Resources الأرشيف

Essential Readings: The Syrian Uprising (by Raymond Hinnebusch)

بواسطة Raymond Hinnebusch | ديسمبر 21, 2017 | Resources, Reviews

“[The Essential Readings series is sponsored by the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) team at the Arab Studies Institute. MESPI invites scholars to contribute to our Essential Readings Modules by submitting or suggesting an “Essential Readings” topic pertinent to the Middle East. Articles such as this will appear permanently on both www.MESPI.org and www.Jadaliyya.com.]

The Syrian uprising precipitated an explosion in publications on what had hitherto been an understudied country. The conflict has, however, produced a more limited number of high quality works that present a wealth of empirical findings, take theoretically innovative approaches, or both.

Several volumes provide general context for the uprising:

Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria (Brookings Institution, 2005) and David Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria (Yale University Press, 2005) provide sympathetic but insightful glimpses of the dilemmas facing Bashar al-Asad during his early years in power.

Radwan Ziadeh, Power and Policy in Syria: Intelligence Services, Foreign Relations and Democracy in the Modern Middle East (I.B Tauris, 2011) provides a broad background: it examines Hafiz Assad’s power consolidation around personal loyalty to the president and based on pillars of civil bureaucracy, the security organs and the Baath party; also it looks at the succession of Bashar al-Asad and repression of the Damascus spring; isolation brought on by Bashar’s foreign policy in Lebanon and Iraq; and the role of the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate Islamic opposition.

Raymond Hinnebusch and Tina Zintl, Syria from Reform to Revolt, Vol. 1: Political Economy and International Relations (Syracuse University Press, 2015) brings together senior and younger scholars doing cutting edge research in Syria in the first decade of Bashar al-Asad’s rule. It explores the ways in which Asad’s domestic and foreign policy strategies during his first decade in power safeguarded his rule and adapted Syria to the age of globalization. The volume’s contributors examine multiple aspects of Asad’s rule in the 2000s, from power consolidation within the party and control of the opposition to economic reform, co-opting new private charities, and coping with Iraqi refugees. The Syrian regime temporarily succeeded in reproducing its power and legitimacy, in reconstructing its social base, and in managing regional and international challenges. At the same time, contributors detail the shortcomings, inconsistencies, and risks these policies entailed, illustrating why Syria’s tenuous stability came to an abrupt end during the Arab uprisings of 2011. In a companion volume, Christa Salamandra and Leif Stenberg, Syria from Reform to Revolt, Vol. 2: Culture, Society and Religion focuses on key arenas of Syrian social life, including television drama, political fiction, Islamic foundations, and Christian choirs and charities, demonstrating the ways in which Syrians worked with and through the state in attempts to reform, undermine, or sidestep the regime.

Three studies provide the political economy context of the uprising:

Bassam Haddad, Business Networks in Syria; the Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2012). This political economy analysis of the impact of Bashar al-Asad’s reforms in the late 2000’s shows how regime favoritism toward investors was paralleled by a decline in the living standards of the state-employed middle class and the regime’s former plebeian constituency—arguably an element in the 2011 Uprising. But the regime’s move toward a more formal state-business alliance deterred business from joining the opposition. Thus, state-business networks both contributed to and detracted from authoritarian resilience.

Linda Matar, Political Economy of Investment in Syria (Palgrave, 2016) takes the determinants of investment and the agency of class, as an analytical lens to understand Syria’s failure to promote employment-generating investment prior to the uprising. Matar argues that neoliberal reforms under Bashar al-Asad failed to build productive capacity and instead enriched a few through short-term speculative and mercantile ventures. The proponents of the free market justified policies which exacerbated unequal income distribution, thus contributing to the social explosion in 2011.

Jamil Baroutt, The Past Decade in Syria: the Dialectics of Stagnation and Reform (Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, 2011) is a political economy analysis by a Syrian scholar that examines the formation of a bureaucratic capitalist class and authoritarian liberalization to understand economic stagnation and the regime’s inadequate strategies for overcoming it. The gap between economic growth and population growth, resulting in growing youth unemployment, concentrated in neglected rural provinces, provided the tinder for the uprising.

The following studies expose the religious, social and cultural context of the uprising:

Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, ) focuses on Syria’s ulama and their changing relationship to power. His main argument is that the ulama were more readily co-opted than were Islamist movements when the regime gave them concessions reinforcing their religious authority, notably in conflicts with secularists, or expanded their freedom for non-political dawa. This enabled the regime to divide and rule these two wings of the Islamist movement; he also shows how the erosion of this game helped prepare the way for some ulama to back the opposition after the uprising.

Pierret’s volume is usefully read together with Line Khatib, Islamist Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Secularism in Ba’thist Syria (Routledge, 2011), which shows how the regime played off secularists and Islamists. Indeed, it viewed the secular opposition as a potentially greater threat than the Islamists, hence fostered and co-opted the latter against the former. In doing so, it inadvertently spread the ideology that would be used to mobilize the Islamist movements that came to dominate the opposition to the regime.

Raphael Lefevre, Ashes of Hama: the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Hurst, 2013). While much of the book recounts the 1978-92 uprising from the point of view of the Muslim Brothers, to whom Lefevre had exceptional access, it is quite relevant to the current Syrian Uprising. The earlier insurgency generated a jihadi tradition whose remnants went to Afghanistan, morphed into transnational jihadis, played a role in the founding of al–Qa’ida and returned to fight in Syria after 2011. As part of a 1990s deal with Islamists, the regime had allowed a substantial Islamization of society, at the expense of secularism that grew the potential base of Islamist opposition activated as the post 2011 Uprising became militarized. The current Uprising has been shaped by memories of Hama: the desire for revenge motivates some of the insurgents while the memories of the Ikhwan assassinations of Alawis and of its sectarian discourse forged the solidarity of the regime in the face of the current uprising. However, by contrast to Egypt and Tunisia, where the organized Ikhwan filled the gap after the quick fall of presidents, the protracted struggle in Syria has generated sectarian hostility to the advantage of radical jihadis.

Charles Lister The Syrian Jihad: Evolution of an Insurgency (Hurst, 2015) takes up the story, which looks at the jihadists who came to dominate the uprising, including al-Qaida avatars, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

Michael Kerr and Craig Larkin (eds.), The Alawis of Syria: War, Faith and Politics in the Levant (Hurst, 2015) examines the role of the key pro-regime minority community in Syria. This edited collection examines Syria’s Alawi community, a key constituency of the Asad regimes. Several chapters examine the historical emergence of the community (Aslam Farouk Ali), their experiences under the Ottomans (Stephan Winter) and the French mandate and early independence (Max Weiss) Two look at the complex relation of regime and sect: their prominent role in the Ba’th party and army (Raymond. Hinnebusch) and their demographic spread to the cities, especially Damascus under Ba’th rule (Fabrice Balanche). Leon Goldsmith examines their implication in the regime; Aron Lund the Shabiha phenomenon and Reinoud Leenders the regime’s strategy of repressions

The roots and trajectory of the uprising are more specifically addressed in these studies:

Carsten Wieland, Syria: A Decade of Lost Chances: Repression and Revolution from Damascus Spring to Arab Spring (Cune Press, 2012).

This book provides a valuable and detailed examination of Bashar al-Asad’s rule, particularly of what Wieland considered the opportunities missed by the president to carry out political reforms that might have headed off revolution. The traditional opposition was loyal and moderate and its political incorporation could have enabled a gradual and peaceful transition to a more democratic and legitimate regime. In Wieland’s view, Asad could have won a free election in 2011 had he embraced the demands of the opposition, portrayed himself as the solution rather than the problem, and led the transition to democracy. Most Syrians would have welcomed this. Instead Asad played the sectarian and security cards, destroying his status as a secular popular leader while the violent response to protestors only further propelled the uprising. Wieland believes the security solution was decided by a special committee that concluded that the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes had fallen because they had used insufficient repression. The author benefited from extended discussions with the secular “traditional opposition,” notably Michel Kilo.

David W. Lesch, Syria: the Fall of the House of Assad (Yale University Press, 2012).

How, David Lesch muses, did Bashar al-Asad, a man who had appeared to him as “a relatively ordinary person,” quite different from the princelings in other authoritarian regimes, become drenched in blood? The book ably summarizes the structural factors against and for an uprising in Syria: on the one side there was the Asad’s nationalist stature and relatively good image as a youthful reformer, the substantial stake in preventing Islamic fundamentalism by minorities the secular middle class and the bourgeoisie—who could account for half the population in Lesch’s calculation; and the fragmentation of opposition. On the other hand, the rapid growth of unemployed educated youth that the economy could not absorb; the shaving of social safety nets and growing inequality. Given this relative balance, Asad’s approach to the protests could have made a big difference. Lesch explains his resort to repression by their belief in foreign conspiracies and that any concession seen to be made from weakness only encourages enemies. Once the killing reached a certain point, there was no way back. The regime hunkered down, counting on creating a favourable stalemate to survive.

Samer Abboud, Syria (Polity Press, 2016).

This volume focuses on the uprising years, particularly examining the anti-regime side. Abboud charts the emergence of protest movements, the external opposition, the “civilianization” of violence, the militarization of the uprising and the war economy. A main thrust of his analysis is how the fragmentation of the opposition prevented it from coordinating around a common political and diplomatic strategy and obstructed the emergence of military formations able to defeat the regime. The emergence of Islamists, themselves ideologically divided, further fragmented the opposition despite periodic efforts to bring the multitude of jihadists groups together in “fronts.” Formations large enough to hold and expand territory could not be sustained and fighting groups, rather, were satisfied with profiting from local fiefdoms; as they became warlords they lost their popularity. Abboud’s analysis goes far toward explaining the failure of the Uprising.

Illuminating the conflict from the point of view of its victims, ordinary people, is Wendy Pearlman, We Crossed that Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria (Harper-Collins, 2017), while Yassin al-Haj Salah, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Hurst, 2017) examines what went wrong from the point of view of a prominent anti-regime activist

The international context of the uprising is most ably charted in:

Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (Yale University Press, 2016).

While Phillips acknowledges the domestic roots of Syria’s conflict, his main argument is that without external interference the fragmented opposition had little chance of prevailing. Importantly, this interference was driven by miscalculations, most importantly the delusion of anti-Asad forces that his regime was fragile and would soon fall, and, if not, that US intervention would tip the balance against him. Miscalculations by the regional opposition to Asad led them to follow inflexible policies in Syria. Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were convinced that US intervention was coming and they conveyed their confidence to the exiled opposition, thereby discouraging any compromise with the regime. As for the West, its main mistake was to make uncompromised-able demands on the Asad regime, convinced it was on the way out, even while it had no intention of intervening militarily. On the other side, however, Iran and later Russia were determined to prevent regime collapse. The resulting “balanced intervention” by anti- and pro-Asad powers tipped Syria into protracted civil war.

Philips’ analysis could be usefully read in tandem with Nikolaos Van Dam, Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria (I.B Taurus 2017), by a diplomat-scholar with decades of experience of studying Syria. He similarly examines the mistakes of the West in its expectation that the regime would easily be swept away.

John McHugo, From the Great War to the Civil War (Saqi Books, 2014) provides a wider historical sweep regarding the deleterious impact of foreign powers on Syria, seeing its very founding as a modern state under French tutelage as sewing the seeds of the uprising.

For a broad overview of the uprising:

Raymond Hinnebusch and Omar Imady, The Syrian Uprising: Domestic Origins and Early Trajectory (Routledge, 2018).

This major edited collection provides a uniquely comprehensive examination of the uprising. The book consists of nineteen chapters, each addressing an aspect of the Uprising. The chapter cases are located within a framework that poses a series of key questions or issues raised in the scholarship and debates on the Syrian uprising. Chapters 2-8 focus on the structural vulnerabilities and strengths of the regime that help explain the origins of the uprising (causes, grievances, and opportunity structure); how such mass protests became possible but also why they did not initiate a democratic transition; why the protests were militarized and sectarianism instrumentalized, resulting in civil war; and how the regime survived and how it was able to keep support of key constituencies, including the military, business, and the minorities. It takes the view that the structure goes far to explain the roots and early trajectory of the uprising, with chapters looking at regime formation (A Saoul) and practices (S. Valter), e.g., how “Sultanism” precluded democratic transition (Soren Schmidt), the military-business complex that backed it (Salam Said); the political economy context (F Lawson); regime divide and rule strategies e.g. Islamism vs secularists (L Khatib); Sufis vs Islamists (O Imady) and the role of the Alawis (L. Goldsmith). Agency also mattered and subsequent chapters examines Asad’s decisions (D. Lesch), the emergence of civil society as a base of opposition (T al-Om), the role of notions of dignity (J. Harkin) and the social media (B Brownlee) in mobilization; the role of the Muslim Brotherhood (N. Ramirez Diaz); the sectarianization of the conflict (E Bartolomeni; O. Rifai); the emergence of salafist jihadists (I Eido), and the roles of the Druze (M. Kastrinou), the Left (F Arslanian) and the Kurds (D. Cifci). Subsequent volumes in this series will examine the external role in the uprising, and its later evolution.

In addition to these works, students of contemporary Syria may wish to consult the only scholarly journal devoted entirely to Syria, Syria Studies; the valuable reports of the International Crisis Group; and in-depth news and analysis websites such as Syria Deeply; and the Carnegie Middle East Centre.”

[This article is published jointly in partnership with Jadaliyya.]

Alia Malek, The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria – A Review

بواسطة Max Weiss | ديسمبر 12, 2017 | Resources, Reviews

“The Syria war continues to deform the world we live in. Incessant reports about urban guerilla warfare or airstrikes, civilian massacres or chemical weapons attacks suffuse the mediascape even as war “fatigue” seems to have set in around the world, especially in the United States. Over the past few years, a number of first-person narratives have been published that exceed or complicate military or geostrategic analysis of the ongoing conflicts; they successfully, often powerfully, bring the personal tolls of the conflict to the fore. The diaries of Janine di Giovanni, Jonathan Littell, and Samar Yazbek, just to name a few of the most prominent voices, help to focus attention on human-scale aspects of the Syria War. Where political analysis and war reporting stops, memoirs and essays shed light on some of the poignant social and individual dimensions of everyday life for Syrians both inside the country and in the diaspora.

In The Home that Was Our Country, Syrian-American lawyer and journalist Alia Malek presents a fresh and gripping account of her own family’s history. Narrated with style and grace, the book is not only a deeply felt and richly textured memoir, but also a bracing introduction to Syrian history, politics, and everyday life, from the late Ottoman period to the present. Indeed, the book is noteworthy and distinctive for being a splendid interweaving of historical narratives that link individual and family, nation and imagination, place and memory. Malek paints a kaleidoscopic picture of the conditions of Syria both before and after the uprising in 2011 as well as the multifarious journeys Malek took as lawyer and journalist, around the Middle East and Europe. From Damascus to Homs and Beirut, from Egypt to Armenia and Germany, Malek has trodden some of the same unstable terrain as many Syrians who are fleeing unceasing violence and trying to survive the seemingly interminable chaos into which the country has fallen.

After the marriage of Malek’s maternal grandmother, Salma, who hailed from Hama, and her maternal grandfather, who was from Homs, the couple moved to a modest apartment in the Ain al-Kirish neighborhood, near Sarouja, just outside the old city of Damascus during the early days of Syrian independence in the late 1940s. In her narration of her family’s experience in the cataclysmic experience of World War, Armenians who had fled the genocidal program of the Ottoman military authorities in Anatolia took refuge in the family home, and some became veritable members of the family. In a move that was more of a financial decision than a humanitarian one, the family house in Damascus was subsequently rented to acquaintances when Malek’s family moved to North America. The house, in turn, serves as the material fulcrum at the heart of Malek’s memoir. Syrian law protects the rights of subletters, thus awkwardly preventing Malek’s family from reclaiming their apartment when they wished to refurbish the property, to carve out a space in Syria to which they could return when they were finally ready to do so.

Malek grew up primarily in Baltimore, Maryland, though she spent substantial periods of time during her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in Syria, Lebanon, and the occupied West Bank, whether that was in the context of visiting family and friends, or gaining work experience with Palestinian and other regional legal organizations. Malek lived in Syria from April 2011 until May 2013, working on this book about her family history while also experiencing first-hand and chronicling the emergence of the nonviolent Syrian uprising. She soon witnessed it devolve into a bloody civil war that has now been raging for upwards of seven years. Towards the end of her narrative journey, Malek somberly relates how she “thought with sadness again of how all this had started—with Syrians simply asking to be included in their own governing—and looked up at the sky and hoped nothing would explode” (311).

Malek paints a vivid picture of her own family history: her great-grandfather Abdeljawwad al-Mir (1889-1970), whose family were Antiochian Orthodox Christians in the village of Suqaylabiyah. In the context of early post-Ottoman Syria under French Mandate control, Abdeljawwad, who as an only son thus escaped conscription into the miserable seferberlik, came into contact with nationalist resistance leaders Shaykh Salih al-ʿAli and Ibrahim Hanano, among others. Just after the arrival of the French Mandate authorities, Abdeljawwad moved his family to Hama, where Malek’s maternal grandmother, Salma, was born in 1924. After Salma’s older brother defied Abdeljawwad’s wishes and eloped to Damascus, Salma visited and fell in love with a man named Ameen, with whom she moved to Damascus in 1949, to the family apartment in question where they became the first occupants. Colorful stories of the original inhabitants of the building bespeak the diversity and dynamism of Damascus during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1970, Salma decided to rent out the apartment to make some much-needed cash, and she did so to a man named Hassan, who would live in the house until the 2000s, and with whom Malek would maintain a personal relationship for a long time to come. “I was writing about Salma and the house,” Malek writes, “a house that my grandmother, my mother, they, and now I had lived in. Its history included all of us, and they had been in it for forty years. Even if it was at the expense of my family, I didn’t want to erase their lives from it” (319).

With the fate of the family house in limbo, Salma was facing her own health challenges. After Salma had a stroke and was consigned to a catatonic condition, Malek described her as being “locked in,” which is the same term she uses to describe Syria under dictatorship: “To be locked in is to be completely alive—to be there fully—inside a body that is wholly paralyzed” (106). This arresting image of a country still alive, still subject to thoughts and emotions and aspirations and memories even as it is held captive to the ravages of illness or authoritarian rule is profoundly troubling. Malek bleakly connects the two as she recalls of life in Syria during the heyday of Hafiz al-Asad’s reign. ““To my evolving consciousness, still that of a child, Syria was like my grandmother Salma—suspended between life and death. There and not there” (110). Given her diasporic crossings from Beirut to Cairo, from Damascus to Baltimore, it is hardly surprising that Malek would have an evolving relationship to the home that was her country, to her native Syria. “Although both had once been very real to me, all I had of Salma and Syria were memories, and both topics in our house were tinged with sadness” (110). Her grandmother Salma died in August 1987.

Many Syrian activists who were mobilized during the early days of the Syrian uprising in 2011 and who continued to animate the inspiring pockets of nonviolent organizing in order to build another Syria, a new Syria, would speak of how they “discovered” or “rediscovered” their country during that initial mobilization. Taking shelter in mosques and other houses of worship where the state security services were unlikely to suspect they had gathered, these activists found like-minded men and women who came from diverse segments of Syrian society, from all manner of sectarian, ethnic, class, and regional backgrounds. Not only does her family recognize the significance of religious and ethnic diversity first-hand—as her family is part Christian—but the cast of characters Malek meets along the way in her own memoir represent the gamut of Syrian diversity: Kurds, Jews, Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims, Christians of multiple denominations, ʿAlawis, and Armenians. Much like thousands of other Syrians, Malek seems to have “re-discovered” Syria through her return to her family’s fascinating history as well as through her frantic attempt to keep up with the challenges and the dangers of the war in Syria as it raged around the country and spilled out into the region and around the world. One particularly poignant moment in the book concerns a series of gatherings that Malek attended with her cousin Tala, a “psychodrame” organized by Jesuits in Damascus in August 2011, which was meant to serve as a venue for self-expression, dialogue, and collective soul-searching about the situation in a therapeutic and performative mode. One of Malek’s takeaways is that previously “Syrians had no forum in which they could talk directly to each other about what was happening in their country,” that adults had been “infantilized” by decades of authoritarian rule (207). Even as Malek seeks to understand the perspective of her fellow Syrians amid these cataclysmic events, she is by no means willing to hide her own politics. “I was angry at those who supported Assad out of conviction—those who actually believed in him. But I felt a kind of skin-crawling embarrassment at the nonbelievers who nonetheless chose to be obsequious, and even theatrical, in supporting him” (228). This anger and embarrassment notwithstanding, Malek shows grace and determination in directly engaging with the diversity and differences percolating in Syrian society and culture during a time of profound destabilization and uncertainty.

The Home that Was our Country is a marvelous achievement, a first-hand testimony of one Syrian-American coming to terms with the tragedy of Syria. But the book is so much more than this: history lesson, social tableau, cultural analysis, and highly specific personal memoir. In her concise and accessible account of the making of modern Syria, Malek is as comfortable evoking the terror and thrill of the Syrian revolution and its aftermaths as she is at deftly describing and analyzing centuries of Syrian history. She is interested in “all the little and big things Syrians all over the country had left behind, thinking they were coming back” (xvi). Her depiction of local culture—food, smells, handicrafts, everyday family life—add texture to the dry historical narrative and political analysis that has all too often saddled the shelves of the library of modern and contemporary Syria.

The Home that Was our Country holds out modest hopes for a future Syria beyond the current catastrophe. When her father fell ill in the spring of 2013, Malek decided to return to the U.S. in order to spend time with him, and her sense of being caught between her ancestral homeland and her Syrian-American family is powerfully rendered here, as throughout the book. Malek raises important questions about the nature and diversity of Syrian society, about the possibilities for reconciliation and reconstruction in the wake of such terrifying and traumatic dislocation and devastation. As she notes, the only way for the country to begin down the path of reconciliation and reconstruction is for foreign powers—especially Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies as well as the United States—to contribute more robustly to creating the conditions of possibility for that outcome. Whatever optimism is left for those concerned with the fate of Syria will be nourished by the beautiful stories being created, told, and related by Alia Malek and her generation of Syrians, both inside the country and in the sprawling—and tragically ballooning—Syrian diaspora.”

[This article is published jointly in partnership with Jadaliyya.]