengagement among activists overwhelmed by defeat.
70No doubt the latter, encouraged by external observers and by certain powers little inclined to involve themselves directly, had initially framed the Syrian revolution “within the teleology of democratic transition,” harbouring illusions about a shift in the balance of power (Dot-Pouillard 2015). They overlooked the Assad regime’s extensive coercive resources and underestimated its capacity to intensify the repression and stir up division at every stage of the war. They did not foresee how quickly violence would spread between opposing armed forces. Neither did they anticipate the international community’s seemingly endless wait-and-see approach.
71The reality is that the Syrian uprising of 2011 took place against a state that adhered to the neoliberal economic and security world order (Abboud 2020), a state that has faced no consequences for violating international political and ethical norms. Under Russian patronage and thanks to the alliance with Iran, Bashar al-Assad has greatly expanded and enforced this unequal order across the country. Since 2011, the Syrian state has enacted legislation, organised sham elections, imposed unfair administrative rules, and authorised radical security measures. In a country where the middle classes and intellectuals have been particularly affected by emigration, the state has employed threats and rewards to deepen identity-based divisions along ethnic and religious lines (Weiss 2018: 202).21 It has largely succeeded in polarising Syrian society by distinguishing two categories of individuals: those who are loyal to the regime (or at least have come over to its side) and the others, the protesters and the “deserters” (the absent), whom it has deprived of their rights.
72Looking for small signs of hope in the interstices of the Syrian disaster, this work wagers on the long term. The regime had already lost all ethical legitimacy.22 All that was missing was the spark of a surprising, new and disruptive event.
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Tarragoni Federico, “Les cendres et le brasier : Ce que l’historien apprend au sociologue des révolutions,” Écrire l’histoire. Histoire, Littérature, Esthétique 18, pp. 69–79. <http://journals.openedition.org/elh/1409>.
Valbjørn 2015
Valbjørn Morten, “Reflections on Self-Reflections – On Framing the Analytical Implications of the Arab Uprisings for the Study of Arab Politics,” Democratization 22/2, pp. 218–238.
Vignal 2016
Vignal Leïla, “Syria: The Strategy of Destruction,” Books & Ideas. <https://laviedesidees.fr/Syria-the-Strategy-of-Destruction>.
Vignal 2019
Vignal Leïla, “Local and Transnational Reconfigurations of the Syrian Society,” Speech at the International Scientific Symposium Syria Today, September 29.
Wedeen 1999
Wedeen Lisa, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Weiss 2018
Weiss Max, “Mosaic, Melting-Pot, Pressure Cooker. The Religious, the Secular and the Sectarian in Modern Syrian Thought,” in J. Hanssen and M. Weiss (eds.), Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 181–202.
Wood 2008
Wood Elisabeth, “The Social Processes of Civil War: The Wartime Transformation of Social Networks,” Annual Review of Political Science 11, pp. 539–561.
Yassin Hassan 2018
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Notes de bas de page
1Following the choice made by Richard Jacquemond in addressing the case of Egypt (Jacquemond 2016).
2For example, in the first case, consider the meticulous investigation by Alasdair Drysdale (1981); in the second, consider the remarkable work of Raymond Hinnebusch.
3With rare exceptions such as Michel Seurat, who made it his main research topic.
4The best testament to this is Lisa Wedeen’s (1999) brilliant, elusively conducted analysis.
5This radical critique is not unlike that of Martin Kramer (2001).
6As Laurent Gayer suggested during the closing conference of the ERC project “Social Dynamics of Civil Wars,” held in Paris on 1 October 2021, citing Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours. Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France, 2 décembre 1970 (Gallimard 1971), p. 25.
7Message to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on 9 May 2016 commemorating the 1944 victory over Nazi Germany.
8Until 2023, the UN cross-border mechanism, created in 2014, has only been functioning through the Bāb al-Hawā crossing point, after Russia forced the three other access points into Syria to close in 2019.
9It should be noted that even before 2010, more than half of Syria’s GDP came from the informal sector (Hallaj 2021: 7).
10Translation of the Khaldunian notion of istitbā.
11Interview conducted by Hélène Sallon, “Le Liban dans la crainte d’une nouvelle guerre civile”, Le Monde, 11 July 2013.
12Tarragoni, drawing on William Sewell (2005), speaks of “the dialectic between structural inertias and contingent dynamics” (Tarragoni 2018: 74).
13Here I draw and expand on an expression used by Richard Jacquemond during his talk at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (MUCEM) on 18 January 2021, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSrLS_GYrLk&t=44s>.
14Regarding this generation that was overwhelmed by revolution and then by war, see the critique by Rosa Yassin Hassan (2018).
15Here we find the philosophy of history put forward by Reinhart Koselleck (1997).
16According to the United Nations, Syria’s Human Development Index ranking fell from 92nd in the world in 1994 to 152nd in 2018, <https://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/SYR>.
17See note 48.
18As Joel Migdal writes, state and society cannot be understood in terms of a relationship of domination, but rather as two interwoven entities that constitute one another (Migdal 2001).
19The Syria Report website records the stages of new Syrian legislation concerning housing, land, and property rights in a freely accessible database: <https://syria-report.com/category/hlp/>.
20Via programmes such as the “Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution” project, presented in this book by Sana Yazigi, or the SHAKK university programme at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Paris) <https://anr.fr//Projet-ANR-17-CE26-0021> and at the BnF <https://page.hn/d4edq7>.
21Without yielding to essentialist interpretations that conclude that sectarian conflict and violence are inherent to a profoundly divided Syrian society, we cannot overlook the pluralism of ethnic and religious identities.
22As Fares al-Helou vigorously declaims in Rami Farah’s 2011 film, A Comedian in a Syrian Tragedy.
Auteur
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Élizabeth Picard
CNRS
elizabethpicard@yahoo.com
Élizabeth Picard is an emeritus Research Director at the CNRS (IREMAM). A political scientist and Arabist, she has worked on collective identities and political mobilizations in the Middle East, particularly in the context of regional and civil wars. Her most recent book is Liban-Syrie, intimes étrangers. Un siècle d’interactions socio-politiques, Arles, Sindbad, Actes Sud, 2016.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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