Skip to main content

Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death: Syria 1963-2024 (Conclusion)

At the end of his book, Yasser Munif asks pwertinent questions that are still relevant today after the collapse of the Assad regime.

“In a way, the Syrian uprising announced the demise of Assadist eternity, despite the shortcomings of the revolution.

International Relations, as a field of study, exists to maintain hegemonic relations of power. It is utilized to preserve the interests of the state and prevent non-state actors from disrupting the status quo. In the end, mainstream frameworks can become lethal in myriad ways, as the past eight years have amply shown us.

The Syrian people were/ are organizing against dictatorship but also struggling against an oppressive world order. 

How do people develop a critic of the state while, at the same time they recognize the real power of global institutions, laws, and economies in which their practices are rooted?

How do people develop grassroots strategies while at the same time operate within a world order that works against their aspirations?”

****

The demise of the Syrian revolt is perhaps signaling the end of a revolutionary cycle, while the popular struggles in other parts of the Arab world, namely, Algeria, Iraq, and Sudan are gesturing toward the beginning of a new one. These revolts will take many years, possibly several decades before they reach maturation. In the process, they could potentially alter the socio-political and economic structures in the Arab world. In addition, they are disrupting the geography of knowledge and structures of thinking. As people struggle against dictatorship, common sense is being transformed. A democratic future, which appeared impossible a decade ago, has now become possible, despite its daunting absence.

Dictatorship, which until 2011 was the only horizon in Syria, is today undergoing a structural crisis. One of the repulsive Syrian slogans was “Hafez al-Assad, our leader until eternity, and beyond eternity.” Struggles against dictatorship, despite their pitfalls, have shown to Syrians that another outcome is possible. In a way, the Syrian uprising announced the demise of Assadist eternity, despite the shortcomings of the revolution. 

The five chapters explore the relationships between microphysical processes and hegemonic structural. They examine micropolitical forces, or what I have called the politics of death, and the way they were operationalized to crush grassroots resistance. The focus on the politics of death, allows for a capillary analysis of violence. It sheds light on micropolitical processes concerning urbicide in Aleppo. It examines the ways official nationalism was weaponized against Syrians, and their aspirations for democracy. The politics of life on the other hand, opens new vistas to comprehend Syrians’ resistance against the devastating violence of the regime. A politics of life revolves around grassroots narratives and iterative experimentation.

This book is not a definitive assessment of revolutionary processes in Syria since 2011; it is rather an invitation to explore specific aspects of the revolt using unconventional theoretical tools and methodologies. It argues that the outcome of these unconventional tools is highly unpredictable. Unlike mainstream methodologies that constrain the purview of the research and predetermine the array of findings, some of the tools proposed here indicate new pathways. When geopolitics is the sole point of entry to examining the Syrian tragedy, then the starving bodies of Palestinians (and Syrians) living in besieged al-Yarmouk Camp are invisiblized; their agonizing voices are inaudible. International Relations, as a field of study, exists to maintain hegemonic relations of power. It is utilized to preserve the interests of the state and prevent non-state actors from disrupting the status quo. In the end, mainstream frameworks can become lethal in myriad ways, as the past eight years have amply shown us.

This book attempts to investigate the subterranean territories of the Syrian revolt. What one finds in these spaces are people struggling to create new institutions; negotiating ways to provide food for their com- munities; telling their stories despite monumental obstacles, at the same time they reinvent the meaning of the nation-state. They experiment with various tools to create livable spaces; and they do so without the guarantee of success. The iterative process is central in this context since revolutionaries are destroying the oppressive structures of the state and inventing new ways of being.

The Syrian revolution was developing strategies against authoritarian rule but equally as important, it was functioning in a world-system that speaks the language of the nation-state. The Syrian people were/ are organizing against dictatorship but also struggling against an oppressive world order. For example, the United Nations refused to have any relationship with non-state actors and as a result refused to deliver food to the opposition controlled regions. The Syrian regime was tasked with distributing UN aid, while it was besieging dozens of regions and burning crops in insurgents areas. The UN provided medical equipment and medication to a state that had been targeting the medical infrastructure in a systematic way for years. 

The question then is how do people develop a critic of the state while, at the same time they recognize the real power of global institutions, laws, and economies in which their practices are rooted? Another challenge facing Syrians is the question of bottom-up deliberation and democracy. The technologies of violence and the politics of death deployed in Syria reached levels unmatched in recent history. The main perpetrator was obviously the Syrian regime but others had also their share. What kind of democratic praxes can be developed in a context that violence permeates? Finally, how do people develop grassroots strategies while at the same time operate within a world order that works against their aspirations?

Yasser Munif, The Syrian Revolution, Pluto Press, 2020.

******

A revolution could be (mainly) political or it could be both political and social. Syria after Assad has so far witnessed a political revolution led by armed factions not a mass movement yet it that has the potential to establish a parliamentary democracy. It would be a weak and unstable because the social structures, the level of economic development and a few the external powers will hamper the development of even the early experience of Tunisia before Qais Saied. Furthermore, the leading Islamist factions will stifle any movement towards the equality between genders and changes in property relations. 

Initially, in the transitional Syria, the Islamists running the regime might tolerate this or that voice, this or that photo, but if they cannot provide bread, peace, electricity, jobs, etc. they will be discredited and different types of conflicts will emerge. There will be a mixed basket of items from Islamist authoritarianism and items from a neoliberal form of capitalism.

Frantz Fanon, writes Adam Shatz,  “saw very clearly that people suffering from the traumas of racism, violence, and domination were not likely to reinvent themselves overnight—and that they had no choice but to continue fighting, if only so that they could continue breathing. The struggle for human freedom and disalienation was a constant battle between the wound and the will. Fanon bet on the latter, but his work is also a devastating acknowledgment of the former, even though pessimism was a luxury he could not afford. He had witnessed torture and death; he had languished in the zone of nonbeing. But he always placed himself on the side of life, and of creation.”

Syrians who struggle and yearn for social justice, dignity, real freedom free from exploitation and oppression – whether cloaked in religion or in ‘liberal democracy’ – and free foreign domination and manipulation will not reinvent themselves overnight. Their struggle is not seperate from the Palestinian, Kurdish or Iranian struggle. Nor is it separate from the struggle of the oppressed in the world..

Further readings





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...
Post a Comment
Read more
"If you don't attack the economic power of the elite, soon or later it will attack you." That's what the Arab uprisings, for instance, were unable/failed to do. K for Karl – Revolution (episode 3)
Post a Comment
Read more
"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond.  Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package.  It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...
Post a Comment
Read more
"In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to ob­tain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged  to work. . . . Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary con­ditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms  manufac­turer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the pro­duction of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

UK

"We are all in it together" A letter from a doctor to Boris Johnson published a few months ago: ' Johnson has contributed to thousands of deaths ' Related 'The greatest global science failure for a generation' 'Herd immunity' or lockdown
Read more

US

 Written in June: The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again. Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Against Authoritarianism and Neoliberalism in Venezuela

“The current confrontation in Venezuela today is not between left and right.” “We are witnessing the transition from a government with authoritarian tendencies to a dictatorial regime.” “This is not a government ‘backed’ by the military, but, as Maduro himself has said, the government is led by a ‘civilian-military-police alliance’. “Those who continue to support Maduro, including parties and movements of the Sao Paulo Forum or the spokespersons of Podemos in Spain, are causing severe damage to the left in the region and the world. They are damaging anti-capitalist struggles in the broadest sense.” The US embargo is ‘in violation of international law’. This is a useless statement repeated a million times, and it has come back again during the ongoing Israel’s genocidal war. “[A]fter the failure of the current, self-defined “socialist” governments, Venezuelan society tends to associate any reference to socialism or the left with the corruption and authoritarianism of the Maduro governme...
Post a Comment
Read more