Necropolitics: The Taxonomies of Death in Syria (1) The silence of slippers is more dangerous than the sound of boots. —French priest Martin Niemöller It’s not a civil war. It’s a genocide. Leave us die but do not lie. —Kafranbel banner, November 2, 2012 This chapter explores the taxonomies of death and technologies of violence that the Syrian regime has deployed over the past eight years to crush the uprising. It argues that the current politics of death would not have been possible without the imposition of a state of emergency in Syria. Emergency was a vital political tool that allowed the regime to maintain power for several decades. It would not have been consequential, however, without the prison system and state terror that enforce it. The chapter begins with a brief history of the state of emergency and how Assad used it to eliminate his political opponents and consolidate state power. It explores the significance of Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” in the Syrian context....
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51