Following the Syrian regime’s violent crackdown on protesters during the 2011 Syrian uprising, leading powers in the Arab world spearheaded a coordinated effort to isolate the Asad regime. But,... Show moreFollowing the Syrian regime’s violent crackdown on protesters during the 2011 Syrian uprising, leading powers in the Arab world spearheaded a coordinated effort to isolate the Asad regime. But, since 2018, we have been witnessing a drastic reversal of this policy, with Arab countries reopening their embassies in Damascus. As the conditions that gave rise to ostracising the Syrian regime have only worsened, we should have expected further intensification of the status of Syria as a pariah state, not its rehabilitation. Nevertheless, this remains a protracted ambivalent process: it involves diplomatic normalisation without political and economic reintegration. What explains this ambivalence? To answer this question, I deploy securitization theory and put forth the concept of ‘mirroring’ securitization. I argue that both the securitization and desecuritization of the Syrian regime by leading Arab states mirror the way of thinking about security of their Western allies, especially the US, and targets Western – not Arab – audiences. Arab states’ speech acts concerning Syria have served to either legitimise from the bottom Western security policies or verbalise what Western countries cannot (yet) afford to verbalise. Overall, this article bridges securitization theory and the study of international hierarchies, and reflects on the agential limits and potentials of securitizing actors in the Global South. Show less
Some twenty-five years ago, hundreds of clay sealings as well as a series of stone stamp seals were foundin excavation at Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria. Dating to the late seventh millennium cal. BC,... Show moreSome twenty-five years ago, hundreds of clay sealings as well as a series of stone stamp seals were foundin excavation at Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria. Dating to the late seventh millennium cal. BC, the find repre-sents one of the largest assemblages of prehistoric sealings known in the Near East until now. By now, evenmore seals and sealings have been found at the site. Their occurrence in securely stratified contexts allowed for interpretations about their use in controlled storage events by pastoralists. This paper is primarilyconcerned with the date of introduction of the sealing practice at Tell Sabi Abyad and its embedding inthe wider cultural setting of the time. Show less
On-side fighting – outright violence between armed groups aligned on the same side of a civil war’s master cleavage – represents a devastating breakdown in cooperation. Its humanitarian... Show moreOn-side fighting – outright violence between armed groups aligned on the same side of a civil war’s master cleavage – represents a devastating breakdown in cooperation. Its humanitarian consequences are also grave. But it has been under-recognized empirically and therefore under-theorized by scholars to date. This article remedies the omission. Existing research can be extrapolated to produce candidate explanations, but these overlook spatial and temporal variation in on-side fighting within a war. I provide a theory that accounts for this ebb and flow. On-side fighting hinges on belligerents’ trade-offs between short-term survival and long-term political objectives. Enemy threats to survival underpin on-side cooperation; in their absence, belligerents can pursue political gains against on-side competitors. I evaluate this threat-absence theory using evidence from the ongoing Syrian Civil War’s first years. Fine-grained fatalities data capture fluctuating enemy threats to on-side groups’ survival and situate on-side fighting and its absence. Findings support threat-absence theory and contribute to research on warfighting and political competition in civil wars and to the study of coalition dynamics in other settings, including elections and legislatures. Show less
This article analyses how the film essay Taste of Cement by Ziad Kalthoum portrays Syrian construction labourers in Lebanon. It shows that the film’s evocation of sensory experience makes two... Show moreThis article analyses how the film essay Taste of Cement by Ziad Kalthoum portrays Syrian construction labourers in Lebanon. It shows that the film’s evocation of sensory experience makes two important contributions to the way we conceive of cities in general, and of post-civil war Beirut in particular. First, Taste of Cement succeeds in representing the workers as subaltern subjects without participating in their erasure. Second, the film presents a view that I call “oscillating urbanism,” thus challenging conventional narratives of (post-)conflict cities. Show less
This dissertation situates the war in Syria within the actual and imagined system of international criminal justice. It explores the legal impediments and diplomatic challenges that have led to... Show moreThis dissertation situates the war in Syria within the actual and imagined system of international criminal justice. It explores the legal impediments and diplomatic challenges that have led to this tragic state of affairs and reviews a number of accountability solutions being explored within multilateral gatherings, by states, and by civil society actors, including innovations of institutional design; the re-activation of a range of domestic jurisdictional principles (including universal jurisdiction in Europe); the emergence of creative investigative and documentation techniques, technologies, and organizations; and the rejection of state consent as a precondition for the exercise of jurisdiction. Engaging both law and policy around international justice, the text offers a set of justice blueprints, within and without the International Criminal Court. It also considers the utility, propriety, and practicality of establishing an ad hoc tribunal and pursuing a transitional justice program without a genuine political transition. All told, the book attempts to capture the creative energy radiating from members of the international community intent on advancing the accountability norm in Syria even in the face of geo-political blockages within the U.N. Security Council. Show less
Studies of conflicts involving the use of surrogates focus largely on states, viewing the relationship between sponsors and proxies primarily as one in which states utilize nonstate actors as... Show moreStudies of conflicts involving the use of surrogates focus largely on states, viewing the relationship between sponsors and proxies primarily as one in which states utilize nonstate actors as proxies. They have devoted far less attention to sponsor-proxy arrangements in which nonstate actors play super-ordinate roles as sponsors in their own right. Why and how do nonstate actors sponsor proxies? Unlike state sponsors, which value proxies primarily for their military utility, nonstate sponsors select and utilize proxies mainly for their perceived political value. Simply put, states tend to sponsor military surrogates, whereas nonstate actors sponsor political ancillaries. Both endogenous actor-based traits and exogenous structural constraints account for these different approaches. An analysis of three case studies of nonstate sponsors that differ in terms of ideology and capacity—al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the People's Protection Units in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon—confirms this argument, but also suggests that the ability and desire to control proxies varies with the sponsor's capacity. High-capacity nonstate sponsors such as Hezbollah behave similarly to state sponsors, but remain exceptional. Most nonstate sponsors are less dominant, rendering the relationships to their proxies more transactional and pragmatic, and ultimately less enduring than those of state sponsors and their clients. Show less
This article addresses the ways in which the Syrian author Khaled Khalifa describes and invokes feelings of shame as a literary strategy in the novel No Knives in the Kitchens of this City (2016).... Show moreThis article addresses the ways in which the Syrian author Khaled Khalifa describes and invokes feelings of shame as a literary strategy in the novel No Knives in the Kitchens of this City (2016). It argues that the author capitalizes on shame’s peculiarly unstable nature in expressing the unbearable subjugation to a system that is as brutal as it is banal under Syria’s president Hafez Al-Asad and later his son Bashar. Shame in this novel travels from character to character and from characters to readers in uncontrolled ways. The article teases out these trajectories in order to argue that the affective nature of shame is particularly suitable for addressing the conditions of living in Syria under the Asads. Show less
The German doctor and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf (15351596) was the first postmedieval European to travel to the Levant and Mesopotamia. The travel account that he published on his hazardous... Show moreThe German doctor and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf (15351596) was the first postmedieval European to travel to the Levant and Mesopotamia. The travel account that he published on his hazardous journey (15731575) is well studied, but the plants he collected during his travels have hardly been subjected to scientific study. The fourth volume of Rauwolf’s 16th century book herbarium includes plant specimens collected from the area encompassing modernday Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. We digitized this valuable historic collection, identified all specimens in the herbarium, analyzed its floristic composition, transcribed and translated the Latin and German texts accompanying each specimen and updated the names with the latest accepted nomenclature. The herbarium book includes 191 specimens representing 183 species belonging to 64 families. It includes original specimens of Linnaean type illustrations as well as historical crop cultivars from the Near East. The Rauwolf Herbarium gives a unique insight in the exotic, unknown and useful species of the Near East from the perspective of a 16th century European botanist. Show less
The EU's good governance policy considers civil society an actor promoting development as well as political accountability of governments, thus contributing to the democratisation of political... Show moreThe EU's good governance policy considers civil society an actor promoting development as well as political accountability of governments, thus contributing to the democratisation of political systems. This study argues that the EU's policy is based on questionable assumptions with respect to the nature of civil society, as well as the willingness of state and civil society to cooperate. Syria, as an extreme case of authoritarianism, is taken as an example. The connotation attached by the EU to civil society in Syria is normative and overlooks its complexity and the character of its relations with the state. Within the context of intergovernmental and multilateral cooperation, the Syrian regime could select and control activities in the domain of good governance, including possible involvement in its implementation by Syrian civil society organisations, which were not perceived as a threat to the regime's power. In fact, this support may have even contributed to the resilience of this authoritarian regime Show less
statutory, political, communal, and individual. The author believes that this study makes a useful and valuable contribution to understanding the historical, socio-political and religious... Show morestatutory, political, communal, and individual. The author believes that this study makes a useful and valuable contribution to understanding the historical, socio-political and religious complexities that mark today’s Syria. The thesis consists of two parts. Part One, entitled ‘The Plural Legal Landscape: Family Laws in Syria’, focuses primarily on the historical, legal, and political aspects of Syria’s plural family law system. The inherited plurality founded the fabric of Syria’s current mosaic of family law, with all its complexities and contestations. Part Two, entitled ‘Unity in Multiplicity: Muslim and Christian Laws and Legal Practices’, focuses on the content of the various personal status laws and discussing legal practices in and around some personal status courts, in particular a sharʻiyya and a Catholic court in Damascus. Moreover, the argument that, albeit this plurality, the diverse personal status courts are united in their shared communal, cultural understandings on marriage, gender and family relations, runs as a connecting thread through the second part. Show less
Unity is Strength – this was the core statement made by Syrian freemasons already in 1876 when spreading their ideas all over the Syrian lands. With this phrase in mind, in this book Dorothe Sommer... Show moreUnity is Strength – this was the core statement made by Syrian freemasons already in 1876 when spreading their ideas all over the Syrian lands. With this phrase in mind, in this book Dorothe Sommer analyses early masonic lodges that existed in the late Ottoman Empire showing how Syrian freemasons used the lodges to reach out to other Syrians. Freemasons in Syria wanted to form a sense of unity inside Ottoman Syria; a unity that could act as a bridge to span religious cleavages and to ultimately help to produce inter-confessional sociability. European freemasonry, outside of the Western sphere of direct influence, developed a life of its own and paradoxically promoted a new sense of self-perception among Ottoman Syrians. Consequently, this analysis directly contradicts previous research carried out in the field of colonial freemasonry, according to which the lodges served as vanguard for Western purposes of occupation and domination. Additionally, freemasonry during Ottoman times was the first and by then the only institution that overcame religious cleavages outside Beirut and attracted more participants than any other society or fraternity. In this, it was unique and warrants an in-depth study. Show less
Although the Syrian art scene is by and large characterized by artists working in traditional techniques like painting and sculpture, young artists are discovering new forms of expression such as... Show moreAlthough the Syrian art scene is by and large characterized by artists working in traditional techniques like painting and sculpture, young artists are discovering new forms of expression such as video art. Building upon a long tradition of artists offering social criticism, these artists comment in their work on presentday Syrian society. This article analyzes videos of two artists, locating their art in the context of current social and political debate. Show less
“The Pots and Potters of Assyria” is a comprehensive discussion of all evidence relating to pottery production from the Late Bronze Age site of Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria. Technological, morphological,... Show more“The Pots and Potters of Assyria” is a comprehensive discussion of all evidence relating to pottery production from the Late Bronze Age site of Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria. Technological, morphological, stylistic and archaeological data are integrated into the understanding of pottery production and use. The pottery itself and its chronological sequence, the shaping and firing techniques, raw materials, wasters and unfired pottery are presented. In addition, workshops and their layout, tools, as well as pottery kilns and their construction are discussed. Together with information on standardization, output and demand, as well as information from contemporary texts, these sources are used to reconstruct the organization of pottery production at the site. A chapter on vessel function and use including a list of Middle Assyrian vessel names concludes the study. Introductory chapters discuss field methodology, the historical background and stratigraphical information. Seven appendices present the database used for this study, the shape typology, a detailed study of the pottery kilns, the results of archaeometric research including thin-section analyses, potters’ marks, and cuneiform texts from Sabi Abyad related to pottery. The thesis is lavishly illustrated, including an extensive catalogue, detailed illustrations of workshops, tools, shaping techniques, kilns, thin-section slides, and vessels in iconography Show less
In the absence of credible alternatives, “regimefall” is not something to look forward to. Still, when regimefall has been made inevitable by the very internal logic of the regime involved, one... Show moreIn the absence of credible alternatives, “regimefall” is not something to look forward to. Still, when regimefall has been made inevitable by the very internal logic of the regime involved, one cannot but watch, with a certain amount of awe, sorrow, and macabre fascination, the unfolding event. Show less
Satellite television stations are subtly challenging the state's monopoly over the means of persuasion and information in the Arab world. A Qatari-based television channel, Al-Jazeera's coverage of... Show moreSatellite television stations are subtly challenging the state's monopoly over the means of persuasion and information in the Arab world. A Qatari-based television channel, Al-Jazeera's coverage of Syrian politics exemplifies how satellite television is changing the conditions of communication between citizens and states in the Arab world and increasing the space for civil society, creating more moments in television that are not as controlled by states. The significance of the Syrian case lies in the fact that the Syrian regime is highly authoritarian and still maintains near total control of information and communication. The following examines Al-Jazeera's reporting of several issues considered highly sensitive according to the censorship policies of Syria's Ministries of Information and Culture and Guidance: political opposition in Syria, succession, and the impact of the peace process on the regime's survival ability. Show less
Last November, the Syrian province of al-Suwaida was again in the news - Arab and European news, that is. The Syrian media remained silent on the matter. The province, better known as 'Druze... Show moreLast November, the Syrian province of al-Suwaida was again in the news - Arab and European news, that is. The Syrian media remained silent on the matter. The province, better known as 'Druze Mountain', is also called 'Hawran Mountain' and 'Arab Mountain', the name confusion already hinting at the complicated identity of its inhabitants. It was, once again, surrounded by army troops. What had happened? Show less
The announcement of Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad's death on Saturday, 10 June 2000, prompted panegyrics to his greatness and public displays of grief. Syrians Ð those who genuinely admired him... Show moreThe announcement of Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad's death on Saturday, 10 June 2000, prompted panegyrics to his greatness and public displays of grief. Syrians Ð those who genuinely admired him and even those who feared him Ð may have experienced sadness at his passing. Death has a way of generating mournful feelings, or at least of inducing apprehension about the future. Yet the political rituals praising his rule, likening his brilliance to the sun's and stressing his role as a 'man of the people', were not new to Syrians. Asad's image was omnipresent for much of his rule (1970-2000), and the rhetoric of flattery was commonplace. In newspapers, on television and during orchestrated events, Asad was repeatedly lauded as the 'father' and the 'gallant knight'. If only by dint of its repetition, all were fluent in this symbolic language of the Syrian state, which had become a hallmark of Asad's rule. Show less
