Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Justified under the pretext of combating the "remnants of the Assad regime," the massacres were primarily driven by sectarian hatred and a sense of "revenge," falsely equating the entire Alawite community with the former regime. This occurred despite the fact that the vast majority of Alawites did not support the attacks carried out by regime remnants against the security forces. Moreover, many of the civilians who were assassinated had actually opposed Assad’s rule and had celebrated its fall in December 2024. “We have to be clear that these sectarian tensions and hatred are not due to ancient religious divisions or as something essential to the people of the region.  Sectarianism and sectarian tensions  are a product of modernity and have political roots. In this case, they are the result of the former Assad regime’s sectarian policies and practices, which were used as a tool to divide Syrians, as well as the actions of the new ruling authorities, including HTS a...

Towards freedom or tyranny

A two-part essay from 2018 Secularists, Secularism and the Syrian Uprising Part 1 Part 2

“Had he [Öcalan] betrayed the Kurds? Could the self-dissolution of the PKK be understood as anything other than a total capitulation? What factors prompted the decision? ”

“So far,  HTS  has undertaken no ideological updating. They prefer to maintain a kind of vagueness rather than taking a clear line which might antagonise the conservatives still belonging to the movement. With the fall of Damascus, that ideological clarification is of course more necessary than ever   ; at stake are, on the one hand, the movement’s local acceptance and, on the other, the international recognition of the new Damascus authorities. In fact when the movement’s leaders are asked to define themselves, there are as many different answers as there are individuals questioned. “At present it is a sort of Thermidorian logic – a kind of post-revolutionary moderate pushback – which prevails. The page of Terror has been turned and the movement is banking on the different silent majorities as much to consolidate its grip on domestic affairs and eliminate the remains of a radical minority as to present themselves as a national alternative. “ HTS  is not a ...

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 aspira...

[The question about Syria is about looking for a pure revolution á la ‘Marxist-Leninist’ or the ‘liberal-democratic’ criteria or it is not a revolution. Nor is it just about the reactionary forces that have destroyed the revolutionary experiment and potentials and they have know claimed its ‘flag’. It is the character and content of the process and what the actors involved envisaged. The early content and character cannot be seen neither in the outlook of those who toppled the regime in December 2024 nor in the one of the regional and international actors that are trying to influence the current outcome and the future of Syria. ] “Syrian revolutionaries like those in Manbij did not speak the dominant academic Western language about social processes and revolutions—either because they could not or were unwilling to. As a result, many journalists and academics have effectively denied them any form of agency. Many Western descriptions present them as mindless fighters who are easily manip...

[ 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...

[T]he rejection of state-centric nationalism, while desirable, could leave a discursive space that sectarian or despotic groups could occupy. This explains why supra-nationalist and infra-nationalist groups with Islamic, tribal, and ethnic identities dominate the scene. Due to these competing identities, which are functioning at the local and trans-local levels, popular nationalism is facing a major challenge as it attempts to counter state nationalism. Popular nationalism could be overtaken by other competing ideologies. Most opposition leaders are detached from people’s everyday realities. They are mostly busy producing centralized and exclusive narratives that are in many ways a replica of the regime’s ideology.] Noticeable from the start though, in the early period of popular nationalism women were mostly invisible in street activities although a few took part in the beginning of the revolution. During the toppling of the Assad regime by the leading force of HTS, women were hardly ...