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Blog, Features, Syria After The Assads

Zoya Masoud: Of Exclusive Victimhood and its Competitive Narratives in Post-Assad Syria

Image 1: The city of Jableh on the Syrian coast witnessed extreme stress between Alawite and Sunni communities since December 8th, 2024. © Zoya Masoud, 2017.

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 have conducted interviews with Syrians as part of my academic and professional work focusing on heritage destruction and how experiencing loss (re-)constitutes heritage and ascribes new values to it. These interviews contained testimonies about imprisonment and/or forced migration due to indiscriminate shelling and bombing and various forms of pervasive violence. After the euphoria over the Assad regime’s collapse in December 2024 had faded in the wake of massacres against some Syrian communities, I witnessed some public responses of my earlier interviewees to these acts of violence. In the following, I invoke these two kinds of material to probe the possibility of imagining a practice that recognizes the extreme experiences of violence beyond attributing exclusive categories of victims and perpetrators to any certain group. I do this from a position of uncertainty, as events continue to accelerate and unfold.

Ruptures of the dictator-era

At the beginning of the peaceful demonstrations against the Assad regime in 2011, social media platforms became an arena for heated debate over the “truth” of what happened in Syria. Over nearly a decade and a half of an “infra-state conflict” (Vignal 2014), polarisation regarding the events in Syria led to extreme segregation in the virtual sphere of social media: pro-Assad supporters unfriended/unfollowed those opposing him, and vice versa. Pro-Assad mass media outlets framed the peaceful demonstrators of 2011 as “sleeper-cells” of terror and “incubators” of terrorism, while the pro-revolution media channels portrayed it as a legitimate act of resistance against the repression policies of the Assad regime.

The regime had been implementing systematic and widespread violations against the Syrian population, including arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions. International organisations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International characterise the Syrian war as a state of exception in which strategies such as “surrender or starve” have been implemented (Amnesty 2017, Daniels 2020).

The rebel areas inhabited by a Sunni majority were intensively bombed by the Assad government, supported by both the Russian army and Iranian and Lebanese Shi’a military forces (Alkousaa 2016, Graham-Harrison 2016, Grant & Kaussler 2019, Neumann & Schneider 2022). Various reports have interpreted the large-scale bombing by the Syrian-Russian coalition as a form of collective punishment (e.g., Vignal 2014, Clerc 2014, Sharp 2016, Abou Zainedin 2021). Individuals were exposed to constant fear of being murdered everywhere and at any time. Achille Mbembe names such a constellation of modern terror as “death-worlds;” namely “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead“ (Mbembe 2016:92). Many Syrians fled the death-worlds and sought refuge in neighbouring countries, in Europe and the rest of the world.

After 14 years of war, a militia named Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), supported by allied Turkish groups, led a coalition of military factions that on November 27, 2024, launched a military offensive campaign entitled “Deterrence of Aggression” against the Assad troops. The campaign was successful, and in the early morning on December 8, 2024, the fall of the Assad regime was officially announced, after Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus to Moscow, ending a 54-year-long dictatorial regime of the Assad family.

In a matter of hours, social and mass media were full of images and videos depicting the ongoing return of numerous refugees to Syria. Since then, and for the following weeks and months, many individuals I interviewed, who either remained in Syria throughout the war or returned after the fall of Assad for a visit, shared pictures of themselves in their cities on their social media profiles. Other visuals emerged documenting moments of liberating political prisoners from Assad’s torture-security centres, evoking a dual response: they are both horrifying and glorious visuals. The glory lies in the fact that individuals who endured captivity in dark underground prisons can now experience sunlight again. In contrast, the disturbing nature of the photographs from these facilities revealed the extreme conditions to which these prisoners were subjected. Each individual in Syria was exposed to the fear of entering such horror facilities. Those who were “living dead” in death-worlds before December 2024 got the chance after the collapse of the Assad dictatorship to speak out and articulate their experiences of injustice and get attention in the public sphere. The Assad regime not only marginalised their suffering but also stigmatised them as criminals and a risk to Syrian society.

Same slogans, different names

Before the collapse of the Assad regime, slogans glorifying Assad and portraying him as the saviour of Syria took an extreme form of self-destruction. For example, “al-Assad au la Ahad” (Either Assad or no one); “Al-Asad au Nahruq al-Balad” (Either Assad or we will burn the country). In the final months of 2025, similar slogans referring to Al-Sharaa appeared from the region around Deir az-Zour, particularly from al-Asha’er (Bedouin groups). Some people displayed messages on their cars, “al-Sharaa au Nahruq al-Zare’” (Either Al-Sharaa or we will burn the agricultural crops). These parallel uses of wording and terminology seem neither coincidental nor accidental; rather, they represent a continuity of belief in the exclusive occupation of power.

Though the impact of war was drastic in all of Syria, Sunni majority rebel regions faced disproportionately higher levels of violence during the conflict compared to areas controlled by the regime or inhabited predominantly by minorities (as documented also by Mazur 2021). The mass media of the Assad regime did not record these acts of destruction and killing in rebel areas as crimes, but as collateral damage of dismantling the danger from terrorists. While the regime categorized its own casualties as “shahis” (martyrs), it designated those who fell from the opposing side of rebels as terrorists. This oppressive pattern of collective punishments especially against certain rebel areas and of denial of victimhood for the Syrians living in these areas was arguably linked with a systematic instrumentalization of minority protection as a tool to consolidate the authoritarian regime’s power in Syria. Also, before 2011, the Assads portrayed any alternative to their rule as a direct road to sectarian chaos. Especially after they successfully suppressed Sunni Islamist opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s, they presented themselves as a bulwark against Islamists who would persecute religious and ethnic minorities if they came to power.

Propagating the image of Assad as the sole guarantor of security for Syria’s minorities – particularly Alawites, Christians (including Armenians, Assyrians), Druze, Ismailis, and others – did not reflect the reality. Many minority communities lived below the poverty line without proper infrastructure. Additionally, many of their male members were forced to serve the compulsory military service, where they often faced injury or death.

When the regime fell, assaults against Alawites were often dismissed by the transitional government as “individual cases,” but they escalated on March 7, 2025. Following attacks on the new security forces by armed Alawite Assad-loyalists, a systematic massacre of Alawite communities began on that date. Human Rights Watch reported on identity-based killings against Alawites (2025). Records reported around 1400 victims (UN News 2025), with probably a greater number of undocumented cases. Since then, reports of abducted Alawite Women and girls frequently emerged. The perpetrators, many of whom belonged to the Ministry of Defence of the al-Sharaa government or to militias allied with it, filmed themselves and proudly posted evidence of their crimes (Reuters 2025). There have been reports of forced migration, eviction from homes and villages and the prevention of these communities from returning to their property (Syrians for Truth and Justice 2026).

Until now, the government’s response to the abduction and sexual enslavement has been limited to publishing a belated report by the Ministry of Interior that claims to record only 42 suspicious cases of abduction. However, the report found that 41 of the 42 suspicious cases were falsified or incorrect, and that only one abduction case was proven. No further details around the only one abduction were mentioned (see the Enab Baladi report on the investigation of Ministry of Interior, Syrian National News 2025).

As the Assad regime forcibly displaced Syrians, there are reports about a new practice of evicting Alawite families from their houses. For example, there was a mass forced displacement of predominantly Alawite villages in the eastern rural areas of Hama. Villages like al-Zughbah, Muraywid, al-Talisiyah, Ma’am, al-Faam and Abu Mansaf were directly attacked following the collapse of the Assad regime on the 8th of December 2024 (Syrians for Truth and Justice 2026). Though the scale of displacement might have been greater during the Assad era against Sunni communities, it is still an unethical vantage point to accept evicting families from their houses due to their sectarian identity.

The mass media under Assad labelled peaceful demonstrators as “infiltrators” (mundassūn), or “revenge seekers” (Mawtwrūn) and ascribed political opponents of Assad to be “terrorists” and “criminals.” Then, many families suffered the fateful disappearance of family members and watched them later on Syrian Television, admitting their participation in terrorist attacks on governmental facilities. These confessions were extracted from the victims under torture in Assad’s security centres. After Al-Sharaa came to power, the abduction of Alawite girls and women became increasingly common. Over time, more families began to raise their voices about the whereabouts of their daughters. Some female victims of sexual violence returned to their families and appeared in videos broadcast on social media accounts of the official Syrian TV channels. These videos were produced under obscure circumstances and aimed to systematically negate and deny the reality of the females’ abduction. The explanations given for their disappearance were trivial and nearly impossible to believe: visiting a friend in another city, forgetting to inform their family; finding a job in a faraway city and travelling there without giving notice to their relatives; experiencing family stress, or having fallen in love with another man, leaving their husband and kids behind without any note of their decision. One should keep in mind that Syrian society, and the Alawite community from cities and villages in the coastal area, is conservative and considers such behaviour of females to be unacceptable. Here, too, the practice of extracting fake confessions is repeated in both the Assad and Al-Sharaa eras.

The amount of discrediting directed at Alawite victims on social media and intergovernmental mass media shows a pattern of discrimination against these women, stripping them of their rights to be heard and believed. Such videos of Alawite females explaining their disappearances to be voluntary or forced due to family stress and not abduction are omnipresent on social media. I prefer not to quote these stories and reproduce their violence. For documented cases of unpublished cases, see the work and summary of the campaign’s documentation on cases of women’s abduction in Syria (February–December 2025) of the grassroots campaign “Stop the Abduction Of Syrian Women” in English and Arabic on their social media page, and the reports on the website of the Syrian Feminist Lobby (2025, 2026).

Exclusive victimhood

Since the beginning of 2025, my social media feeds have been filled with testimonies and news of horrifying incidents of sexual violence. Posts from friends of friends in the cities and villages where my aunts and cousins live – the same places where I spent my childhood vacations at my grandmothers’ and relatives’ houses on the Syrian coast – have been particularly unsettling. Social media also played a crucial role in shaping narratives around these events, with many blaming the victims due to their alleged ties to the former regime. The acceleration of events was accompanied by waves of amplified polarisation and campaigns that oversimplified complex issues on social media, resulting in effects with global repercussions. Syrians around the globe participated in such debates. Some individuals, whom I interviewed for my research before the fall of Assad, expressed discriminatory views against Alawite victims and shared pejorative jokes about Alawite women, suggesting they were disloyal to their men, hence blaming the victims for the sexual violence imposed on them. Even some of my female interlocutors engaged in such social media discourses.

In this contribution, I will share insights on two patterns of my former interviewees and their reactions to the violence against Alawite women. There are other patterns within my interview samples, supporting Alawite victims. However, this contribution focuses only on these two patterns.

The first group did not actively celebrate the violent events but rather focused on celebrating the achievements of the interim government without mentioning the atrocities committed against the Alawite communities. For instance, they celebrated an agreement between the interim Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa and Mazlum Ibadi, the leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which was signed on March 10, even as attacks on Alawites were still unfolding. This agreement promised to affirm the inclusion of Kurds in the political transition process and guaranteed their rights and interests. Some interviewees posted about this but failed to mention war crimes against the Alawites. During the Assad era, members of this same group of interviewees accused any Syrian who did not openly condemn the regime’s criminal acts of complicity and indirect participation in causing their suffering. Nevertheless, in March 2025, they themselves ignored the suffering of Alawites.

The second group of my interviewees did not remain silent; but engaged with the news about the massacre, responding with the “haha” emoji and claiming that the victims were adopting a fake “mazloumiyya” (oppression position). According to them, Alawites were misusing and abusing their victimhood to undermine what the people posting perceived to be a fair and just interim government of Syria. They labelled anyone who shared information about sexual violence or the murder of Alawites as “fulul” (remnants of the Assad regime). The landscape on social media became extremely polarised.

Many of my interviewees before December 2024 experienced the horror of the death-worlds and stepped out of their previous home cities, traumatised with scars on their personal biographies. Following the downfall of the Assad regime, however, these individuals, who had been denied their rights to representation, experienced a moment of recognition. Those who were defeated and denied their civil rights of freedom of speech and were either forcibly displaced or imprisoned under the Assad era, celebrated what they considered a victory after the fall of the Assad dictatorship. Nevertheless, they also managed to deny or justify the crimes against the Alawite communities in post-Assad Syria.

The cluster of social media reactions around the Alawite massacres showed that some of these interviewees internalised the dominant discourse of the interim government and aimed to be virtual defenders of Ahmad al-Sharaa in a dogmatic attitude, denying the pain of others.

Al-Sharaa’s government is thus establishing a hegemonic discourse that mirrors that of Assad, marginalising the sufferers of certain groups, while framing the suffering of its own group as singular, unique, incomparable, or morally superior. This approach comes at the expense of acknowledging harm to others. By introducing competitive narratives of suffering, the government positions its own persecution as the only legitimate one, delegitimising other narratives and framing victimhood as bound solely to its social groups of allies. This transforms suffering into a political category to be instrumentalised to justify own committed crimes, rather than acknowledging it as a universal human experience. Within post-conflict communities worldwide, these transformations have been a recurring theme (see Druliolle and Brett 2019). Institutionalising such exclusive spaces also means consolidating them through commemorative practices. For example, certain Syrians posted pictures of humiliations of Alawites on social media on the first anniversary of the massacres against Alawites in March 2025. Some even indicated that the 7th of March 2025 was an “extension of the revolution,” as one post put it.

The interim government aims to capitalise on and appropriate the trauma of the death-worlds, which Syrians went through in a single cast that aligns with its objectives, namely, a trauma or persecution of Sunni communities, which the new regime argues was inflicted mainly by the Alawite minority. In doing so, the new government downplays or mitigates the suffering of Alawite individuals under its reign and frames the atrocities against them as fragmented and as a quest for rightful revenge against a perpetrator. This sense of exclusive victimhood stems from the intensity of suffering and its temporality. One interlocutor captured this sentiment by saying, “We suffered first.” This quote reflects the broader tendency recorded in several excerpts. In an interview on the official Syrian TV, a narrative of disproportion between Sunni and Alawite perpetrators was propagated (Syrian National News 2025). Even if we entertain the concept of accusing all perpetrators of atrocities in the Assad era of being Alawite, this still does not justify attacking civilian Alawite women and abducting them, nor does it justify assassinating Alawite perpetrators. The latter must be brought before the court and held accountable for their crimes. The instrumentalizing or manipulation of one social group’s victimhood to legitimise or justify further violence, are evident here.

But what constitutes Sunni trauma? Many victims of the Assad regime, who were born to Sunni families, are advocating for Alawite victims. Some of those celebrating the sectarian atrocities remained silent during the Assad era, especially the ones who stayed in Syria and did not flee the war. These latter individuals did not lend their support to Assad’s victims regardless of their sect and ethnic backgrounds. Jeffrey C. Alexander (2012) defines collective traumas in his social study as “reflections of neither individual suffering nor actual events, but symbolic rendering that constructs and imagines them.” The ambiguity of mental images on trauma resulted after the Assad era played the role of an incubator for spacing processes, assigning all Alawites as perpetrators, and all Sunnis as victims. These claimed homogenous groups have never existed as such in the Syrian society: some Sunni elite actors cooperated with the regime, and some Alawites opposed the regime and vice versa. Here, trauma appears to be not only socially constructed, but also fails to resonate with any holistic, alleged homogenous group of Syria.

In a post-dictatorship Syrian setting, implicit or explicit comparisons of suffering treat recognition as a scarce resource rather than a shared moral and ethical obligation. This reproduces the Assad regime’s mechanisms for treating individuals and groups unevenly based on their sect, political, and ethnic affiliations, and definitely reproduces the exclusive patterns of binary thinking: those “good” citizens loyal to the interim government against those “bad” citizens who oppose it.

Of multidirectionality

The primary issue with such a competitive narrative is its drastic effects on civic identity and a sense of belonging in post-Assad Syria. Michael Rothberg (2009) introduced the concept of multidirectional memory, going beyond competitive memory. This invites us to promote multivocality and plurality in our thinking of identity’s discourses. It is essential to create a representational space that encompasses all human communities that have historically inhabited the geographical territory known as Syria. To truly celebrate our plurality and diversity, rather than suppressing it under the dominant narratives of majorities and minorities, we must actively engage economically, politically, and socially marginalised groups in public discourse. These groups should be empowered to articulate their suffering, their rights to the city, village, heritage, and express their identities.

When marginalised populations, who often lack representation in official discourses, raise their voices through narratives that reflect their histories and heritage, they challenge the prevailing interpretive systems that govern societal discourse. By elucidating their demands for safety, justice, and dignity, both spatially and socially, they play a crucial role in shaping the conversation around governance.

Interim governments should be held accountable for refining the discourse surrounding a unified Syrian national identity by emphasising the pluralism inherent in historical narratives. This entails fostering democratic spaces that facilitate the representation of diverse identities within the public sphere. Achieving fair and democratic representation necessitates ongoing negotiation and dialogue regarding the foundations and narratives of these identities, alongside a commitment to honouring the lived experiences of all citizens. This is particularly crucial given Syria’s complex and painful legacy of 54 years under dictatorship and violent repression.

The painful stories of those affected by this tumultuous history must not be overlooked, as they are integral to understanding the social fabric of contemporary Syria. Integrating and acknowledging the experiences of all individuals and communities identifying as Syrian can foster chains of solidarity and mutual support. This approach promises to assist in the sustainable reconciliation and enhance social relationships among Syrians.

Zoya Masoud is an urban researcher, currently conductign her Project “Irrestitutable” within the ERC Project “BEYONDREST”. Her work engages in critical inquiry into identity, architecture, heritage, commemoration, violence, and knowledge production.

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Cite as: Masoud, Z. 2026. “Of Exclusive Victimhood and its Competitive Narratives in Post-Assad Syria” Focaalblog, March 30. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/30/zoya-masoud-of-exclusive-victimhood-and-its-competitive-narratives-in-post-assad-syria/

Features, Syria After The Assads

Birgitte S. Holst: Introduction: Uses of the past in the post-Assad political transition in Syria


Image1: In what remains of a public building in Darayya, Damascus, a wall painting of Hafez and Basel Al-Assad (Bashar Al-Assad’s late father and brother) is scratched as the building stands empty, April 2025. © Birgitte Holst

Since Bashar Al-Assad was overthrown as President of Syria in early December 2024, the political situation in the country has been volatile. Although a new group of powerholders have taken over, their grip on power is far from complete just as some Syrians are unsure or worried about what such a complete grip on power might entail. As Syrians have endeavoured to navigate this volatile period, the past has emerged as significant in several ways. Understood as both specific renditions of historical events and as particular experiences of life in Syria under first Hafez and then Bashar Al-Assad but also before, the past has been a point of contestation in itself, it has been invoked as a justification for various political claims and projects, and it has been employed as a framework through which to interpret unfolding events.

This has taken various forms. For instance, in the first months after the toppling of the Assad-regime it took the form of contestations over how the very distant past of the pre-Islamic history of the area we today know as Syria should be presented to Syrian school children as somehow formative of the Syria they now live in (see Kielsgaard this feature). There have also been frequent references to the atrocities committed under Assad rule with various groups and individuals making demands about how to enact justice for that (see Al-Khalili, Masoud – both in this feature). Moreover, many Syrians (professional analysts and non-analysts alike) have invoked examples of how Ahmad Al-Sharaa and his group HTS (Hay’a Tahrir Al-Sham) have ruled in Idleb (where the group held control for several years) to assess/predict how the group was likely to rule from Damascus (e.g., Kalam 2024).

Hence, from very early on in the post-Assad period in Syria, the past featured prominently in Syrians’ attempts to navigate the political transition, including formulating political claims and visions for the future of Syria as a nation/homeland/state. The contributions to this feature examine these diverse uses of the past by various groups of Syrians with the purpose of unravelling some of the complexities of the ways in which the past is shaping the present in Syria but is also shaped by the present. Accordingly, while much attention is presently devoted to questions of how Syria’s new rulers herald continuations or discontinuations of the geopolitical, economic and religious landscape as it looked before the overthrow of the Assad-regime (e.g., Tuğal 2025), this feature rather dives into the question of how various groups of Syrians (including the government) invoke the Assad-years and other pasts to navigate the present.

The past, political identities and political turmoil

On the one hand, the past arguably figures prominently in many processes of identity formation and constructions of political projects. Charles Taylor (1989) argued that to know who we are, we must know how we have become and where we are going. Similarly, scholars of nationalism have suggested that nationalists often point to a specific rendition of the past that allows them to argue that the nation is a continuation of previous groups in a different form. This claim regarding the nation in turn allows nationalists to make political demands on behalf of one such earlier group, which they portray as central to national becoming (e.g. Hobsbawm 1983; Smith 1971). Ideas akin to Taylor’s have also been used in various analyses of how political parties claim a coherent group identity through reference to the past and through their agendas for the future (e.g., Bryan 2000).

On the other hand, the context of political transition in the aftermath of a radical break with a previous political order often appears to intensify such processes. In the wake of the collapse of a regime that prohibited or heavily circumscribed contestation of the officially prescribed line of historical rendition, we often see a profusion of engagements with the past. These engagements pertain to questions of who was a victim of what, but also to questions of what events are significant, how they should be interpreted and especially what this means for who “we” are (Krawatzek and Soroka 2021). Moreover, when a political order is upended, uncertainty about the future often follows and as events in the present evolve in unforeseen directions, new perspectives on the past might emerge (Thomassen and Forlenza 2017). This impacts the construction of identities and also of political projects that are caught up in ongoing redefinitions of past, present and future.

In Syria, we have, for instance, seen that past grievances have led to renewed violence which in turn led to new claims about victimhood as well as new political agendas. Hence, while the current Syrian government seems to be heading towards institutionalising their particular version of the connections between past, present and future for Syria, the present moment offers a unique opportunity to grasp the multifaceted ways in which various Syrians are coming to understand these connections and use them to navigate the current political situation. This feature unravels some central aspects of these processes.

Key developments during the first post-Assad year

Overall, the contributions to this feature make clear that while the new government is institutionalising its multidimensional vision of Syria’s past, present and future, this happens in a context of numerous counter stories.

One way in which the past is invoked is to formulate a national identity or a state identity. The new government has taken several steps to designate a direction. As discussed by Kræn Kielsgaard in his contribution, changes to school curricula were one of the first items on the agenda and was initiated already in December 2024. So far, this work has mainly been about editing out any improper references to the Assads while remodelling religious education to the standards of the new Islamist rulers. In addition to amending schoolbooks, in early autumn 2025 the government proclaimed that several national holidays would be scrapped in favour of new ones. Among the cancelled holidays were Martyrs Day and Tishreen Independence Day. Martyrs Day refers to 16 Arab Nationalist Syrians hung by the Ottomans in 1916. Cancelling it may indicate a distancing from Arab Nationalism and a simultaneous toning down of any criticism of the Ottomans (who were Sunni). Tishreen Independence Day marks a victory in the October war in 1973 (against Israel). Cancelling it indicates that no achievement under the Assads should be celebrated. Instead, 8th December, the date when Bashar Al-Assad was toppled in 2024, and 18th March, the date when the revolution began in 2011, are new holidays celebrating achievements of the new government.

While such changes institutionalise a specific national memory (cf. Connerton 2010) that aligns with the religious and political agendas of the new rulers, the government also appears to support (or at least not be against) less institutionalised forms of memory production. Government supporters have, from the early days of the post-Assad period, been saying that the overthrow of Assad rule by a coalition of Arab Sunni Islamist groups (headed by HTS) amounts to a return of the Umayyads. The Umayyad Caliphate was one of the first Sunni Islamic Caliphates and was led from Damascus. Invoking a reference to it underlines the Sunni character of the new rulers. It, moreover, connects Ahmad Al-Sharaa and his government not only with a glorious Sunni past but also with the successful eviction from Damascus of what many Sunnis perceived to be Shia occupiers. During the civil war, the Assad-regime received support from Iran and Shia militias (often of Iraqi origin) were stationed in Damascus. This was a source of much distress among many Sunnis (especially Islamists). They now invoke the reference to the Umayyads also as a way of marking the overthrow of this perceived occupation.

Against this very Sunni vision of the new Syrian state, leading minority figures and also secular intellectuals (Sunni or otherwise) posit that Syria is historically an ethnic and religious mosaic. They hope that this vision can take a prominent place in the definition of the Syrian nation and state in the coming years (e.g., Haj Saleh 2025). That suggestion finds a perhaps surprising resonance with the new government’s continued emphasis on the rich cultural heritage of Syria. As discussed by Christine Crone in her contribution to this feature, the state-controlled news site SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency) continues to produce content that celebrates the diverse parts of Syria’s past. As such, although Syria’s new rulers appear to want to emphasise that the state is now led by Sunnis and that their claim to power is justified by the revolution, they also leave space for claims-making based on the multifaceted history of the area.

In addition to invocations of the past that impart particular messages about the character of the new Syrian nation and state, the past is also invoked by various groups of Syrians in ways that indicate the specific political agendas or models of rule they believe the new government should implement. One issue at the forefront of many Syrians’ concerns is the question of how to rectify the violations committed by the Assad-regime. As Charlotte Al-Khalili shows in her contribution, different Syrians have diverging wishes for how justice should be served in response to these crimes. While some hope for justice through legal routes, others argue that access to knowledge or socio-economic reconstruction of Syria would be more just approaches. Zoya Masoud moreover discusses how the crimes committed under the Assads form the grounds of claims of exclusive victimhood that in turn reignite rifts between Syrians as they lead to a lack of recognition of crimes committed after Assad.

Some groups of Syrians are, however, also invoking slightly more distant pasts as models to think with regarding the question of what kind of new political structure to erect in Syria. As Thomas Pierret analyses in his contribution, the Sunni Ulama (that is, the leading Sunni clerics in Syria) are invoking mainly the 1950s and 1960s, when Syria was newly independent, as a model for rule. Although one might expect the Ulama to highlight instead past periods of Islamic rule, Pierret suggests that they prefer the 1950s and 1960s because this was a time when the Ulama was listened to by politicians and given a freer hand.

Besides the Ulama, some parts of another group of Syrians (that this feature does not discuss in detail) are also invoking the 1950s as a model for rule. This regards what one could call the secular intellectuals who are at present attempting to find their feet in a new reality where the Assad-regime that many of them opposed has been overthrown by religious Sunnis rather than secular Syrians. This group is not unified, and they do not have a coherent position on the new rulers. Some individuals do, however, attempt to impact decisions by the new government. One such attempt emerged already in December 2024 when Syrian filmmaker Ali Atassi (2024) argued that Syria’s interim government should temporarily reinstate the 1950 constitution. This constitution, he suggested, would allow for free elections. After elections, the work to draft a new constitution could start as this work would then be undertaken by democratically elected officials. He pointed out that this exact model has been used before, in 1954 and 1961 respectively, and that there was no reason to do things differently now.

The near and the slightly more distant past is thus invoked in diverse and conflicting ways by different Syrians to make specific political claims about the kinds of actions a new government must take.

Lastly, the past is also used by Syrians to navigate the present volatility. In that regard, Syrians’ responses to the massacres of Alawis in March 2025 and then Druze in July 2025, both at the hands of government affiliated militias, must be highlighted.

Although the massacres had particular political motivations and therefore arguably did not amount to a threat to all minorities, all minorities were affected by them in the sense that the violence roused fears of further attacks on others. Christians are a case in point. When I visited Damascus in February 2025, the Christians I talked to were wary about the prospects of Sunni Islamist rule but also referred to the ways in which minorities had been promised some self-governance in their villages and towns as the Islamist coalition came and left during the “Deterrence of the Aggression” advance (when Bashar Al-Assad was overthrown). Citing these acts of the new government to allow minorities self-determination, the Christians I talked to expressed hope for the future. When I returned to Damascus in April 2025, the massacres on Alawis along the coast had shifted perspectives. People now talked about renewed persecution at the hands of Sunnis. Many invoked examples of sectarian violence unleashed by Islamist militias during the war and some even referred back to 1860 when around 5000 Christians were killed by (predominantly) Sunnis in Damascus. In June 2025, after the bombing of the Mar Elias Church in Damascus, the Patriarch of Antioch and all the East for the Greek Orthodox Church, John 10 Yazigi, made this reference as well. The fear among the Christians I talked to in April was that this historical persecution would continue in the future.

What I want to highlight about this is that while previous persecution of minorities was most likely always in the back of the minds of my Christian interlocutors, the massacres along the coast made them invoke this history actively as a lens through which the present could be understood and the future predicted. As discussed by Salam Said and Maria Kastrinou in their contribution, the Syrian Druze after the massacres committed against them in Suwayda are invoking the past in another way. On the one hand, they are attempting to comprehend how the past of (overall) inter-sectarian conviviality could be shattered so profoundly in the space of a few days. On the other hand, some are invoking historical references to understand what kinds of destruction of the national fabric is unfolding at present. Hence, in divergent ways Christians and Druze are relying on the past as a compass with which to navigate uncertainty, but this does not relieve that uncertainty.

While the massacres are crucial, Katharina Lange (in the final contribution) points to the significant issue that the toppling of Bashar Al-Assad has not entailed significant changes for everyone. She describes how Syrians in some parts of Syria that were neglected by Assad and are also neglected by the new government have invoked the past of tribal political leadership customs to fill the void of an absent state and position themselves in relation to competing powerholders. Hence, Lange’s post demonstrates that the past is not only a navigational tool for those who are caught up in the current changes in the country but also for Syrians who experience the present time as very similar to the recent past.

The significance of the past in the political present

While not exhaustive, the developments unfolded above are some of the key examples of the uses the past is put to by Syrians in the present period. Interrogating these uses, as the posts in this feature do, is significant because the new government, various political actors and divergent groups and communities in Syria have not yet solidified their approach. There is a space to make changing claims. While they may not be listened to, they show us how divergent Syrians are coming to see themselves in relation to Syria past, present and future.

References

Atassi, Ali. 2024. “تفعيل دستور 1950 كمظلة للمرحلة الانتقالية في سورية”. Al Jumhuriya. https://aljumhuriya.net/ar/2024/12/18/%d8%aa%d9%81%d8%b9%d9%8a%d9%84-%d8%af%d8%b3%d8%aa%d9%88%d8%b1-1950/

Bryan, Dominic. 2000. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control. Pluto Press.

Connerton, Paul. 2010. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haj Saleh, Yassin. 2025. ”الوطنية السورية وبدائلها”. Al Jumhuriya. https://aljumhuriya.net/ar/2025/09/02/%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%88%d8%b7%d9%86%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%88%d8%b1%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d9%88%d8%a8%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%84%d9%87%d8%a7/

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions”. In Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.) The Invention of Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kalam. 2024. “Who are HTS? The New Rulers of Syria – with Orwa Ajjoub.” Kalam podcast. December 2024. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6p8VU2HL3fdcbXReN9XvuC

Krawatzek, Félix and George Soroka. 2021. “Circulation, Conditions, Claims: Examining the Politics of Historical Memory in Eastern Europe”. East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 36(1): 198–224

Smith, Anthony. 1971. Theories of Nationalism. London: Duckworth.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Thomassen, Bjørn and Rosario Forlenza. 2017 (2013). “The Pasts of the Present: World War II Memories and the Construction of Political Legitimacy in Post–Cold War Italy”. In Christian Karner (ed.) The Use and Abuse of Memory. New York: Routledge.

Tuğal, Cihan. 2025. “The Evolution of Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham and Syria’s Future.” Spectre Journal. https://spectrejournal.com/the-evolution-of-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-and-syrias-future/

Birgitte S. Holst is an associated researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (ZMO). She is an anthropologist focusing on processes of political and social change with a special emphasis on Syria. Her first monograph Authoritarianism, Displacement and Syrian Family Life: Reckoning with the State (Berghahn Books) will be published in 2026.

Cite as: Holst, B. 2026. “Introduction: Uses of the past in the post-Assad political transition in Syria” Focaalblog March 20. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/20/birgitte-s-holst-introduction-uses-of-the-past-in-the-post-assad-political-transition-in-syria/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Marc Edelman: Encirclement: Historical Roots of Putin’s Paranoia

“What’s going on inside Putin’s head?” “He’s insane.” Questions and declarations like these pepper discussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While insanity appears an obvious — albeit broad — diagnosis, particularly to those in the West, even the most delusional psychosis has its internal logics and deep structures. And while we can never really get into someone else’s head, anthropological or psychoanalytic conceits about others’ subjectivity notwithstanding, it may be possible and useful to grasp another’s craziness, if we understand the roots of their version of reality.

Encirclement always loomed large in pre-1917 Russian, Soviet, and then post-1991 Russian imaginaries. Russia experienced four invasions that came through Ukraine — in 1812, 1914, 1919, and 1941. Many analyses point to NATO’s eastward expansion as a proximate cause of today’s crisis, with some viewing it as a tragic historic mistake and others pointing to the invasion itself as a post-hoc justification. What these and other studies almost always miss, however, is that NATO’s expansion is significant because it triggered archaic anxieties dating back to Tsarism. That Ukraine’s constitution enshrines an aspiration to join NATO and the EU did little to allay these historical, though clearly overblown, fears.

Vladimir Putin and I were both born in 1952. Our fathers and uncles fought Nazism on different fronts, his in the Soviet Red Army and mine in the U.S. Army and Navy. The Great Patriotic War certainly overshadowed his childhood, as World War II did mine. Fascism and Nazism, even if defeated before our births, remained a frightening specter. Putin’s family, like most Soviet families and virtually all Leningraders, suffered terribly in the War (Gessen 2013). In my family, one great uncle went missing in the Battle of the Bulge when his assault boat capsized in the Roer River after a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines (the Army confirmed his death five years later, but never recovered his remains). My father and other uncles returned with horrifying stories, relatively minor injuries, and what we might today describe as PTSD.

Unlike almost all Americans but like quite a few New Yorkers of my generation, as a child I knew many more Communists and ex-Communists than I did Republicans. Later, in 1986, as an exchange scholar in the Soviet Union, I had many conversations with young university students who were suffering through the soporific required course on “Nauchnyi Kommunizm” (“Scientific Communism”) and with a more ideologically zealous or simply opportunistic subset of these who were majoring in Istoriia KPSS (History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — yes, that was an important, if soon to be useless, undergraduate major). So, between growing up among red and pink diaper babies in 1960s New York  (Freeman 2001) and my brief but intense sojourn in the USSR (Edelman 1996), I have some sense of the emotional valence that attaches to encirclement in the minds of those socialized in orthodox Communist worldviews.

The Russian inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West is a longstanding, hackneyed trope in writing on geopolitics. What is frequently forgotten is that Russia — or its upper classes at least — also had an inferiority complex in relation to the East. Japan, a rising power in Asia, trounced the Russian Empire in their 1905 war. This was a huge blow to the narcissism of the Russian nobility and elites, who not long before had conquered most of Central Asia and imagined themselves as part of European civilization, ipso facto superior to those “lesser” peoples of the East.

Russia’s performance in World War I was little better than it had been against the Japanese and the near collapse of its military was part of the maelstrom that led to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Russia’s withdrawal from the War. In the immediate aftermath of the Bolsheviks’ seizing power, more than a dozen foreign armies invaded Russia (Ullman 2019) and fought with the Whites against the Reds in a bloody Civil War that only ended in 1920. These mostly small interventions didn’t make much difference militarily, but the memory seared into Soviet and later Russian collective consciousness, fueling a siege mentality. Soviet (and western) Communists would self-righteously point to this long after as a key reason why the USSR had to be vigilant and maintain strong defenses.

Towards the end of the Civil War, in 1919-20, the Red Army launched a separate campaign out of Russia’s northwest that tried to spread Bolshevism to Belarus, Lithuania, and newly independent Poland. While this complicated conflict aimed in part at opening a Red corridor to Germany, where the military crushed a Communist uprising in 1919, Polish resistance at Warsaw turned back the Bolshevik advance. Isaac Babel’s (2006) memoir Red Cavalry , reports that in one of the last battles, “The enemy machine-guns were firing from twenty paces away, and men fell wounded in our ranks. We trampled them and attacked the enemy, but his square did not falter; then we ran for it.”

Image 1: 1920 poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky hailing the Soviet invasion of Poland. “To the Polish front! The commune is getting stronger under a swarm of bullets. Comrades, we’ll triple our strength in riflemen!”

The 1939-40 ”Winter War” with Finland barely went better. Ignited with a Soviet invasion that aimed at grabbing a wider buffer zone between Leningrad and the border, the conflict ended with some minor Finnish territorial concessions and a humiliating Soviet defeat inflicted by agile ski troops in white camouflage uniforms. Hitler was watching, and many historians attribute his fatal 1941 decision to invade the USSR to a belief that if the Finns could thrash the Soviets, the Germans certainly could too.

The Red Army, of course, was key to defeating the Nazis, but it did so at tremendous cost. Soviet casualties in most battles were many multiples of German ones and the country lost as many as 27 million citizens, between military and civilian fatalities. The sacralized state-managed memory (Markwick 2012) of the Great Patriotic War and the victory over Nazism became the pivotal legitimating narrative in the post-Stalin USSR. This was even more the case for post-Soviet Russia, when the state pushed War-related patriotism to plug what Putin called the “ideological vacuum” left by the collapse of communism.

Many Ukrainians understand this narrative in different terms. Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s hit Ukraine especially hard, with a planned famine in which at least 3.5 million peasants died of starvation. Not surprisingly, many Ukrainians came to despise and distrust Russia.

After Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the USSR some 250,000 Ukrainians joined the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS or served as concentration camp guards (millions, of course, fought in the Red Army) (Khromeychuk 2016). Some Ukrainian nationalists today glorify Stepan Bandera and other pro-Nazi fighters. Statues of these loathsome figures dot today’s Ukraine (as they do upstate New York, not far from where I live). The Azov battalion, a far-right militia that attracted foreign white supremacists and whose members became part of Ukraine’s military in 2014, figures significantly in Russia’s anti-Ukraine propaganda and in that of the “campist” left in the West, even though its support base is rather paltry (Gomza and Zajaczkowski 2019).

Putin sees today’s Ukrainian nationalists as progeny of the enemy in the Great Patriotic War, an earthshaking event imbued with deep emotion for Soviet and now Russian patriotism. It’s not that fascists and antisemites aren’t worrisome, whatever country they are from. But as VICE reporter Tim Hume pointedly notes, “Ironically, given the Kremlin’s attempts to use Azov’s extremist ideology to smear the Ukrainian forces as a whole, white supremacist foreign fighters also received training and fought for the pro-Russian separatists through groups like the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), an ultranationalist organisation which claims to be fighting for the ‘predominance of the white race.’”

Ukraine’s despicable far-right and neo-Nazi elements, while theatrically visible at times, are hardly significant in the country’s politics. National Corpus, the Azov-aligned political party, failed to elect a single candidate in the most recent parliamentary elections. The same is true for Right Sector, another pro-fascist party. The extreme nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) Party has one representative. Vox in Spain, Rassemblement National in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, or the Republicans in the United States have vastly more support. After a Russian attack damaged the Holocaust memorial at Babyn Yar, where the Nazis massacred 33,771 Jews in two days in 1941 and some 70,000 more Jews and others during the rest of their occupation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — from a secular Jewish family — seethed with anger as he accused Russia of “killing Holocaust victims for the second time.” These are not the words of the head of a “neo-Nazi” state.

Putin’s assertion that Ukraine is suppressing Russian language is equally risible, especially given how the USSR actively Russified its non-Russian republics. In practice, most Ukrainians are bilingual and in rural zones many speak a mix of Ukrainian and Russian known as Surzhyk. The country did pass a law making the use of Ukrainian mandatory for public sector workers, but Zelensky, then a presidential candidate, opposed it, has failed to enforce it, and frequently uses Russian when he addresses domestic and international audiences.

Masha Gessen’s (2013) biography of Putin depicts a prickly, thin-skinned, and pugnacious boy and young man who then and later cultivated a reputation as a brawler and thug. Recent accounts highlight his isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and the way he has surrounded himself with sycophants and “yes-men.” Like Stalin, he rises late and often works into the wee hours of the morning.

Since the USSR’s collapse, Russia has consolidated control inside, with two wars in Chechnya, and relentlessly expanded outside, annexing Crimea (2014) and carving out bogus “republics” that it controls in Transdniestria (Moldova, 1992), Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia, 2008), and Donetsk and Luhansk (Ukraine, 2014). In Putin’s embittered and aggrieved mind these military conquests, which — like its backing for Assad in Syria and today’s invasion of Ukraine — exhibited a total indifference to human life and international norms, were necessary steps to buffer Russia’s heartland against foreign attack.

The first Cold War was never really “cold” and this one isn’t either. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unfolding in a context where the binding treaties and security architecture that regulated East-West competition have mostly unraveled. When the United States withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, a few isolated voices warned that this was hugely destabilizing. Now both sides have deployed these previously banned weapons, including U.S. missile interceptor launchers in Poland. In 2020-21 the United States and then Russia withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty. The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty died a slow death, marked by eight years of reduced Russian compliance and finally withdrawal in 2015. The 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is the only remaining treaty limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and it expires in four years, which is not enough time for negotiating a new agreement, especially when a “hot” war is ongoing.

The late Viktor Kremenyuk — Russian, though born in Odessa and with a Ukrainian surname — was for many years one of the Soviet Union’s and Russia’s leading academic experts on the United States. A decade ago, in a paper on international negotiations, he remarked that, “In the long run much will depend on the psychological framing of the activities of negotiators and their ability to prove to national decision-makers that negotiable solutions are ‘not worse’ than unilateral ones and may be even better” (Kremenyuk 2011)

Kremenyuk also observed, with eerie prescience given the current situation and Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, “In a democracy the processes that shape the negotiation behavior and changes in position are totally different from those in a totalitarian system where very often one person decides the final shape of the position of the nation. It also depends on the tradition and previous experience of the nation.”

This does not augur well for efforts to restore peace and stability in Europe or to rein in the squandering of vast resources on military budgets. The renewed love affair on both sides with fossil fuels further delays urgent transformations of the energy matrix needed to avert climate catastrophe.

Americans are famously amnesiac about the past, but in Ukraine and Russia historical memories have a long arc and terrible contemporary resonance. They are the background conditions for an unfolding confrontation that can only bring more tragedy to a region that suffered massively in the twentieth century and, in the worst case, to the entire world.

Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Many years ago, he held an IREX fellowship at Columbia University’s W.A. Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union and did research in Tashkent and Moscow on Soviet-Latin American relations.

References

Babel, Isaac. 2006. Red Cavalry and Other Stories. Penguin Classics.

Edelman, Marc. 1996. “Devil, Not-Quite-White, Rootless Cosmopolitan: Tsuris in Latin America, the Bronx, and the USSR.” In Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. AltaMira Press.

Freeman, Joshua B. 2001. Working-Class New York. Life and Labor Since World War II. The New Press.

Gessen, Masha. 2013. The Man Without a Face. The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Riverhead Books.

Gomza, Ivan and Johann Zajaczkowski. 2019. “Black Sun Rising: Political Opportunity Structure Perceptions and Institutionalization of the Azov Movement in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine.” Nationalities Papers 47 (5), 774-800

Khromeychuk, Olesya. 2016. Ukrainians in the German Armed Forces During the Second World War. History. The Journal of the Historical Association 100 (343), 704-724

Kremenyuk, Victor. 2011. “Ideal Negotiator: A Personal Formula for the New International System.” In Psychological and Political Strategies for Peace Negotiation. Springer.

Markwick, Roger D. 2012. “The Great Patriotic War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Collective Memory.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History. Oxford University Press.

Ullman, Richard H. [1961] 2019. Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917-1921, Volume I. Intervention and the War. Princeton University Press.

Cite as: Edelman, Marc. 2022. ”Encirclement: Historical Roots of Putin’s Paranoia.“ FocaalBlog, 18 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/18/marc-edelman-encirclement-historical-roots-of-putins-paranoia/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Derek Hall: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to David Harvey

David Harvey’s February 25 FocaalBlog post is presented as “An Interim Report” on  “Recent Events in the Ukraine”. Harvey’s essay effectively covers some of the core forces that have led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the devastating impact of 1990s shock therapy in Russia to Russian reactions to NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 and NATO’s incorporation of new members in central and eastern Europe. As a response in real time to the full-scale invasion of a nation of 40 million people by a nuclear-armed great power, however, it is analytically inadequate and misleading and politically and ethically flawed.

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Art and Visual Anthropology, Close-Ups

Massimiliano Mollona: Ethnographic filmmaking and the political imagination: A review of “Desert People” by Ian Dunlop (1967)

In the opening sequences of Desert People (1967, 49 minutes, Australian National Film Board), we read, “This is a film on two families of the western Australian desert.” But in fact the film’s real subject is the wonderful Gibson Desert—whose textural surface is magically rendered by black and white 35mm film—and the relationship with “its” people as they constantly move across it, stopping only for short moments of rest. This relationship is marked by material scarcity and hard labor. We see boys and men restlessly digging the hard surface of the desert with spears and wooden tools. We see their bodies slowly disappearing inside it, to reappear with handfuls of water, small lizards, and rats. We see women making food out of wild grass. We see families gathering to eat, forced into a momentary standstill by the heat of the sun at midday.
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