[The present is a consequence of an ongoing past. In order to understand the coming alliances and conflicts, cooptation and containment, grassroots struggles and top-down repression, the old and new market forces and those who pull the strings regionally and internationally, the cultural scene and the new cultural production, the role and position of women in the ‘new Syria’, the adaption and concessions or intransigence and authoritarianism of this or that political group, one needs to map out Syria what has happened. Who will ‘the Islamist-led regime’ work with, who will provide the capital and the conditions? What condition state like the US and Turkey set? Will the old institutions – or what was left of them – be transformed or reformed? Those who marched from Idlib to Damascus do not have the experience of running big cities like Aleppo or a big and diverse capital like Damascus. Even if the leaders tolerated the cultural and artistic traditions of the past decades, would the...
“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