[An English woman once asked me: “why are we here?” I answered: “I am more interested in how we got here and where we are going to.” In the context of Syria and the MENA region as a whole, by historicizing everything, as Walter Benjamin advised, we understand how Syria got to where it is today. In the following Munif rightly makes the role of class relations in the Syrian society fundamental, especially class conflict and alliances after independence. The conclusion is:
- a weak bourgeoisie that is unable to carry out economic development
- a nationalist regime that is unable to pursue an alternative path to capitalism due to the failure of economic development resorts to repression to maintain its rule
- a regime that pacifies significant layers of the population and contains active discontent through subsidised commodities, namely bread, and ideological means but it cannot sustain itself when a crisis hits. “The state and capitalist assemblages became ineffective when the 2011 revolt erupted.”
- Combined and uneven development of capitalism in Syria as elsewhere is fraught with contradictions, crises, social conflicts – now hidden, now open.]
The politics of bread and micropolitical resistance (1)
The Syrian people are not hungry
The People want the fall of the regime
—Syrian protest chants
This chapter examines the politics of bread in Syria since independence. It starts with a history of the agrarian reform that Abdel Nasser implemented in Syria in the late 1950s as well as the policies put in place by the Baath party since 1963. It explores the Syrian regime’s strategy of curtailing political rights while providing inexpensive bread. The first section explores the agrarian reform and the technologies of population management. Prior to the revolt, the state used bread as a tool to control and discipline the population, and to regulate the lives of its citizens. Since 2011, it deployed new strategies to build loyalty among the residents in the areas it controls, and to cripple the communities living in the liberated regions. The chapter shows that the Syrian state used bread as a lethal weapon during the revolt to suppress opposition and undermine revolutionary processes. The regime bombed bread lines to break the revolutionaries’ morale and burnt wheat and barley fields to starve the liberated areas.
The last section maps the tactics utilized by revolutionaries in Manbij as they build and maintain an autonomous economy of bread. The chapter argues that state power should not be reduced to the coercive power of the military and security apparatuses. The Baath party built a robust assemblage in rural areas that allowed it to control every aspect of peasants’ lives. French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze proposed the concept of the assemblage as a way to understand the complex matrix of power. He explains that state power is constituted of networks dispersed throughout a territory that helps control it. It constantly captures new spaces by expanding its perimeter and thus making it virtually impossible to escape its grip.
In the Syrian context, the Baath used the agrarian reform, the construction of dams, and the creation of irrigation networks, among other tools to impose an assemblage to control the lives and subjectivities of the rural population. The task of the Baath assemblage was to capture any spaces previously outside its purview. The Baathist state made it gradually more difficult for peasants to have any form of autonomy in the rural areas.1
Land reform
While the French Mandate built a solid alliance with powerful landowners, their relationship was conflictual during World War II. The colonial power gave landowners numerous privileges including tax exemption on farming. Following in the footsteps of the Ottomans, French bureaucrats believed that powerful landowners would be useful in helping quell peasants’ protests and protect France’s political and economic interests. When mechanization reached the Syrian countryside, it produced a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of powerful landowners, and immiseration of large segments of the peasantry, reducing many to only seasonal work.
During World War II, the colonial power had a tense relationship with landowners and peasants for their refusal to surrender their grain production at a price below market value. French bureaucrats were also facing frequent unrest in large cities. The urban population was dissatisfied for two reasons, namely, low wages and the high price of bread. Populist politician Shaykh Taj al-Din, appointed by France as president of Syria, was tasked with collecting funds for the war effort. He tried to collect taxes from the middle classes to subsidize bread while also driving up the national debt. Then, to address the mounting debt, he raised bread prices and allowed merchants in Aleppo and Damascus to profit from the war by letting them sell their grains at an inflated price.2
The anti-colonial movement gained momentum by organizing hunger marches against the French Mandate and the government of Shaykh Taj al-Din. Political scientist, Steven Heydemann notes that nationalist notables, “took over leadership of hunger marches from unions, women, and others and coordinated a sustained campaign against the alleged corruption of Prime Minister Barazi, ousting him in December 1942.”3
After independence, wealthy landowners and merchants dominated political life in parliament, while communists and Arab nationalists parties, namely, the Baath and the Arab Socialist Party, headed by Akram al-Hourani, were gaining traction in the street. Land reform was one of the mobilizing issues for the base. Hourani was an excellent orator and a central figure in Syrian politics in the post-independence era. He created a party with a radical agrarian program, by advocating for land distribution and the end of feudalism.
Palestinian historian, Hanna Batatu notes that Hourani, who created a party against landlords in 1943, popularized the slogan, “Fetch the Basket and Shovel to Bury the Agha and the Bey,” to highlight his disdain for the landed oligarchy. He made the struggle against the feudal class a focal point in his political strategy. He believed the only way to improve peasants’ conditions, and end feudalism, was to enact a profound agrarian reform. Batatu adds, “Hawrani returned from Palestine convinced that ‘feudalism’ was the cause of the Arab defeat and that the agrarian question and the Arab national cause were closely linked.”4 Hourani had a lasting impact on Syrian politics and more specifically on the peasant question. After his trip to Palestine, he became persuaded that land reform was essential, not only to end peasants’ plight, but also to build a modern nation capable of developing its economy, and defeating Western imperialism and Israeli Zionism.
Land reform was a polarizing topic among the Syrian ruling classes, who had divergent interests. After independence, the industrial bourgeoisie began encroaching on the power of the landed oligarchy. To consolidate their economic power, they needed to create a national market and a new middle class with the means to consume locally manufactured products. In the early 1950s, 55–60 percent of the population was composed of peasants and the vast majority were extremely poor.5 Syria’s industrialist class was mainly based in Aleppo and used the People’s Party, a moderate center-right party to further its interests.
The People’s Party represented principally the Aleppan ruling class in parliament and often clashed with the National Party, which was based in Damascus. Aleppo was the wealthiest and largest city in Syria until its gradual marginalization after World War I. Since the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the creation of borders between Iraq and Syria, Aleppo suffered tremendously from the separation of its Iraqi trading partners. By losing its long-standing trading networks with Iraqi cities, Aleppo’s economy gradually declined. The People’s Party wanted to revive these trading networks by building a union with Iraq, while the Nationalist Party opposed it vehemently.6
In 1950, the People’s Party, with the support of nationalist forces in parliament, passed a new constitution with provisions regarding land distribution and limits on lot size.7 The People’s Party, which represented the interests of industrialists, considered the distribution of state land to landless peasants vital for a new middle class with the means to consume local production to emerge. However, the reform from above failed because nationalist and communist forces were on the rise, and were pushing for a more radical reform that the landed oligarchy and their allies could not accept. After independence, new nationalist forces, such as the Baath party forged an alliance with the People’s Party, and advocated for an import substitution economy and land reform. The National Bloc (which later became the National Party) perceived land reform as a direct threat to its economic interests, and opposed it fiercely in parliament.8
The alliance between nationalist forces and the People’s Party fell apart in 1953–1954. In the early 1950s, Syrians were drawn to Arab nationalism and socialism due to several factors, among these the Palestinian Nakkba, the 1949 CIA-engineered coup in Syria, and the Soviet support for progressive causes in the region. As a result, people demanded more radical changes that traditionalist leaders could not sanction.
The new political environment forced traditionalist parties to overcome their differences and build a conservative alliance against Baathists and Communists. To prevent the complete destruction of the dominant social order, and the takeover by radical forces, the ruling classes (industrialists, merchants, and landowners) were forced to work together, despite their divergences. In the mid-1950s, after failing to implement a moderate reform from above, with the help of the Baath and other radical parties, the People’s Party forged an alliance with its arch-enemy, the Nationalist Party. The collapse of the reformist alliance opened the door for more radical possibilities.9 Heydemann notes,
In Syria as in other countries, a conservative coalition between the declining landed elite and an emerging bourgeoisie emerged to confront growing mobilization among peasants and workers. Land and capital joined to defeat an increasingly militant force of workers and peasants. Efforts by capitalists to achieve Syria’s industrialization by means of controlled, liberal social pact had failed.10
Unlike European countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where a strong industrialist class built a robust coalition and annihilated the feudal system, Syria’s industrial bourgeoisie was unable to impose its economic program on traditional forces.
In the late 1950s, the Syrian Communist Party (SCP) pursued its ascendency by mobilizing workers and peasants in the street and becoming a formidable force in Syrian politics. In 1957–1958, traditional parties and the Baath viewed the union with Egypt as a better option than a power takeover by radical forces, especially the SCP. Communists were not always popular in Syria especially during the 1940s. In 1947, Moscow accepted the partition of Palestine, which became the official position of many communist parties worldwide, including the SCP. Thousands of members left it to join nationalist forces, including Akram al-Hourani’s party. In the late 1950s, the SCP regained a certain momentum due to domestic and international factors, and was perceived as a threat by Baathists and traditional parties. The Union with Egypt was the best option for these forces to prevent Communists’ rise to power. During the Union with Syria, Nasser banned all political parties, which led to the gradual decline of communism in Syria. When the SCP re-entered the political arena in 1966, it had already become insignificant.11
During the Union, Nasser built an alliance with Syrian capitalist classes, who were essential for the success of the developmentalist project. He was determined to destroy the feudal class, and did so by implementing a comprehensive agrarian reform. His goal was to end industrialists’ dependence on the landed oligarchy, which in turn would help him build the industrial sector in Syria. Peasants’ work was regulated by new laws, including a minimum wage and better working conditions. In addition, Nasser required that all peasants join a labor union by 1960. Law 143 regulated the relationship between landowners and peasants and systematized collective bargaining, while it made sure to address the injustice inherited from the feudal system. Members of the peasants union were prohibited from engaging in any activities that could be interpreted as political. In addition, it denied members the right to strike or demonstrate. By regulating every aspect of peasants’ lives, the state restricted their political power.12 Heydemann explains:
[…] the law also brought peasants firmly within the embrace of the state and ensured that neither the collectivization of rural labor nor their integration into popular organization would enhance their political autonomy. The incorporation of peasants into the regime’s ruling coalition produced substantive gains in peasants welfare and income, but it followed a thoroughly corporatist design, thus underscoring the regime’s authoritarian and state capitalist character.13
The law stipulated that all peasants who are recipients of private or public land join a cooperative to get loans or seeds from the state. The new regulations were put in place to prevent the feudal order from dominating again. A vast network of cooperatives was created throughout Syria to make sure that Baathist policies were implemented thoroughly. At the same time, the new system kept peasants under the suffocating grip of the state. Overall, the reform introduced by Nasser’s government during the Union weakened the landowner’s class. It gave power to peasants but it also built the foundation for an oversized bureaucracy, and opened the door for power centralization and authoritarian politics. By weakening landowners and appropriating their land, Nasser began to gradually integrate rural regions in Syria into the capitalist circuit. The developmentalist project required that peasants support the ruling coalition, which was achieved through the agrarian reform.14
Baath: 1963-1970
The ideologues of the Baath party viewed the agrarian reform primarily as a political tool, not simply an economic goal. This means that the primary purpose of the reform is not to generate capital necessary for industrialization but primarily to build rural communities loyal to the regime.15 Raymond Hinnebusch qualified the Baath rule in 1963–2000 as an “agrarian revolution”16 due to the centrality of the agrarian reform and the role peasants played in the Baathist coalition. When the Baath party seized power in 1963, it quickly moved to implement an agrarian reform more radical than Nasser’s. The neo-Baath, which ruled Syria in 1966–1970, represented the more radical faction of the Baath. It “reduced the ceilings on ownership, accelerated the pace of reform, and ultimately confiscated 22 percent of the cultivated land. Large landowners retained 15 percent of the cultivated area, including much of the best land.”17
The radical and moderate factions of the Baath had substantial ideological differences, including how far the agrarian reform should go. Radicals advocated for state control of vital sectors of the economy. They wanted to undermine the power of merchants and landowners. In April 1964, merchants in several cities organized a strike to oppose the new policies and put an end to their economic and political marginalization. The Baath’s response was swift: it quelled the protests and introduced new economic reforms. The state fixed grain prices and began buying peasants’ production. These policies weakened the power of merchants in Aleppo and Damascus, many of whom used to stock grains to create shortages, and subsequently inflate prices. Merchants used these strategies to put pressure on the state and undermine its legitimacy but ultimately they failed.18
The following section explores the politics of bread in Syria since the 1960s using French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of power. To avoid essentializing state power or reducing it to the coercive force of the military and security apparatuses, the French intellectuals developed a theory of power based on decentralized networks. The history of the agrarian reform in Syria highlights the process through which the Baath built a ubiquitous network that allowed it to control the countryside. Deleuze and Guattari provide a framework to analyze power that is dispersed throughout the social space. Their theory rejects essences to examine instead the ways elements are constructed and ultimately form an assemblage. It allows for a non-conformist reading of history that emphasizes “the becoming” rather than “the being” of objects and subjects. The main question for them is not to discover the inner essence of things but to understand how they connect and operate together. According to Thomas Nail, the questions that Deleuze and Guattari ask:
[…] are not question of essence, but questions of events. An assemblage does not have an essence because it has no eternally necessary defining features, only contingent and singular features. In other words, if we want to know what something is, we cannot presume that what we see is the final product nor that this product is somehow independent of the network of social and historical processes to which it is connected.19
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of immanence opens new spaces to reflect upon the Syrian uprising. It avoids ontological questions and decenters the state, both of which are necessary moves to make revolutionary processes visible. Deleuze writes “politics precedes being” and in that sense, theory is always contingent upon the ever-changing geography of power and subjectivities. A theory, or what Deleuze calls a plane of consistency, emerges only as a result of the complex assemblage of heterogeneous elements. The plane of consistency is always shifting and adapting to create a new coherence.
Theory, for Deleuze, should not be simply used to interpret the world but rather to transform it. In what follows, I deploy two particularly productive concepts from the Deleuzian toolbox to examine the politics of bread in Syria. The first one is the “assemblage,” which does not exist by itself in the world but rather appears according to specific conditions of possibility. The relations that connect the different parts of an assemblage are meaningful. An assemblage emerges as a result of confrontations with antagonistic forces, as well as the synthesis of various processes that converge toward each other.20
The second concept is the dyad of “deterritorialization and reterritorialization,” which represents two distinct moments of an assemblage. Deterritorialization, according to Deleuze, is the process of change or breaking away from a previous assemblage. It represents the process of liberation from a prior function. The process of reterritorialization refers to the ways in which (deterritorialized) processes form a new assemblage, which is different from the one that preceded it.
The assemblage could be the result of state or capitalist power.21 The state captures new social spaces by imposing specific relations and logic, which dominate if not challenged. The state builds an assemblage on the ruins of what preceded it. It destroys any processes or networks that do not fit neatly within its assemblage. The state assemblage is totalizing and imposes a closed circuit that gradually absorbs the outside and prevents the inside from escaping it. Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaux (1987),
The State … makes points resonate together, points that are not necessarily already town-poles but very diverse points of order, geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities. It makes the town resonate with the countryside. It operates by stratification; in other words, it forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the horizontal lines in a dimension of depth. In retaining given elements, it necessarily cuts off their relations with other elements, which become exterior, it inhibits, slows down, or controls those relations; if the State has a circuit of its own, it is an internal circuit dependent primarily upon resonance, it is a zone of recurrence that isolates itself from the remainder of the network, even if in order to do so it must exert even stricter controls over its relations with that remainder.22
Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that the despotic state is simply the result of centralized power. Instead, they propose an impersonal and decentralized understanding of power that is pervasive throughout the social body. The assemblage connects heterogeneous elements to each other to create a seamless relationship between the different parts. For the purpose of this chapter, the assemblage includes the modalities of land distribution, the design of irrigation networks, as well as the construction of dams throughout the Syrian territory. The state assemblage strives to constantly colonize new spaces. Instead of reducing the state to the centralized power of the autocrat, the analysis below shows that the agrarian reform, as an assemblage, is regulated by policies and composed of infrastructures dispersed through the territory. In that regard, state power cannot be reduced to military, the security branches, or the carceral archipelago. It is also, and more importantly, the power of impersonal networks that the state builds by relentlessly colonizing various social spaces.
From a Deleuzian perspective, the Baath agrarian reform should be understood as a process of destruction (or deterritorializing) of the feudal system and imposition of state developmentalism (reterritorializing). The goal of the Baath was to undermine the power of merchants, industrialists, and landowners, and they did so through land reform and by nationalization of the economy’s main productive sectors, including the textile and extractive industries.23 After 1965, the state controlled most strategic industrial sectors, thus undermining the economic power of wealthy classes. Agriculture was evidently necessary to provide the raw material as well as the capital required for various sectors of the industry. It became clear to the Baath that without a robust agricultural sector, state developmentalism was bound to fail. Agriculture was gradually integrated to the structure of the economy, through agro-related industries. In addition, agricultural production was used in local industries such as the textile industry. However, as Italian historian Massimiliano Trentin explains:
[…] the marginality of the private sector, lack of funds, and mismanagement often led to failures in the heavy industry sector, so that the regime later directed most investments toward agricultural production and to light and transformation industries. Since the state was the main agent for industrialization, the Ba’thists saw planning as the best strategy to rationalize its engagement.24 When Assad seized power in 1970, he gradually compromised with the private sector at the expense of the peasants and working classes.25
The goal of the Baath was not simply a productivist one—it was primarily about the consolidation of state control over rural areas. While the state owned only a small segment of the land, it controlled agricultural activity through the credit system, the distribution of seeds, or the purchase of grain production. The Baath party built an extensive network, which forced peasants to interact with the state at every level in order to operate. The main purpose was therefore the formation of a populist state, while land reform was one of the tools used to achieve that goal.26 The land reform allowed Baathists to dismantle the feudal state and erect a new assemblage controlled by the party. It captured deterritorialized peasants and incorporated them into the state assemblage. Peasants escaped one assemblage, namely, the feudal, to be incorporated into the assemblage of the despotic state.
The Baath party built an alliance initially with the poorest segment of peasantry, by furthering their interests through the land reform. The priorities of the party gradually shifted toward supporting the interests of the middle class and landed oligarchy. Describing the regime policies in northern Syria, geographer Myriam Ababsa explains,
the Ba’thist regimes adopted a pragmatic policy toward the Jazira, which consisted in promoting the emergence of a class of middle-sized shawi landowners who were loyal supporters of the party, while allowing the great feudal landowners to keep the basis of their wealth.27
Baath bureaucrats issued an amendment to the land reform that made it possible for landowners who had recently irrigated their land to maintain it. In addition, those who had a close relationship with the party were given some of the most arable land. The purpose of the new legislation was to build a basis of support among the middle-class peasants, who formed a large segment of al-Jazira region in Northeastern Syria.28 “Their aim was to control a region whose inhabitants were 92 percent rural and 96 percent illiterate, and to create favorable conditions for the implementation of the great Euphrates and Khabur Project.”29 What happened instead is that those who were close to the Baath were able to negotiate good deals while others were excluded.30
The Baath expanded the network of the Agricultural Cooperative Bank by creating new branches in many regions including the most secluded ones. The number of branches doubled in 30 years, going from 30 to 62, between 1953 and 1986.31 In 1964, the regime created the General Peasants Union (GPU), which was led by Baath loyalists, and run as a top-down organization and with no input from members. By the end of the 1960s, the Union had 120,000 members and associations in the vast majority of villages and cities in Syria. The state used the Union to limit peasants’ autonomy and keep a close watch on what they were doing. It was used extensively to implement the government’s five-year plans, and collect peasants’ grain production.32
The GPU was an effective tool to reterritorialize peasants and expand the reach of the state. While the GPU provided necessary vital resources to the peasants, it also colonized every aspect of their lives. When the land reform was completed in 1970, approximately 1.5 million hectares had been expropriated and redistributed. About one-third went to individuals and one-quarter was used to create peasants’ cooperatives.33
In 1970, Assad seized power through a coup he labeled the “Corrective Movement” against Neo-Baath’s deviations. He threw his political enemies in jail, namely, Salah Jadid and Nureddin al-Atassi, and ended economic policies he considered too far to the left. He stopped the distribution of new land and shifted the Baath’s center of gravity from small- to middle-class peasants.34 In addition, he allowed members or individuals affiliated with the Baath to profit from state institutions. In the end, the regime built a clientist system that rewarded loyalty to Assad. Bureaucrats made deals under the table or used institutional power to profit from a corrupt system. They enriched themselves by leasing state-owned land outside institutional channels, or seizing tribal land.35 These practices reproduced certain aspects of the feudal system that the agrarian reform was supposed to destroy.
The Baath implemented an agrarian reform in the 1960s to dismantle the feudal system, and the oppressive social relations in the countryside. In less than 20 years, a new cruel arrangement was erected on the ruins of the old one. Hanna Batatu explains that the class structure the Baath created in rural areas is quite complex. It is composed of a range of different groups including wealthy farmers who owned most of the land and communities who earned meager incomes from agriculture. He notes that rural groups:
[…] consist essentially of three elements. One is composed of the remnants of the old Beys or their descendants. They live in the cities but thrive in some villages because they are, in the words of the local peasants, mad’umin—supported—from above. Another constituent of the class of richer farmers is rural and has a partly plutocratic and partly official character in the sense that its position is based partly on money and partly on its links with the government or the Ba’th party.36
The third group is composed of the investors (mustathmirs), who have capital to invest in agriculture and can be of urban or rural origins.37
The new social constellation in the countryside was the result of various contradictions within the Baath party. There was an ongoing debate between bureaucrats trained in the Soviet Union, who wanted to maintain state-owned farms, and those educated in the West, who pushed for privatization.38 The conservative faction of the Baath advocated for privatization of state cooperatives but Assad refused.39 The regime opposed extensive privatization to maintain economic leverage over Damascus and Aleppo bourgeoisie. Assad feared that extensive privatization would produce a powerful capitalist class that would eventually challenge, or worse, threaten his rule. He preferred to give the Syrian bourgeoisie gradual access to key sectors of the economy and as such prevent them from contesting his power.40
In the early 1980s, the security and military apparatuses committed massacres in Hama and Aleppo in order to crush the opposition to the regime, which was in part composed of a debased urban bourgeoisie. By the mid-1980s, Assad had neutralized his most threatening political enemies and believed the moment was opportune for an economic détente with the Syrian bourgeoisie. The regime passed Decree No. 10 in February 1986 to create a friendly environment for foreign investment in agriculture.41 In 1987, Syria experienced an acute economic crisis. The Baath conservative branch seized the opportunity to push for extensive privatization.
In the early 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the conservative position of the Western-educated bureaucrats finally became dominant, and the regime began a period of economic liberalization that intensified when Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000. Privatization was convenient because the government did not have the financial means to fund additional state farms or even to maintain the already existing ones because they were draining state resources. Instead, it leased some of the land to entrepreneurs and reserved its resources for building large hydrological projects.42
A transition from state to capitalist assemblage occurs, according to Deleuze, when the process of capturing new spaces becomes less consequential for state power. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari write, “[c]apitalism forms when the flow of unqualified wealth encounters the flow of unqualified labor and conjugates with it.”43 While state assemblage assigns rigid roles to individuals and prevents their movement, capitalism “liberates” and allows them to move freely.
Yasser Munif, The Syrian Revolution, Pluto Press, 2020.
Notes
1. This chapter is based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in Manbij and other cities in Northern Syria during several extended trips in 2011–2014.
2. Elizabeth Thompson, “The climax and crisis of the colonial welfare state in Syria and Lebanon during World War II,” in Steven Heydemann (Ed.), War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 75–6.
3. Ibid.
4. Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 121.
5. Steven Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria: Institutions and Social Conflict, 1946–1970 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 47.
6. Ross Burns, Aleppo: A History (New York: Routledge, 2017), 283.
7. Majid Khadduri, “Constitutional development in Syria: with emphasis on the Constitution of 1950,” Middle East Journal 5, no. 2 (Spring 1951): 137–60.
8. Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria, 48–50.
9. Ibid., 32.
10. Ibid., 51–2.
11. Hanna Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 44.
12. Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria, 111–12.
13. Ibid., 112.
14. Ibid., 112–17.
15. Ibid., 193.
16. Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Ba’ath’s agrarian revolution (1963–2000),” in Agriculture and Reform in Syria (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, distributed for the University of St. Andrews Center for Syrian Studies, 2011).
17. Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, 133.
18. Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, 47.
19. Thomas Nail, “What is an assemblage?” SubStance 46, no. 1 (2017), 24.
20. Ibid.
21. Deleuze and Guattari identify four types of assemblages: territorial, state, capitalist, and nomadic. Each one of these assemblages emerges at a different historic conjuncture and has its own specificities.
22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 478
23. Massimiliano Trentin, “Modernization as state building: the two Germanies in Syria, 1963–1972,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (June 2009), 492
24. Ibid., 496.
25. Ibid., 494.
26. Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria, 195–6.
27. Myriam Ababsa, “Fifty years of state land distribution in the Syrian Jazira: agrarian reform, agrarian counter-reform and the Arab Belt Policy (1958–2008),” in Habib Ayeb and Reem Saad (Eds.), Agrarian Transformation in the Arab World: Persistent and Emerging Challenges (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009), 36–7.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 39.
31. Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, 122.
32. Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria, 202.
33. Ababsa, “Fifty years of state land distribution in the Syrian Jazira,” 37.
34. Trentin, “Modernization as state building,” 495.
35. Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, 37.
36. Ibid., 51.
37. Ibid.
38. Nabil Sukkar, “The crisis of 1986 and Syria’s plan for reform,” in Eberhard Kienlp (Ed.), Contemporary Syria: Liberalization between Cold War and Cold Peace (London: British Academic Press, 1994), 23.
39. Hinnebusch, “The Ba’ath’s agrarian revolution (1963–2000),” 4.
40. Ibid., 5.
41. Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, 92.
42. Hinnebusch, “The Ba’ath’s agrarian revolution (1963–2000),” 3.
43. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 453.
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