Category Archives: Blog
Iqra Anugrah and Rachma Lutfiny Putri: A Revolt that never was? On the aftermath of the 2025 Indonesian protests
Political upheavals can feel like riding a roller coaster – exhilarating at the beginning, full of adrenaline rush, until it suddenly stops. This is what happened to the biggest protests against Prabowo administration and its erratic policies in late August-early September last year (Anugrah and Putri 2025). Mass arrests of protesters (including dissenting netizens), declining […]
Maria Kastrinou and Salam Said: How to kill a country: Feeling history in scenes of pillage
We write at a time of genocide, war, and the feeling that whoever has the more guns can do whatever they want. We ask how different forms of violence — physical, symbolic and economic — undo the fragile infrastructures of coexistence and national belonging. We are scholars of Syria, coming together from different disciplines: Maria […]
Zoya Masoud: Of Exclusive Victimhood and its Competitive Narratives in Post-Assad Syria
In this contribution, I investigate continuities and ruptures across various patterns of exclusive victimhood in Assad- and post-Assad Syria. Having been born and spending the first 24 years of my life in Damascus, I witnessed the peaceful demonstrations that erupted in 2011, the subsequent outbreak of war in 2012, and its repercussions. Since 2015, I […]
Antonio De Lauri: The Trump Administration: Theology into Statecraft
One of the most troubling features of Trump-era politics is not simply nationalism, authoritarian style, or contempt for institutions. It is the extent to which large parts of the administration and its surrounding ecosystem have normalised a form of religious absolutism, especially in its Christian Zionist variant, as a legitimate basis for public policy. This […]
Charlotte Al-Khalili: Transitional Justice from Below: Demands for Truth and Social Reparations
What do transitional justice aspirations look like a year after the downfall of the Assad regime for Syrians in the country? What can transitional justice mean for a people who have lived through several decades of an extremely brutal dictatorship? If the violence of the Assad regime culminated after the start of the 2011 revolution, […]
Thomas Pierret: The Sunni Ulama: Syria’s Parliamentary Era as a Golden Age
One might intuitively assume that the Syrian Sunni ulama (religious scholars) would valorize periods emblematic of Islam’s bygone grandeur, such as the Umayyad or Ottoman empires. In practice, however, their historical narratives accord greater significance to the era of parliamentary rule spanning the late French Mandate through the early years of independence (1932–1963). This emphasis […]
Christine Crone: Constructing post-Ba’athist Syria through Cultural Heritage: the role of the Syrian Arab News Agency
In the years leading up to the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad and the downfall of the Syrian Ba’athist state, the Syrian state propagated what I referred to in previous publications, as a ‘post-war narrative’ (Crone 2023; 2025). This narrative became particularly evident after the last-remaining area of rebel-held Aleppo was recaptured by the state army […]
Kræn Kielsgaard: Rewriting Syria´s history – the case of Israel in Syrian schoolbooks after December 8, 2024
This post examines how the new Syrian state seeks to reconstruct public memory through revisions of public-school curricula in a period of profound political and social transformation after December 8, 2024. It unfolds how education, and more specifically official historiography, are employed by the new state as symbolic tools through which the former regime is […]
Khalid Syaifullah & Wardatul Adawiah: Asking, and Asking Again: Understanding the Roots of Ecological Disasters in Sumatra
Amid the outpouring of public solidarity for the victims of floods and landslides in Sumatra, one development deserves close attention. The term “natural disaster,” long used to describe such events, is increasingly being questioned and replaced with a more political framing. This shift has gained significant traction on social media. Rather than calling these events […]
Giorgos Poulimenakos: (Con)fusing geoeconomics and geopolitics: Logistics fetishism and infrastructural speculation on the waterfronts of Western Attica
The appointment of a female former TV persona as the new U.S. ambassador to Greece drew some derisive, if not openly sexist, comments. Such a choice by President Trump, the analysts pointed out, is symptomatic of Greece’s supposed marginality within U.S. strategic priorities. However, Kimberly Guilfoyle’s first statements upon arriving in Greece suggested precisely the […]