On December 8, 2025, a brief video video was disseminated on You Tube, X and other social media to mark the first anniversary of the overthrow of the Asad regime. For just over three minutes, it showed a speech delivered by an older man wearing a black headband (‘agal) with a red-checkered headcloth and a long robe (gallabiya) with a suit jacket. Identified as Sheikh Hamed al-Faraj al-Salama in the video’s title, the speaker is framed by two large flags of the Syrian revolution and the new Syria, green-white-black with three red stars in the white field. They were held up by a silent and unmoving group of sixteen young men, some dressed in camouflage, others in black. In front, to Sheikh Hamed’s right hand (or more precisely, his right knee), we see two little boys in civilian clothing.
Image 1: A still from a video uploaded on Youtube, and X (among other platforms) on December 8, 2025 (still by the author).
The speaker begins his speech by marking the occasion that prompts the publication of the video:
“Today we celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of the defunct Ba’athist regime in Syria. We congratulate our people and everyone on this occasion, from […] the guesthouse (madafa) of the Wulda – the very guest house [he gestures to the house behind the group] where my father and my younger brother were killed by shelling from the Tabqa airport artillery […] we have stood with the Revolution since its beginning […] we fought in all the battles against the defunct [Baathist] regime […] We are patriots. My grandfather was exiled to Kamaran Island for three years for the sake of this people’s livelihood, and we are ready to make every sacrifice for our people.”
These first seconds of the video thus allow for a political as well as social positioning – the speaker politically aligns not only himself, but a “we” that includes “al-Wulda”, one of Syria’s tribal groups (asha’ir / Sing. ashira), with the victorious Syrian revolution. Terms such as “madafat al-Wulda” i.e. the guesthouse or reception hall of the Wulda, and the clothes worn by Sheikh Hamed, point to this tribal identity, while the educated accent in which the speech is delivered, as well as the dark suit jacket worn over the gallabiya, add a layer of Syrian urbanity.
This entry interrogates how the past has been referenced to underline present-day political claims among some of Syria’s tribal communities (asha’ir or qaba’il) in the Euphrates valley upstream of Raqqa. As an example, I focus on the Wulda ashira, in which I have been interested for a long time. This post is based on fieldwork I conducted in Syria between 2001 and 2011, and a short visit in May 2025.
The Wulda are one of numerous tribal or descent-based social groups which have long served as a fundamental structuring factor for social belonging in Syria’s eastern and southern parts. People who identify as belonging to one of these tribal groups are tied into long genealogies through the male line (although, as I have argued elsewhere, female perspectives are an essential if invisibilized component of this history). Reflecting segmentary models of social order, the Wulda specifically are made up of a number of smaller descent groups (confusingly, also referred to as asha’ir) among them the Nasser (from whom Sheikh Hamed himself has descended), the Ghanim, the Bu M’sarra, the Turn, ‘Ili, etc. Each of them, again, consists of distinct clans and families. In turn, the larger unit of the Wulda itself (like neighbouring groups such as the Afadla or the Sabkha) forms part of the Bu Sha’ban who in turn trace descent from the Zubaid and eventually, the Qahtanite Arabs whose roots lie in Yemen.
The ability to trace one’s genealogy to these ancient roots is particularly important given the collective classification of the Wulda (and other tribes) as “shawaya”, a classificatory term that has historically been distinct both from “sedentaries” (hadar) and also from the Bedouin who can claim Arab authenticity, strong genealogies, and nobility. The term itself is most often explained as a derivative of “shat”, sheep, indicating that “shawaya” were originally herders of small livestock. The term has also been used pejoratively, as an insult to designate the tribal inhabitants of Syria’s Eastern regions who are sometimes feared, but also looked down upon as backward, less civilized, wild and potentially violent.
For a critical intellectual readership, talk of tribes, asha’ir or qaba’il, and descent-based models of social belonging may seem outdated – or even, particularly among (some) anthropologists, suspicious of a dangerously exoticising and Orientalising view of at least part of the Syrian population. Yet for those who identify as a descendant of this milieu, genealogies and narratives about particular groups and ancestors are often a source of fierce pride. Moreover, in times where state structures are weak or even absent, the social networks created by tribal belonging and genealogy serve as a real and vital resource for social solidarity and mutual support.
Genealogies, anecdotes and icons of the tribal past, are a matter of great interest and debate in this region, as well as Syria’s tribal milieu more generally. Thus, to a local audience, Sheikh Hamed’s videotaped reference to his grandfather and his enforced exile immediately evoked a familiar discourse. This reference draws from a well-known narrative that has been told and retold to cement the status of the Wulda as a “patriotic” (watani) tribe. Its roots go back to the colonial era in Syria, the period of the French mandate (1920-1946).
Image 2 and 3: Older photos show Sheikh Muhammad al-Faraj (in 1972, right; in 1981, left) who was an important representative of the Wulda tribe during the French mandate era and Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan. His portrait has become an iconic image of tribal masculinity circulating on social media (images provided by the author).
Sheikh Hamed’s grandfather, Muhammad al-Faraj al-Salama (d. 1972) was one of the two paramount sheikhs representing the Wulda tribe during this era, alongside his equally famous cousin, Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan (d. 1981), whose portrait, featuring a memorable, pointed mustache, has become popular as an iconic image of tribal masculinity on social media, proudly referred to especially by people identifying with the Wulda. The “exile” which is mentioned in the video refers to an event from the 1940s. In July 1941, the administration of Syria had been taken over by the British and the Free French. Before the background of the Second World War, they imposed strict regulations on Syrian cultivators regarding the production and marketing of wheat, which was considered a strategic resource. In 1943, Sheikh Muhammad, who was one of the regions large landowners, was found guilty of “grain hoarding” – i.e., hiding part of the wheat harvest from the authorities. Together with other notables, among them the Shammar sheikh, Daham al-Hadi, he was sent into exile on Qamaran Island in the Red Sea, from where he returned in 1945.
This event has retrospectively been celebrated by members of the Wulda tribe as an example of anti-colonial resistance by the Sheikh and, by extension, the Wulda, underlining their self-ascribed credentials as a “patriotic” tribe. Besides conflicts and battles involving other members of the Wulda, notably the other famous Wulda sheikh of the mandate era, Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan, Sheikh Muhammad’s exile was one of the moments of Wulda history that was mentioned repeatedly during my fieldwork.
During the 2000s, a number of books authored by writers who for the most part originated from Syria’s tribal milieu themselves amplified such historical perspectives, which had hitherto been transmitted mainly orally. While the books had limited circulation (editions were typically printed by local publishing houses with 1000 or 2000 copies), after 2011, these (and other) iconic references to particularist, tribal histories were made more widely accessible through social media, which during the revolution became a forum for debates, controversies, and political (self)positionings hitherto unheard of for Syria. Beyond textual and discursive sources, images serve as references to Arab tribal values. Among them, visual indications of generosity and hospitality (videos of receptions in tribal guest houses, images of coffee pots, large metal trays or rows of big cooking pots come to mind).
The video from December 2025, cited at the beginning of this text, is an example of such a political self-positioning. In his statement, Sheikh Hamed makes more or less explicit reference to his controversial position as a vocal supporter of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and its Syrian Democratic Forces. To counter accusations of “treason”, Sheikh Hamed gestures to descent and tribal history, emphasizing that his understanding of patriotism encompasses the wellbeing of all components of Syrian society (in other words: Kurds as well as Arabs).
The position of the Wulda with regard to Arab-Kurdish politics in the Syrian Jazira (the land between Euphrates and Tigris; i.e., for Syria, the territory east of the Euphrates) has a long and complex history that is directly related to their geography. Historically, for the past two hundred years at least the Wulda have settled on both banks of the Euphrates river upstream of Tabqa. Until the mid-twentieth century, most households derived their income from a combination of seasonally mobile raising of small livestock (mostly sheep), as well as seasonal farming near the river. This gradually was replaced by a sedentary lifestyle and year-round agriculture. The construction of the Euphrates Dam at Ṭabqa, officially inaugurated in 1973, and the ensuing flooding of this part of the Euphrates valley marked a decisive rupture. The emerging reservoir submerged up to three hundred villages, displacing an estimated number of at least 60 000 to 70 000 individuals. A significant part of these so-called “submerged Arabs” (“Arab al-Ghamr” or “Maghmurin”), the majority of whom identified with different branches of the Wulda, were resettled in the Syrian Jazira on lands that had previously been farmed by ethnic Kurds. As Arabization measure and “Syria’s greatest social engineering project” of the Baathist era,a chain of thirty-nine new villages now formed the so-called “Arab belt”.
While the Arab belt villages have been governed by the Kurdish-led AANES since 2012, most Wulda villages on the Euphrates between 2013 and 2017 were ruled by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as part of its “Caliphate” centered in Raqqa. Since its demise, the area around Raqqa and the Jazira more generally became part of the AANES governed territories – a situation that is changing dramatically just as this blog post is being written.
For the Autonomous Administration, the co-optation of the Arab tribes of the Jazira was an important political goal; and not least, more than half of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were estimated to be Arab tribal fighters. Among other measures, tribal representatives were included in local councils. In 2017 Sheikh Mahmoud Shawakh al-Bursan of the Wulda, distant cousin of Sheikh Hamed and son of above-mentioned anti-colonial hero, Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan, was appointed to co-chair (together with a female Kurdish civil engineer, Leila Mustafa) the Raqqa Civilian Council (RCC).
Sheikh Mahmud’s and Sheikh Hamed’s public support for the AANES and the SDF can be seen as a pragmatic position, echoing earlier accommodations of Baathist structures. However, in light of the political polarization between Arab and Kurdish sides in the Syrian conflict, and wide-spread anti-Kurdish sentiment, Sheikh Hamed’s support for the AANES has also been explicitly criticized as “betrayal” of the Arab cause. Thus, Sheikh Hamed’s speech of December 2025 can also be understood as a way to counter this criticism by balancing support for the AANES with equal support for the new leaders of Syria.
While a more detailed account of the different positions taken by men who claim to speak in the name of the Wulda, or the Bu Sha’ban, cannot be given here, it is important to note that the above-mentioned Wulda notables’ declarations of support for AANES are countered by others who have lent support to political and paramilitary forces on other sides of the conflict in Syria. Thus, in a familiar historical pattern, representatives of the Wulda and related groups have politically aligned with different, even opposing sides. Tribal fighters who identify as members of “the Bu Shaaban” or other descent groups related to the Wulda have also inscribed themselves into formalised structures of the Syrian revolution, including the HTS.
Among the tribal notables who have vocally opposed the AANES is Sheikh Abd al-Qadir al-Bursan, another descendant of famous anti-colonial hero, Sheikh Shawakh. Using social media, Sheikh Abd al-Qadir has repeatedly called on the tribal fighters of the Euphrates valley to rise up in arms against the SDF – most recently in the January 2026 war between the two sides. To support his political agenda, he, too, draws on the anti-colonial history of the Wulda, and especially the role played by above-mentioned, famous Shawakh al-Bursan, who is remembered locally for his armed opposition to French mandate forces. In the case of Sheikh Abd al-Qadir, this past is invoked mainly through visual means. Besides clothes that are typically worn by tribesmen of a certain social status, Sheikh Abd al-Qadir cultivates a mustache that closely resembles that of Sheikh Shawakh, creating immediate visual associations between the two men.
Image 4: A still from a video uploaded to social media shows Sheikh Abd Al-Qadir wearing clothes typically worn by tribesmen of a certain status and sporting a moustache resembling that of Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan brewing coffee (still by the author).
A final point that must be noted but cannot be explored here in detail is the gendered nature of this digital universe: the images and iconic references to tribal history described here project a distinctly male image of history as well as politics in the Syrian Jazira. From this vantage point, a particular image of tribal masculinity is an integral part of these references (strongly contrasting with otherwise gendered images of female activists and fighters, for instance – but not exclusively – characteristic of Kurdish representations).
The Syrian uprising against the Asad regime, which has transformed Syrian society in so many ways, has also impacted the role of Syria’s tribal groups. Men who position themselves as members of Syria’s tribal milieu legitimize and mobilize support for different, even opposed political positions in (post)revolutionary Syria by referencing well-known tropes and images of tribal history – expressing values such as “patriotism”, hospitality, masculinity, courage – that are well familiar from earlier decades. But the persistence of these symbols and tropes despite the considerable changes that this region has seen over the past fifteen years should not be taken as an indication that Arab tribal identity is unchanging or even timeless. Rather, the value attributed to certain symbols of social belonging based on descent and genealogy can be seen as a response to unstable and changeable political orders on the ground.
Katharina Lange is a senior research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin with fieldwork experience in Syria and Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, among others. Her current research focuses on oral and gendered histories, rural and agrarian lives, and the impact of war and violence on livelihoods in northern Syria.
Cite as: Lange, K. 2026. “Uses of the Past by Representatives of Syria’s tribal groups (asha’ir) – the Wulda example” Focaalblog, April 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/04/06/katharina-lange-uses-of-the-past-by-representatives-of-syrias-tribal-groups-ashair-the-wulda-example/
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 is an anthropologist who has been working in and on Syria since 2008 writing about the Druze,i sectarianism and the state. Salam is a Syrian economist who has been working on the political economy of olive oil, the Syrian army, and social justice. For the past year we have shared our doubts, hopes and devastation as we have witnessed, from afar, the sectarian violence in the Druze-majority governorate of Suwayda in southern Syria that took place in July 2025.
Between 14 and 16 July 2025, Suwayda witnessed a sectarian assault of shocking scale. Testimonies describe executions inside homes, killings in the main hospital, people forced to jump from balconies, ritual humiliations and beheadings—often filmed by the perpetrators. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, up to 1,700 people were killed in a week in July alone; hundreds remain missing, including 235 women (HRW 2026). The majority of those killed are civilians of the Druze religion. The violence was disproportionate and indiscriminate towards anyone who was seen as a religious other, as both Druze and Christian communities in Suwayda were attacked.
We have asked each other where did all the hatred and racism come from? We’ve found no satisfactory answer (Kastrinou & Said 2025).
On 15 July, Israel struck Syria’s Ministry of Defence and the Presidential Palace inside the Syrian capital Damascus, proclaiming a duty to “protect” the Druze.ii The United States brokered a ceasefire on 21 July 2025.
As the dust and the blood from the massacres ‘settled,’ we shared our profound uneasiness with the political repercussions and aftermaths of this violent attack: the rising calls for Suwayda’s autonomy, and especially those calling for Israeli ‘protection.’ It has been incredibly taxing both to write about acts of extreme violence, like the July attacks; as well as to write about the aftermath of this violence, namely the emergence of conservative pro-Israeli forces within Suwayda. As scholars, we find ourselves profoundly opposed to the notion that a state that erases Palestinian lives, can ever ‘protect’ the Druze or the Christians, or anyone else, for that matter, in Syria. But isn’t the basis of anthropology to grapple with the moral dilemmas of being human? Can we not extend our understanding to those that we disagree with?
In Salam’s latest visit in Syria, in December 2025, some friends, family and acquaintances were convinced that the Syrian Druze are not safe under the current “Islamist and terrorist” – descriptions they used – “regime” in Damascus. Those who did not support succession had quieter voices and uncertain plans. Salam was told often: “Khalas, there is no other way. As long as there is this regime, we can only rely on Israel for survival.” Even those who are explicitly against Israel said “We don’t like Israel but we have to admit without its intervention, the Druze community would have been completely exterminated,” or that “we are too small and too weak to decide on Suwayda, while the majority of the Druze community fears being killed.” A sense that the sectarian attack by the new Syrian regime, and the subsequent Israeli intervention was part of a “done deal” is what comes out of our connections and friends in Damascus and in Suwayda.
Using anthropology as a grounding tool, we juxtapose three scenes of rupture from the violent assault in Suwayda in order to put together the local forms of shock and betrayal that can help us sense the local contours of trauma, shock and revenge. These vignettes are not ‘ethnographic’ in the usual sense: the first is taken from a published piece of non-fiction detailing the experiences of a Druze nurse resident of Suwayda city, as narrated over the phone by herself to her former medical colleague, who is a doctor and a writer. Maria interviewed the author, and we use this piece as an ethnographic example, even if not collected by us, that elucidates the breakdown of society at the microlevel. The second is a vignette based on a conversation with a survivor that Salam met in a recent visit in Syria. And the third is the sense of historical change as gleaned from the opinions, delivered through WhatsApp and Facebook of one of Maria’s longest Syrian friends. Collected from afar and without being there, these are scenes of rupture with the past that permit us to put together a sense of history in the making, and at the same time prohibit and question the emergence of certainty of the unfolding and messy ways that history is felt in Suwayda and in Syria today. Perhaps we are as vulnerable and naïve for trying. Perhaps anthropology itself, can be a way through which to sense, to get a feeling of the past and the present.
First, we start with an introduction to the geographic and local conflicts that intersect and complicate the telling this violent and treacherous story.
What is New?
The ‘new’ Syria that emerged after the fall of Assad on December 8, 2024, is inseparable from the ‘new’ Middle East shaped through the violence, strangulation and ongoing genocide against Palestinians by Israel and its allies. What is ‘new’ about a ‘new’ Syria, or indeed about a ‘new’ Middle East? Is there perhaps new hope for peace and justice? ‘New,’ here, if anything is a bitter irony: despite Assad’s fall, and the battering of the Axis of Resistance — Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — there is no new hope for the region’s peoples. What appears instead is a deepening condition of permanent war and pacification.
Since 2023, Israel, with the arms and the backing of all the world’s strongest powers and their coalitions, has caused the direct death of more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, while criminally attacking, and in some cased invading and occupying, its neighbours in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. It is within the context of the supreme military and technological might of Israel combined with the international powers’ carte blanche (despite the pending arrest warrants for its leaders), that the formerly internationally ascribed terrorists of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), with the crucial backing from regional and international allies, were able to make a lightening advance that soon reached Damascus and ushered a ‘new’ Syria.
Is there anything ‘new’ in HTS – who are leading the state of Syria? The short answer is ‘no.’ HTS is a political coalition based on conservative and authoritarian premises, who strategically broke away from Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but whose ideological basis is shared, and whose governing experiment in the north-western Syrian governorate of Idleb has been described as ruthless and foreign to the Syrian national experience.iii The first act of their government was to make all political parties illegal – a prohibition still standing more than a year later.
What has changed is that HTS is no longer ascribed ‘terrorists’ but has become an ‘ally’ to the most powerful backers, especially USA. Why this change? Not because HTS changed, but because the regional alignment changed: the so-called ‘Islamist extremists’ are now good for doing the reconstruction business with. In the regional chessboard, the change of regime has been advantageous for Turkey who wanted to expand its regional influence and crush any hope for Kurdish autonomy; and good for Israel who crushed Hezbollah in Lebanon, wants to destroy Iran, and has a long-term strategic goal to establish a demilitarized zone in Syria and Lebanon beyond its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights.
Despite the new geopolitical context, were there local reasons and past grievances that festered the ground upon which the sectarian massacre was carried out?
Syria is home to many of the region’s diverse religions and ethnic groups, but also home to a strong nationalist and politically pluralist heritage. Indeed, Suwayda, although the only Syrian governorate with a Druze majority, is also home to Christian and Sunni Muslim villages and neighbourhoods, as well as seasonal populations of Bedouin and farm workers that migrate periodically in and out of the region. Conflict, especially between Bedouins and Druze are not new but these conflicts, and the logics of their revenge and honour codes, are not sectarian or indiscriminate as the July attacks were (Dukhan & Chatty 2025). Fourteen years of war have indeed eroded trust between and within Syrian communities, some of whom see non-Sunni or non-Arab communities if not as complicit with the previous regime, then as unfairly treated. This image, often projected by the HTS-government in Damascus, is that Suwayda’s politics is tarnished by its former association with the Assad regime, and, after the Israeli intervention in July 2025, its current association with Israel. Neither of these allegations are true.
During the early years of uprising, Druze areas in Syria were as split between pro-and anti- protesters as any other place in Syria. As the uprising was weaponised and turned into a proxy war, Druze areas such as Jaramana and Suwayda were able to maintain a relative autonomy and broker local deals, from the central government as well as with surrounding rebel militia. In practice, that meant that Druze areas became safe havens for the internally displaced persons evading violence, the majority of which where peri-urban, or rural, and poor. Moreover, Druze areas are known to be liberal, educated, and politically progressive, and despite the rise of religious-military power in the years of war, many Druze were members of left non-sectarian parties, and many youth formed and participated in NGOs and other political organisations focussed on political change, solidarity and aid for the displaced.iv
What is new, therefore, is the increasing sectarianisation of political discourse and volunteering practice within Suwayda and Jaramana. Druze flags, Druze institutions, and NGOs, even religious attire are on the rise. Indeed, the community seems to be now, after the massacres in July, undergoing a profound change in the interrelations within their society as well as in their relations within Syria and beyond. A new sense of brotherhood across borders is emerging, especially between the Druze in Suwayda and the Druze in northern Israel/Palestine. What is certainly not new is Israel’s propaganda of using Druze religious difference as a means by which to sow sectarian hatred in the place of national belonging in both Palestine and in Syria. And certainly, many in Suwayda see and fear of this history, and feel afraid to call it out.
Scenes of rupture
The following scenesv not only tell us about the violence used, but also about the violence perceived to have been used. Betrayal, sexual depravity, scorched earth: these scenes of rupture are both instances of violence as well as violence perceived – and how different forms of violence carry the seeds of different histories and different futures.
Scene 1
The first scene comes from a nurse in Suwayda, and has been published in Arabic by Dr. Najat Abdul Samad in Daraj Media. Abdul Samad’s journalistic account centres on the nurse’s experience, whom we get to know with her initials, S.F., as she speaks of a lifetime of neighbourly coexistence with her Bedouin friends. Their children played together, families visited each other’s homes, everyday life unfolded through proximity rather than doctrine. Yet, this relationship began to fracture after the transitional government took power. Her friend’s husband forbade visits to Druze households, declaring them not “true Muslims.”
According to the nurse, the massacre was premeditated — an agreement between General Security and certain Bedouin tribes who were given weapons and promised the loot and homes of Druze families they would kill. Her testimony describes the assault between 14 and 16 July 2025. Entire families slaughtered, women and children among the dead, survivors hiding in terror.
What struck her most, however, was the economy of betrayal that preceded the violence. In the days before the attack, S.F. notes that Bedouins were buying large quantities of flour, sugar, and cigarettes; all on credit. When she asked a shop owner why he allowed such risk, he replied that his profits came from such sales, that payment was due Monday, 14 July, and that since even big merchants like Salim Ashti trusted the buyers, he would too. On 15 July, they tied up and robbed Salim Ashti, the elderly owner of the largest shop in the neighbourhood, in front of his shop, to watch its destruction, and then killed him.
The nurse’s account continues with more graphic accounts of deaths and torture in the hands of former neighbours. All of which is utterly harrowing. Yet, focusing on credit and death, this scene reveals not only the horror of neighbour turning on neighbour, but the collapse of trust itself. The breaking of economic credit mirrored the breakdown of social bonds. As anthropologists we know too well that debt and credit are not merely transactions, but forms of sociality, reciprocity, and trust — for example as shown in Paul Anderson’s work on merchants and exchange in Syria (2023). The collapse of credit and trust marks the unravelling of coexistence among the living. But in Suwayda, violence did not stop there.
Scene 2
When Salam returned to Syria in December 2025, she wanted to meet with Nidal, an old acquaintance whom, she had heard, had gone through a terrible ordeal. When they met, his first words were “I’m a refugee here. I have lost everything.” Salam could sense that he was angry, deeply sad, but had not surrendered. Nidal is a journalist with a degree in law. In the years of the Syrian war, he had been working in the Gulf in order to build a house of his own in his hometown in Suwayda, a house he described not as an investment, but as a return. He showed Salam a photograph of the house on his mobile: vibrant, carefully painted, surrounded by a tended garden. The next image was almost unrecognisable. The house had been reduced to blackened ruin; the garden trees cut down. Salam recalls the shock of seeing the images on his phone.
Nidal described the assault as faz`aa. In Arabic, this term carries references to a tribal call to mobilisation, an appeal to men and women to come to the defence of their kin. Since July 2025, many Druze residents used this word to describe the entry of armed Bedouin fighters into their villages. While the government did not officially frame its intervention in these terms, and President al-Sharaa denies sectarian intent, the local interpretation among survivors is that the violence unfolded through precisely this idiom: a tribal logic of collective mobilisation that blurred into state-backed force.
As discussed in the introduction, Druze–Bedouin tensions in southern Syria are not new. Clashes have occurred intermittently over land, honour, smuggling routes and patronage. Yet these conflicts were rarely narrated as indiscriminate or exterminatory. They coexisted with everyday interdependence, such as shared markets, seasonal labour, migration in and out of the region, and forms of pragmatic coexistence within a broader national framework. What Nidal experienced in July 2025 felt, to him, like a decisive break from those earlier logics. This was not framed as dispute or revenge within a shared moral world, but as eradication.
During the assault, Nidal remained inside his house until the early morning of 19 July, when he was kidnapped. Blindfolded and transported to Daraa, he was held for six days in a small, filthy, dark location. He did not wish to speak in detail about that experience. Yet, what he did want to emphasise was that he was “struck” most from a conversation he overheard among his captors: “we are here not to loot houses, but to kill the Druze.” Killing the Druze was articulated as an objective. For Nidal, this language marked the rupture. It suggested not punishment, nor bargaining, nor coercion into submission, but the targeting of a community as such.
After his escape, he began collecting photographs documenting the destruction. One image he described — because Salam could not look at it — showed “naked bodies of women stacked on top of each other. The bodies show gunshots in the knees to prevent resistance while raping them.” For him, this exceeded looting or punitive violence. It amounted to terror aimed at making future coexistence impossible. It was not, he insisted, about disciplining Suwayda or integrating it into the “kingdom of the new Emir” in Damascus. It felt instead like an effort to erase a community, and with it, the fragile national compact within which previous conflicts, however bitter, had been contained.
Nidal, like many people we spoke to from Suwayda and Jaramana, are quick to point to the change in the use of violence from the Assad-era to the Al-Sharaa-era. They say that part of the historical rupture is the change in the kinds of violence used, and the end results that the violence is used to usher. The killings and torture under Assad regime functioned as a form of punishment and a means to eliminate a political opposition that might challenge the existing political order. Similarly in the past, localized tensions between Druze and Bedouin tribes have often been driven by struggles for land, influence or economic power – a competition over resources. However, in the case of massacre of July, however, testimonies such as Nidal, like many people we spoke to from Suwayda and Jaramana, is quick to point to the change in the use of violence from the Assad era to the al-Sharaa era. For them, part of the historical rupture lies in the kinds of violence used, and in the ends that such violence is meant to achieve. Killings and torture under the Assad regime functioned largely as punishment and as a means to eliminate political opposition that might challenge the existing order. Similarly, earlier tensions between Druze and Bedouin tribes were often driven by struggles over land, influence, or economic resources.
In the July massacres, however, testimonies such as Nidal’s suggest that the violence cannot be reduced to struggles for control or collective punishment. Rather, the violence appears directed not at disciplining a political foe but at eliminating a community as such. Five months on, Nidal remained petrified for his life. He wanted Salam to understand that “they see us as kuffār, and they believe they will be rewarded for killing us, exactly what happened to the Yazidis.” The reference, often invoked by survivors, is to the Yazidi ethnic cleansing carried out by ISIS in Iraq in 2014. For Nidal, this form of torture and killing reflects an ideology that frames the destruction of his community as legitimate, even righteous. The violence experienced thus marks both a rupture with earlier forms of state violence and a dangerous present: many now fear that even if Suwayda were to align with a centralized Syrian state, this would not guarantee the Druze’s safety. Targeted violence could continue as long as this ideology persists and its perpetrators enjoy impunity.
Scene 3
Maria met Nadeem in 2008, when she was living in Damascus, in the Druze suburb of Jaramana. It was a different Syria. Nadeem was smart and passionate, working as a photographer hoping to support himself through university. When the war came, he continued photographing. Over fourteen years he created an extensive archive of the first days of the uprising and the war that followed.
In the early hours of July 14, 2025, his village in western Suwayda was attacked. Snipers, he wrote, shot indiscriminately at anyone entering or leaving. Many fled, those who did not were killed. His uncle was beheaded. When Nadeem returned briefly to the village, he found only death, pillage and scorched earth. His house was burned, and his photographic archive was either burned or stolen. “They killed everything,” Nadeem texted Maria on WhatsApp on July 17, 2025.
Nadeem’s story returns us to the question of what, precisely, is being destroyed. Once a revolutionary who smuggled food into Yarmouk camp and documented protest, he briefly joined the popular defence in Suwayda after the massacres. Yet what distinguishes his account is not only what he lost, but how he interprets it. For him, the struggle is between remembering and forgetting. Forgetting, he argues, aligns with colonial and authoritarian power. He points to the abolition of Yawm al-Shuhadāʾ (Martyrs’ Day), which used to be commemorated on 6 May in memory of Arab nationalists executed in 1916 by the Ottomans, and long woven into Syrian narratives of nationalist sacrifice. Its removal by the new authorities is read by him as part of a broader erasure of shared national memory. Alongside the diminishing of national commemorations and the seizure of Syrian land by Israel, he sees a single trajectory: the demolition of national consciousness and its replacement with religious, sectarian and tribal identities.
“This regime is a puppet of all colonial powers,” Nadeem texted in October 2025, asking for my editorial help before he uploaded his opinion in English on Facebook. His message continued: “brought about through the agreement of imperial forces to tear apart Syria’s social fabric, uproot and kill all revolutionaries, and destroy the Syrian state along with all its institutions. If the people do not awaken, they will cease to be a people, and will instead turn into tribal, sectarian, and religious factions.”
For Nadeem, displacement is not only material. “I never wanted to leave my homeland,” he wrote, “but how can I live in a country where I see a flag flying over my land that is not my own. Nor will I accept being defined by my religious sect.” He refers to both the new Syrian flag, but also to the flag of the state of Israel which has been raised in the city of Suwayda by some. He has searched online and through networks in Deraa for traces of his looted equipment. During the fourteen-year war, displaced Syrians were often shocked to encounter their own furniture for sale in Damascus’s “Souq al-Sunna,” known for looted goods (Tizini 2013).
For Nadeem, the burning of his archive and the abolition of Youm Al Shuhadaa (Martyrs’ Day) belong to the same process. The violence of July 2025 was not experienced simply as sectarian brutality. It was felt, by Nadeem and others, as an attack on the very idea that Syria could still be imagined as a common national home.
Making a killing
The historian Usama Makdisi, in The Age of Coexistence (2019: 84), contrasts different killings to show how violence can serve different purposes: the hanging of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in 1821 as warning within an imperial order, and the mutilation of Bishop Chrysostomos in 1922 as an act of elimination. This distinction, more than 100 years ago, reminds us that violence can discipline coexistence — or seek to extinguish it. In the Ottoman Empire, it foreclosed the future of the Turkish, Greek and Balkan states, and acted as a foil for bilād al-shām, modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, where and the politics of sectarianism and co-existence emerged.
What unfolded in Suwayda in July 2025 was experienced by many not as a warning within a shared political order, but as an assault on the very possibility of living together. The violence scarred bodies and the relations through which people lived together, altering trust, neighbourliness, credit and the expectation that governance might restrain rather than unleash force. As Lisa Malkki (1995) reminds us, such violence marks people’s bodies in culturally specific ways. When credit turns into betrayal, archives are burned, commemorations erased, and neighbours mobilised through sectarian idioms, what is undone is not only lives but the infrastructures of national belonging. When violence reaches this point, it no longer aims to discipline coexistence, but to extinguish it, killing not only people but the very idea of a country held in common.
Maria Kastrinou is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London and Research Fellow at ZMO Berlin. Her work focuses on Syria and the Golan Heights, examining kinship, death, land, and sectarian violence through long-term ethnographic research.
Salam Said is an economist and researcher specialising in Syrian political economy and conflict dynamics. She has published widely on sanctions, reconstruction, and regional geopolitics.
Anderson, Paul. Exchange Ideologies: Commerce, language, and patriarchy in preconflict Aleppo. Cornell University Press, 2023.
Davis, H. (2025, March 10). Sectarian violence simmers in Homs. New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/sectarian-violence-erupts-in-homs/
Hassan, R. (2023, March 15). In Homs, revenge is the only law left standing. New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-homs-revenge-is-the-only-law-left-standing/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Human Rights Watch. (2026, January 15). Syria: Accountability lacking for Sweida abuses. Human Rights Watch, URL: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/01/15/syria-accountability-lacking-for-sweida-abuses
Kastrinou, M. (2023) ‘Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan,’ FocaalBlog, 16 November. Available at: https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/
Kastrinou, M., & Said, S. (2025, July 28). Suwayda: Not a local conflict, but geopolitics in disguise. Qantara. https://qantara.de/en/article/suwayda-not-local-conflict-geopolitics-disguise
Kastrinou, Maria, Salam Said, Rawad Jarbouh, and Steven B. Emery. “Still There: Politics, Sectarianism and the Reverberations of War in the Presences and Absences of the Syrian State.” Conflict and Society 9, no. 1 (2023): 147-166.
Kastrinou, Maria. “From a window in Jaramana: Imperial sectarianism and the impact of war on a Druze neighbourhood in Syria.” In The Syrian Uprising, pp. 271-289. Routledge, 2018.
Makdisi, U. (2019). Age of coexistence: The ecumenical frame and the making of the modern Arab world. University of California Press.
Makdisi, U., 2019. Age of coexistence: The ecumenical frame and the making of the modern Arab world. University of California Press.
Malkki, L. H. (1995). Purity and exile: Violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. University of Chicago Press.
Said, S. (2025, August 12). Assad’s shadow looms over fractured Syria. Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/assad-shadow-looms-over-fractured-syria
The Jordan Times. (2025, September 16). Jordan, Syria, US ink roadmap to end crisis in Suwayda, stabilize southern Syria. https://jordantimes.com/news/local/jordan-syria-us-ink-roadmap-to-end-crisis-in-suwayda-stabilize-southern-syria?utm_source
i With its roots in Shia Ismaili Islam, the Druze faith developed during the Fatimid Dynasty in the 11th Century. It holds all prophets of the people of the book sacred, but it combined gnostic, neo-platonic, and Sufi ideas. Historically it emerged as a radical religion doing away with collective ritual, and abolishing polygamy and slavery. Druze societies practice endogamy, meaning that a Druze should only marry another Druze, and they believe in a form of reincarnation called taqammuṣ whereby a constant number of immortal Druze souls is continuously recycled into Druze bodies. But Druze societies are better understood as national ethnoreligious groups. This is because you can only be born a Druze, but you don’t have to be religious. In fact only about 10% of any Druze community can read the Holy books, and only by initiation. The largest number of Druze is located in Suwayda, whilst in Syria there are large communities in Damascus suburbs of Jaramana and Sehnaya, and in the mountains of Idleb. Moreover, stateless Syrian Druze have been living under Israeli occupation in the Golan Heights since 1967. There are Druze communities in Lebanon, Northern Israel, Jordan and there are large diasporic communities globally. They estimate a total of 1-4 million people. But whilst their souls can travel between nation-states and borders, they form integral parts of different social and political histories and cultures in Syria, Israel and Lebanon.
ii There is a Druze minority in Israel/Palestine, live predominantly in the north, hold Israeli citizenship and the men are conscripted to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces. The highest religious-cum-political authority in Suwayda, Shaykh al-ʿAql Hikmat al-Hijri, thanked Prime Minister Netanyahu and called for international protection. The United States brokered a ceasefire on 21 July 2025. Moreover, the role of religious authority itself has changed as a result of the years of war. Druze shaykhs — once respected but marginal religious elders — shifted. They became consensus political mediators between Druze communities, the state, and opposition forces. Local sectarian militias formed, serving both as protection and as part of the wider war economy. Assad struck agreements integrating some militias into the national army while allowing them to remain in their areas in exchange for allegiance. In places such as Suwayda, some shaykhs commanded militia factions, reshaping the alignment of religious, political and military authority. It was within this matrix that religious authority was remade and figures such as the current shāyikh al-ʿaql, Hikmat al-Hijri, emerged as politically representative leaders. Sectarianisation was thus a product of war. Druze communities suffered violence during these years — in Idleb under al-Nusra in 2015, in Suwayda in 2018 during attacks by al-Nusra and ISIS, and in the Golan and northern Israel, where Druze ambushed ambulances transporting al-Nusra fighters for treatment. See Kastrinou et al, 2023.
iii Writing about Idleb, Bakkour and Stansfeld trace the politicisation of religious identities, a process that they quote as the ‘jihadisation of Idleb’ (2025: 247), noting how the eventual win of the Salafist al-Nusra, that would become HTS, in Idleb “refused to participate in any political process that not accompanied by … the establishment of a religious state.” In Idleb, as in Aleppo (Chalhoub 2025: 224), this kind of Islamist government often was seen as a foreign intervention “they banned smoking and want to close shops during prayers. This is how they do it in the Golf not in Syria.”
iv Maria and Salam have previously written about the changes that the Syrian war brought on Druze areas, see Kastrinou 2018; Kastrinou, Said, Jarbouh & Emery 2023.
v We have obtained consent and the right to review and withdraw from everyone involved and have taken care to anonymise and not publish sensitive information.
Cite as: Kastrinou, M. & Said, S. 2026. “How to kill a country: Feeling history in scenes of pillage” Focaalblog March 31. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/31/maria-kastrinou-and-salam-said-how-to-kill-a-country-feeling-history-in-scenes-of-pillage/
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, the methods used by the son, Bashar, had already been tried by his father, Hafez. It was under the latter that the security apparatus, the infamous mukkhabarat services and Syria’s prison archipelago were established (Seurat, 1989; Munif, 2020). Methods of mass repressions against civilians and any kind of political opposition had already been trialled in the 1980s, leading to the siege of the city of Hama that resulted in the killing of over 20,000 civilians and its widespread destruction. The prison of Tadmor (Palmyra) was already infamous for its large-scale torture and killings of political opponents and the massacre of hundreds of them orchestrated by Hafez al Assad’s brother in 1980 (e.g., Khalifa, 2007; Al-Sarraj 2011).
In the fourteen years that spanned from the beginning of the Syrian revolution until the downfall of the regime on December 8, 2024, over 600,000 Syrians were killed, more than 140,000 were jailed, disappeared and tortured in the regime’s prisons. While only 1,300 detainees were freed from the regime’s jails in December 2024, mass graves have been found in different locations, rendering the hope that some of the remaining disappeared might still be alive rather elusive. Many towns and cities were heavily destroyed through the use of heavy weaponry by the regime and its Russian and Iranian allies, leading to widespread “urbicide” (Munif, 2020).
In this context of extreme political violence and mass atrocities, where should a process of transitional justice start? And how can it operate in a country that still has to rebuild itself, with a population in dire need as the vast majority lives below the poverty line; and as violence has not stopped in all parts of the country? Moreover, how does this violent past appear in the present transitional phase in Syria?
A year after the downfall of the Assad regime, my interlocutors – the majority of whom live in the Southern city of Daraa, which has long been considered a revolutionary stronghold, as the revolution started there on 18th of March 2011 – are questioning the slowness of the transitional justice process. In most of the discussions I have had on this topic since my first field-trip in the country on January 2025, it is the question of the detainees and the missing that is central.
These discussions have led me to look at aspirations and claims for justice in post-Assad Syria. In a research project recently started in the country’s south, I ask: What ideas and practices of justice emerge during and after mass atrocities? How can we think of justice in contexts of mass political violence beyond the global frame of “transitional justice” and beyond a universal-secular idea of international law? The project explores local ideas and practices of justice focusing on different temporalities, spaces and modalities of justice.
What I present in this blog is work-in-progress based on fieldwork that I have started inside Syria in the spring of 2025. It presents questions and hypotheses that have emerged from conversations in the city of Daraa, but also from discussions that happened with long-term Syrian interlocutors and friends I met during fieldwork in Gaziantep and Beirut and who were still displaced at the time (see Al-Khalili 2023).
With the overthrow of the Assad regime, the families of those detained and/or disappeared and their advocates have started to occupy the streets of Syria’s towns and cities, protesting, holding meetings and circulating pictures of the missing. Relatives of detainees and disappeared persons have formed committees and organisations in exile and former victims of torture have sought justice in foreign courts. Some of these claims have been successful, with condemnations of those responsible for the torture of prisoners in Assad’s jails heard in landmark cases in French and German courts. With the downfall of the regime, the hope to put these perpetrators on trial in Syrian courts has become more present, but has not become a reality yet, despite the new government and the UN launching specialist commissions to look into the disappeared files, following classic transitional justice paths and top-down approaches (e.g., Kent 2016).
Working in areas that have been marked by the arrest and enforced disappearance of many, I had expected to hear much more about acts of revenge, demands of accountability and legal prosecutions. In the country’s north where I visited friends and interlocutors, daily killings of shabbiha (pro-regime thugs) took place in the city of Aleppo, and demands of accountability and actions against the return of shabbiha in the city of Idleb (Al-Khalili 2025). But in Daraa, where such extra-judiciary killings have happened in 2018, and where most people claim “we don’t have shabbiha here”, considering them either gone after the Liberation or dead before, my interlocutors seemed primarily concerned with uncovering truth and demanded concrete acts that would impact the regime-supporters’ everyday lives and their livelihood. In their claims, they place justice on a collective rather than individual scale and in the social rather than the legal domain.
These scales and domains are, however, not fixed and unique but rather dynamic. Social justice can be seen as both claims for truth and demands of reconstruction. The truth that interlocutors demand often appears as an individual claim when expressed by relatives of missing while reconstruction seems to operate on a collective scale. But these two scales are permeable and become interchangeable and juxtaposing. Such fluidity and multiplicity are also linked to the very nature and intensity of the violence that has unfolded on the Syrian people over the last decades.
Exploring the justice claims of my interlocutors and the situation inside Syria, transitional justice appears first of all to be a social matter: it is about reconstructing social trust and the social fabric, as well as social reparations. Justice thus means to open the archives and learn about the fate of the disappeared and to support those who have lost everything supporting the revolution and fleeing their homes. Those who have fled because of their involvement in the revolution and have then lived in precarious conditions as a result of the destruction of their neighbourhoods, in the rebuilding of a home, of their city and to help them start a new life.
The disappeared: archives, truth-seeking and reparations
Back in December 2024, with news of the opposition forces’ advance through Syria, many of my interlocutors displaced outside the country were particularly impatient to hear of the fates of the country’s many detainees, as they feared they might have been killed before they could be liberated. The opening of the regime’s prisons and security branches reignited hope, as relatives of detained and disappeared people dared to believe they might reunite with their loved ones, or at least learn about their fate (see Al-Khalili & Al-Khalili 2025).
Despite doubts and fear, many hoped to reunite with their detained relatives, leading many detainees’ families to rush to the newly opened prisons. This search for answers and the immense hope of locating detained relatives or discovering the truth about their fate for their relatives.Yet, these early hopes quickly faded away; indeed, if demands for truth, justice and accountability multiply as Syrians can finally speak out, they do not have a legal framework for their claims to be examined yet. Moreover, these don’t seem to be among the government’s immediate priorities.
Over a year after the downfall of the Assad regime, time has now come for many of my interlocutors to question the new government’s actions. Sentiments that I keep hearing– especially among my interlocutors who have missing relatives, but also from lawyers and civil society organisations – conclude “there is no law”, “we don’t have a constitution” and “how can we seek justice?”
Frustration over the new government’s dealing with these issues, and with the withholding of information, is something that I also heard among mothers of the disappeared. One of them, Umm Ayman, a teacher in her sixties whose son has been missing since 2012, told me:
“The state (al dawleh) is now saying that the transitional justice process is over and that we just need to turn the page. But what page? We haven’t even learned about our sons’ fate! … Where is the information (al malumat)? The state has all the information; why is the new government not telling us anything about the detainees’ fates?” She then spoke about her disappeared son: “Imagine that I have been searching for my son for 12 years! I haven’t stopped searching! My son was arrested on December 29, 2012 … We don’t even know what happened to him – I just want to know so my heart eases a little. I want to know where he was for the last 12 years. I want to have answers. I want to know if he is alive or dead, and if he died when and how he died. I want his body! Where are the bodies?”
Such demands for truth were echoed by many. As I waited at the local court to meet a friend of mine who is a lawyer there, a family entered the lawyer’s office and to discuss the possibility to issue a death certificate for their missing son. But the lawyer said there was no way to do that: “the detainees (al-mawtaqalyin) and the missing (al-mafqudyin) are not [officially] dead (maytyin) ” he told them. Yet, in the absence of details about the missing’s whereabouts nothing can be done.
As a forty-year-old man, who presented himself as a “revolutionary at heart” and as a former detainee, said in a collective discussion on transitional justice in Daraa :
There is no transitional justice happening in the country at the moment; ten months after the liberation, nothing has happened yet! Now the shabbiha are walking free, they are not being held accountable … Where is the transparency (shahafiyeh)? There have been no changes in law and no accountability (muhassabeh), so where is the justice? Where are the people who arrested me? It is human nature, especially for those who were detained, to want justice!
Hence, while the possibility of legal justice and accountability in the hands of the current government was met with circumspection, for some of my interlocutors, the claims rather became formulated in collective and social terms: it meant rebuilding the country and insuring a brighter future for Syrians.
In a conversation with Yara, a young second-generation displaced woman from the Golan Heights now living in Daraa’s Palestinian camp, she told me how her father and one of her brothers had been arrested by the regime and detained in Sednaya prison. When I asked her if she or any family member had joined families going from Daraa to Sednaya as the prison was liberated, she said that they had not. They were sure her father and brother would not be there. As they reasoned, they were from Daraa, they had been imprisoned since 2012, and there were strong and believable indications that they had died in the prison several years ago. Discussing Yara’s dreams and aspirations for the future, we touched on the question of legal justice and accountability for those responsible for detainees’ torture and death, and for her dad and brother in particular. It seemed to her reframing justice in individual terms was not the priority. She told me, “Justice is the downfall of the regime and a brighter future for Syria”. To her, justice appeared as a collective end. She envisioned it as a better future that entailed the possibility of resuming school and later accessing higher education, and better job prospects for herself as well as for those who lost their main breadwinners, and help to rebuild their destroyed homes.
As another interlocutor tellingly said: “There is no transitional justice if there is no trust in the government … The issue at the moment is that we can’t trust a government that cannot provide its people with the essentials to live. Did you see how the price of bread went up since liberation?” Here again, transitional justice appeared as tightly related to social justice.
This question of justice’s scale (individual and collective) as well as domain (legal and social) also arose in a conversation I had with Yassin, a long-term interlocutor from Daraa now in his fifties, had been detained in Sednaya prison for eight years before the revolution for his political activism. When we met in Damascus in April 2025, the former detainee had returned to Syria after 14 years of exile and needed a lift to Daraa, where I was also going with a friend. We picked him up at Damascus airport and started discussing his feelings and impressions.
During our two-hour drive, we discussed the recent changes in the country, and it was then that questions of justice and accountability came up. Yassar, his younger cousin who was arrested for his participation in the revolution in 2012, asked Yassin if he planned to visit Sednaya to achieve closure. Yassin raised his eyebrows and clicked his tongue, meaning “no”. Yassar then recounted his own experience of returning to the military branch where he had been arrested and detained, and the intense feelings of peace and justice it induced. Yassar asked Yassin, “You don’t want to find peace going back there? You don’t want to see it all over again now that we got some justice back?” Yassin immediately replied, “What justice? Justice is not the liberation of detainees, justice is the reconstruction of the country, and that will take time!” To Yassin, justice could only be served at the collective, not the personal scale. Justice was not achieved when the regime fell, nor when the detainees were liberated, but would only be realized in the (probably distant) future.
As we entered his city and drove through some almost totally destroyed neighbourhoods, as he saw his family home razed to the ground, Yassin seemed reinforced in his position of justice: What could justice be if not the rebuilding of the country for future generations? What did his personal story have to do with it?
Ruins as evidence? Ethnographic and legal traces
To conclude, looking at ruins – some now used as homes, others as mass graves – brings questions of justice into focus; questions about rebuilding, reconstruction and the disposal of large amounts of rubble as much as questions about body identification, about the souls of the deceased, about truth and transitional justice. The ruins point to the violent past and the immense destruction that occurred, to an unstable and precarious present, and to the shape of the future, stimulating questions about what will be rebuilt, for whom it will be rebuilt and who will carry out the work. The Syrian ruins are not only the marks of past political violence, they also induce political and legal questions about transitional justice. They are, indeed, ruins-as-legal-evidence, and invoke the highly vexed question of what kind of future can possibly be available to those who have lost everything. But they are also what seems to call for social reparations. As Daraa became a stronghold and a symbol of the revolution its city was systematically destroyed. The destruction of Daraa and other towns and neighbourhoods, and the displacement of its inhabitants and disappearance of many, bring to mind the question of truth and social reparation: those people and cities who have given everything to the fight against the Assad regime, and who have lost so much in this struggle, how can they be supported to rebuild their lives, their livelihood, their present and future?
Charlotte Al-Khalili is a Leverhulme early career fellow in anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on revolutionary politics and subjectivities, religious temporalities and practices and forced displacement in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. Her research explores the effects of mass political violence and its aftermaths on displaced communities’ lifeworlds. She is the author of Waiting for the Revolution to End and the co-editor of Revolution Beyond the Event. She is currently working on a new project looking at conceptions and practices of justice in Syria titled “Traces and Archives of Mass Political Violence: Justice and Return in post-Assad Syria”
References cited
Al-Khalili, C. 2023. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity, London: UCL Press.
Al-Sarraj, M. 2011. ‘Aṣī al-dam. Beirut: Dār al-Adāb.
Evans, 2019
Khalifa, M. 2007. Al-qawq‘a: yawmiyyāt mutalaṣiṣ. Beirut: Dār al-Adāb.
Kent, L. 2016. “Transitional justice in law, history and anthropology”, Australian Feminist Journal, vol 42, N1, pp.1-11
Munif, Y. 2020. The Syrian Revolution: Between the politics of life and the geopolitics of death. London: Pluto Press.
Seurat, M. 1989. L’Etat de Barbarie. Paris: le Seuil.
Cite as: Al-Khalili, C. 2025 “Transitional Justice from Below: Demands for Truth and Social Reparations” Focaalblog March 25. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/25/charlotte-al-khalili-transitional-justice-from-below-demands-for-truth-and-social-reparations/
Image 1: Screenshot of one of SANAs articles about Ahmad al-Sharaa’s speech in the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus, December 8, 2025, marking the one year anniversary of what SANA refers to as “the liberation” (screenshot by the author)
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 on December 22, 2016. The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported on the reopening of schools, re-asphalting of damaged streets, recovering business life in once war-torn neighborhoods and other stories that fed into a narrative about the return of ‘normal life’ in Syria. While far from reflecting reality on the ground, the media focus on the reconstruction of the country became an important element in the constructed narrative about Syria being in a post-war state.
A particular feature at SANA was the coverage of ongoing reconstruction projects of important cultural heritage. In 2024, in the article “Reconstructing Ba’athist Syria through Cultural Heritage and State Media”, I investigated SANA’s coverage of the reconstruction of The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque and the old souq in Aleppo (Crone 2025). I argued that the Syrian Ba’athist state was utilizing the narratives of both the destruction and reconstruction of important cultural heritage: on the one hand, to prove the oppositional groups were barbaric terrorists; and on the other hand, to promote the state as the civilized protector of Syrian cultural history and world heritage, thus the natural successor of the ancient nation. Moreover, I argued that the narratives of reconstruction in Aleppo should be understood as an attempt to symbolically retake control over Aleppo by (re)connecting important national cultural heritage to the Ba’athist state.
Not long after I finished the article, Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’athist state became remnants of the past and new rulers had grabbed power in Syria. However, the topic of cultural heritage is as relevant as ever before. My argument still holds that the reconstruction of cultural heritage is part of “a battle over national symbols, narratives and memories, the outcome of which is of crucial importance in determining which Syria is to rise from the ruins” (Crone 2025). The fall of Bashar al-Assad – and with him the collapse of the Ba’athist state which was pivotal for the identity of post-colonial Syria – has created a need to renegotiate national identity. This is currently playing out in armed fighting, in political discussions, in social confrontations and in cultural battles. In this process, the role and meaning of national cultural heritage is (once again) up for contestation. What sites are considered important? What do they symbolize? And what political message should they embody?
In this blog post, I revisit SANA and its reporting on (the reconstruction of) sites of national cultural heritage. I take a look at how this has unfolded in the first year after the toppling of Assad to gain insights into the roles and meanings the new rulers in Syria envision for cultural heritage – from the past to the future. I find that in many ways, they appear to replicate the discourses and narratives of the Ba’athist Syrian state with the small adjustment of Damascus overtaking Aleppo’s key role in the Ba’athist post-war narrative. Although one might have expected that the new rulers wished to promote a different narrative about the past (for instance a more univocal focus on the Islamic parts of history), they appear to be promoting (or at least permitting) a multifaceted focus on the rich cultural heritage of Syria that continues former practices. I suggest that this serves to legitimize the rulers of the country by staging them as caretakers of Syria’s long and proud history, similar to the strategies used by the Baath state.
Below, I first introduce SANA and reflect on the role of cultural heritage in nation-building projects. I then look back at how SANA reported on the reconstruction of Aleppo’s three most important sites of cultural heritage, The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque, and the old souq, before moving on to examine differences and similarities in SANA’s post-Assad reporting.
SANA as a site of state propaganda
Since its foundation in 1965, SANA, the official, state-owned news agency in Syria, has been a central platform for propagating the ideological discourse of the state. Thus, they direct state media in general on how to report on current events. In the days leading up to December 8, 2024, its website, SANA’s website, suddenly became inaccessible and remained inactive for weeks. While the new rulers in Syria used Telegram, WhatsApp and other social media platforms as their main communication tools, SANA was quickly up and running again after a superficial makeover (mainly replacing the old Syrian national flag with the new). The website continued its previous role as a mouthpiece of the rulers; it reports on Ahmad al-Sharaa’s good deeds now, rather than those of Bashar al-Assad. Yet there seems to also be irony in this continuity. News articles from the Assad-era were still available on the website, and for those browsing the site, this collapse of successive ruling regimes in an online space created the schizophrenic experience of articles praising Bashar al-Assad performing his official duties next to praise of al-Sharaa’s latest accomplishments.
Image 2: Screenshot of SANA 11.11.25 that illustrates the peculiar situation where SANA at the same time is reporting on Ahmad al-Sharaa’s whereabouts and latest accomplishments while old stories from the time of Bashar al-Assad are still searchable at the website (the author).
The website was thoroughly remodeled and relaunched on August 22, 2025, promising independent and critical journalism. However, the co-existence of parallel realities at SANA continued as Assad-era articles remained searchable until the end of 2025. The peculiar phenomenon of having news stories from the two political eras available on the same site displayed in an absurd manner the disappointing tendency that SANA has continued its uncritical reporting on national politics and the state leader’s whereabouts. Likewise, it accentuated the continuation of previous rhetorical and visual communication styles – also when covering (reconstruction projects of) national cultural heritage.
Cultural heritage and (Ba’athist) nation building
Most nation states engage in the construction of “useable pasts” (Edgerton 2001) in order to build national identity and legitimize state-building. In post-colonial states in the Middle East and beyond, cultural heritage often plays a central role in this type of political project as it materializes imaginaries of ancient national history, thus naturalizing the postcolonial nation state. This was indeed the case for the Syrian Ba’athist state. Through its 61 years of rule, in different ways, the state has used the historical past of the area that today constitutes Syria to write about national history, thus constructing national narratives. As mentioned earlier, in the last years of the Ba’athist rule, destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage came to play a central role in the post-war Ba’athist narrative. Whereas monuments destroyed during the war (regardless of who the responsible actor was) served as proof that the opposition consisted of uncivilized terrorists, the following reconstruction initiated by the state (often in collaboration with international actors and organizations) proved Bashar al-Assad as the protector of Syrian cultural history and world heritage. In SANA, reconstruction projects of e.g. The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque, and the old souq in Aleppo became platforms for staging Bashar al-Assad as the man who could restore national order and re-establish civilization.
In addition to promoting al-Assad and the Ba’athist state as those who re-establish Syrian civilization, SANA’s coverage of the reconstruction projects also served to regain control over the symbolic meaning of national cultural heritage. The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque and the old souq in Aleppo had all been locations of intense fighting during the battle over Aleppo (2012-2016) while under the control of changing actors. Thus, the media reports of the ongoing reconstruction of these sites served to overwrite the years of war and assign a particular role to these national symbols within the state’s post-war narrative.
This was most spectacularly evident in the visual coverage of Bashar and Asma al-Assad’s visit to Aleppo in July 2022, together with their three children. The trip was staged as a happy reunion between the al-Assad lineage and the ancient city. Images of the family touring Aleppo quickly circulated the news stream, including cheerful images from the crowded and colorful (restored) old souq and more serious images from the presidential couple’s inspection of the ongoing reconstruction work at the Umayyad Great Mosque.
These and other images served to connect the Assad rule with historical monuments and places of symbolic importance in Aleppo – what Assmann calls ‘memorial signs’ (2008) – to regain control over the symbolic meaning of national cultural heritage, and thus over the city, that had been outside state control for four years (Munawar 2022). However, for such signs to be effective, as Halbwachs (1992) reminds us, they must operate within ‘social frames’; they must resonate with or have emotional meaning for people. The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque and the old souq in Aleppo were – and still are –examples of cultural heritage sites of strong significance for most Syrians, as they are loaded with symbolism not only in Syria but across the world. However, what they represent is less clear and potentially contested. This has been the case with other historical symbols that over time have acquired multilayered meanings while adapting to changing historical and political contexts. Moreover, when cultural heritage is damaged or destroyed during wartime, decisions about whether and how to reconstruct it add new layers of symbolism (Viejo-Rose 2011). Below, I move from SANA’s coverage of cultural heritage during the time of Bashar al-Assad to the time of Ahmad al-Sharaa to sketch out potential difference and similarities in how SANA narrates ‘the new Syria’.
Cultural heritage in ‘the new Syria’
Shortly after the Syrian Army had recaptured the rebel-held parts of Aleppo in December 2016, SANA posted photos of The Citadel decorated with an enormous (then) Syrian national flag and equally huge posters of Bashar al-Assad. Regaining control over this ancient monument of medieval Islamic fortress architecture – Aleppo’s hallmark and a cherished site of national and world cultural heritage – obviously mattered beyond its military value. However, The Citadel itself was damaged from the war, and only reopened in 2018. Already from the summer 2017, the city council arranged a number of concerts in the amphitheater situated behind the walls of The Citadel. SANA enthusiastically celebrated its reinstatement as Aleppo’s cultural center stressing that it symbolized how the city’s long history of civilization and steadfastness had defeated the terrorists while staging Ba’athist Syria as both the protector and perpetuator of Aleppo’s important historical legacy.
Serving as a scene for several official events, The Citadel has obviously maintained its high importance to the new rulers and has appeared frequently in SANA reporting during the year that has passed since the overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad. This was the case, for example, when Ahmad al-Sharaa visited Aleppo on Saturday, 29 November 2025, to participate in marking the one-year anniversary of the city’s liberation. Another example includes the official reopening of The Citadel two months prior, on September 29. At SANA, this was covered with multiple videos of the celebration taking place on the stage of the old amphitheater with speeches by the minister of culture, Mohammad Yassin al-Saleh and other important officials. Al-Saleh declared that the reopening of The Citadel was a “prominent symbol of recovery and revival”. The governor of Aleppo stated, “We reopen the gates of the citadel, for the history, the pride and the hope, and we open a new era made of the blood of martyrs, the patience of mothers and the dreams of children”. Other speakers stressed how the ancient monument symbolizes the steadfastness (sumud) of the Aleppian people. This article, The article, ends by concluding:
The Citadel of Aleppo is an ancient historical jewel that rose on its hill thousands of years ago to be an impregnable fortress and a stage for successive civilizations – from the Arameans and Greeks to the Umayyads, Ayyubids and Mamluks – with its towering walls, majestic gates and stones that embrace history. It has remained a symbol of the city’s steadfastness and pride. Today, the citadel opens again, not as a fortress for war, but as a beacon of culture and the arts, and a mirror that reflects Syria’s bright face to the world.
(author’s translation)
Despite the new political context, which of course is reflected in the statements and speeches quoted at SANA, the overall discourse in the coverage is surprisingly similar to that of the Assad-era. The coverage includes: the same images of an illuminated citadel and an amphitheater with musical performances, official speeches and a cheering audience; the same narratives of the citadel as a symbol of Aleppo’s ancient history, the Aleppians’ steadfastness and Syria’s proud civilization and culture; and, not least, the same ambition of connecting the almost 1000-year-old ancient military monument with the current rulers in power.
The old souq and the Omayyad Mosque in Aleppo have both received less attention at SANA than was the case in al-Assad’s post-war narrative; however, their Damascene counterparts – and Damascus in general – have appeared as important locations. This may not be surprising, as Syria’s new rulers had a less difficult task of gaining symbolic control over Aleppo than what could potentially be the case with Damascus, since it had remained under Assad’s control until the end of his rule. Thus, just as SANA through its reporting made an effort to reinstate Bashar al-Assad as having symbolic control over Aleppo’s ‘memorial signs’ after the Syrian Army had regained military control over the city in 2016, SANA has been working to place Ahmad al-Sharaa as having a connection with other important ‘signs’. Most importantly, of course, with its reporting on his first anniversary speech in the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus on December 8, 2025, they marked Bashar al-Assads flee to Russia and Ahmad al-Sharaa’s rise to power. The fact that he was able to address the Syrian population from the ultimate national and religious symbol – the Omayyad Mosque – proved his (partial!) success in ruling not just Idleb but all of Syria. SANA, of course, reported on the event by circulating images of the president from the Mosque as he gave a speech and performed the dawn prayer (wearing the same uniform as he did one year previously when he entered Damascus). Similar to the Assad family’s visit to old Aleppo a few years earlier, the images of al-Sharaa in old Damascus positions a contemporary leader within an ancient national history in order to strengthen his own political legitimacy and perform instant nation-building. In the case of al-Sharaa, his staging in the Umayyad Mosque also served to connect him to the Umayyad Empire, and thus, albeit subtly, spoke to the popular narrative of al-Sharaa representing the return of the Umayyads (see Holst’s introduction to this feature, Pierret’s contribution to this feature).
In a Damascus context, the reconstruction of cultural heritage obviously takes up a less prominent role in SANA reporting, since the city was neither bombed nor a site of intense fighting during the years of war. However, this has not discouraged the news agency from highlighting the historical treasures of the ancient capital – quite the contrary. Since the relaunch of SANA in August 2025, it has continued to promote and highlight cultural heritage in Damascus and beyond, depicting how the new rulers of the country are committed to preserve and protect this national heritage. SANA’s interest in the topic neatly corresponds with the official discourse. On the last day of 2025, the Syrian Directorate of Antiquities and Museums launched a new national strategy for the protection of Syria’s cultural heritage. In reporting SANA’s coverage on the strategy, they highlight how this initiative aims at remedying the previous regime’s mismanagement and neglect, They cite the directorate for stressing that
The Syrian cultural heritage, both the material and the non-material, constitutes one of the main pillars of the national identity and the memory of the Syrian society, which carries of civilizational depth that extends for thousands of years.
(author’s translation from Arabic)
The message seems to be clear: post-Assad Syria is a smooth and natural continuation of the country’s long and proud history. Syria remains the cradle of civilization, and the Syrian state is the guardian of important cultural heritage. Thus, the same, familiar narrative from the time of the Ba’athist state continues to serve as an important element for the Syrian state in consolidating national identity and legitimizing political power.
Christine Crone is an assistant professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is a Middle East scholar working on Arab media. She is the author of Pan-Arab News TV Station al-Mayadeen: The New Regressive Leftist Media (Peter Lang, 2020). She has published on topics such as TV drama, Syrian media and documentaries, and the use of images in Arab media.
References
Assmann, Aleida (2008). “Transformations between History and Memory”. Social Research, 75 (1): 49–72.
Crone, Christine (2025). “Reconstructing Baʾathist Syria through Cultural Heritage and State Media”. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 17 (4): 295–315.
Crone, Christine (2023). “Re-narrating the Past, Producing the Present and Unlocking
Edgerton, Gary R. (2001) “Television as History: A Different Kind of History Altogether”. In: Edgerton and Rollins (eds), Television History: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age. Pp. 1-16. The University Press of Kentucky.
Halbwachs, Maurice (1992). On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Munawar, Nour A. (2022). “Reconstructing Narratives: The Politics of Heritage in Contemporary Syria”. Journal of Social Archaeology 22 (2): 172–190. https://doi.org/10.1177/14696053221073992.
Viejo-Rose, Dacia (2011). “Destruction and Reconstruction of Heritage: Impacts on
Memory and Identity”. In: Anheier, Helmut and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (eds.), Heritage,
Cite as: Crone, C. 2026. “Constructing post-Ba’athist Syria through Cultural Heritage: the role of the Syrian Arab News Agency” Focaalblog March 23. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/23/christine-crone-constructing-post-baathist-syria-through-cultural-heritage-the-role-of-the-syrian-arab-news-agency/
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.
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.
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/
From Andheri to Goregaon—it’s five kilometers. Half an hour by Ambassador in the north Mumbai traffic. Windows down—through them, the usual fumes: chai, wood smoke, diesel exhaust. Plus, the blinding, crunchy, almost chewable dust of the industrial area, a landscape half abandoned, half under-construction. Taxiwala grows edgy—why, Toma can’t fathom. Dumps passengers on an impulse: “New Standard Engineering Grounds”, he says, “ahead.” Ahead it is, indeed—a twenty-minute walk. Add the heat to the scents and more of the dust.
About twenty paces in the queue for registration at the entrance stood the founder of world-systems analysis. He was invited to the event to address the crowd. Toma missed him somehow, couldn’t say “hi.”
There was no category for Toma at the event. He was hoping for “attendee” or “participant,” but—no, no such thing. He became, thanks to the helpful student worker at the registration desk, a “delegate.” The best she could do. So it said on the vibrantly designed tag, hanging from Toma’s neck. Two names: Toma and country.
Speaking of which, he is from two countries, at least. One of those is a titanic, the other a dinghy. She chose the dinghy for him. Upon exit at the end of a long day, another nice person at the same desk confirmed—there were no other “delegates” from country dinghy.
Toma had given a lot of thought to the very idea of this jamboree. How do you organize a “social forum”—for the world, no less, without an underlying theme—other than, supposedly, a vague call for resistance, so to speak, to global capital? And what does it do to that event of resistance that it is sponsored by major multinational corporations? Mind you, a counter-event, held just across the highway, asserted that exact critique. The two events together seemed to “cover” much of the political left of south Asia.
Indeed, how to be “anti-Davos?” besides, what do they do in Davos in the first place? Toma had no idea. The Mumbai event turned out to be a pageantry of all the worthwhile causes good people could think of. Attendance was expected to be 75 thousand. Conversation on the ground went up to as high as 130.000 “delegates” from 130 countries.
“I didn’t quite realize Mumbai was this far,” a group of people chatted in a cluster that somehow ended up including Toma. “Far . . . from where?”, he interjected an old joke from Budapest. Polite amusement, a smile or two. They had an accent Toma could not quite place within the UK.
There was breathtakingly little water for so many people. Toma saw two taps on the entire grounds. Plus, there were of course the drinking water tanks provided by the municipal authority. Neither to be had without boiling. Everybody ran around, hence, with store bought drinking water in plastic bottles, half a dollar per liter—at an event that deplored, among other things, the depletion of the environment, the commercialization of a basic human necessity like drinking water, and pollution of the planet with single use plastic containers.
The Forum was a gigantic café—without tables. A global / adda. \
Toma chatted with hundreds of other “delegates,” mainly young people from Asia. Gaped at Vietnamese students parading with a two-story flag of their country. Talked with South Indian and Latin American activists fighting the good fight against Coca Cola robbing their regions of drinking water. (Or was it Pepsi? Toma can never tell those two apart.) People who organize artisanal cooperatives. Artists of all kinds. Activists for NGOs of people displaced by hydroelectric dams, airports, shopping malls. A gentleman presented a contraption that looked like an aluminum wash basin but glittering inside: It gathers the rays of the Sun to cook a meal. He demonstrated that on the spot. Toma was distracted by something, he didn’t stick around to taste it.
A man with a broad smile approached Toma. He had a mustache and was wearing gauze-thin white cotton tied around his head, a linen shirt and a dhoti. He was very interested in the status of the agrarian question in “Toma’s country.” How peasants are doing in country dinghy. It was important to him, he said, because he knows the peasantries of their two countries could learn much from each other.
Toma made a quick calculation. As far as he knows, eleven of his sixteen great-great-grandparents were born serfs. Then came the abolition of serfdom, capitalism—of Kakanien, the Habsburg variety—two world wars, fascism, holocaust and socialisms, in the plural. Then back to a neoconservative, deeply confused, angry and desperate kind of capitalism. Now everyone in Toma’s extended family lives in cities. The most sweeping form of social change in country dinghy over the last century is that there are hardly any peasants left—other than in one-step removed, virtual forms as cultural movements aim to “preserve” and “re-cycle” peasant culture, especially music and dance, in urban life. In the country of Bartók—who railed against this kind of appropriation—the culture of the peasantry is now re-used as folklorism, exoticizing the lives of the descendants of the people who created that art in the first place.
They discussed the legacies of serfdom and the “peasant question” in Soviet history. And that more-than-half of the peoples of south Asia that hover precariously between peasant near-self-sufficiency and market-driven farming. How the average Indian peasant walks to polling stations to be able to cast a vote. Two hours, both ways. GMO seed. Child malnutrition. Toma’s new comrade had read Chayanov enthusiastically and mentioned Lenin a couple of times. He gave Toma a card. “Secretary General of the Peasant Trade Union Confederation of India.”
There was visible discomfort—among the Europeans. Not so much because of the heat or the dust. Two other things. One was unspoken but Toma felt it. The weirdness of standing out: Their head loomed above almost everyone else in the great sea of global “delegates.” Comrades in terms of politics, moral values, aesthetics, all the good things, with their pink and sweating heads sticking out. Because of their infrequency at the event, they seemed to feel on display. It’s not just that there was staring—there is much more of that on a tram in Kolkata or in a bus in Delhi. They came here to swim in the sea of comrades from the global south, after all. To be in the company of the like-minded from the rest-of-the-world. That was the whole point. There they are now, this is it.
The truly unpleasant thing was realizing that they had not even thought about the possibility of feeling strange. Their own reaction seemed to be a genuine surprise to them. They may well have traveled outside Europe before. But that’s not like this. They saw crowds in Istanbul or Cairo. But this is not that. The crowds on earlier trips were at a distance. Possibly behind windows of buses, or hotel lobbies. Here, everyone is so exposed to a truly intense mix of languages—bodily and spoken—that it is easy to feel lost. More body-to-body contact on a January afternoon than they have in an average year. And all that is driven by rules they don’t quite understand. They could, of course have read about those rules—but they didn’t quite think of it. It didn’t occur to them.
Losing the ability to sort everything out—who is who and what is what—they could neither wipe the discomfort away nor give it a name. For, that might be considered “rude”. . . Too honest. Not to mention admitting defeat, the thought that this corporeal idea of solidarity is not working for them.
There was, then, the second discomfort— and that one was indeed spoken of very much. A metaphor for all other metaphors.
“Child labor.”
The horror.
Who could be in favor of child labor? The abysmal life. The barefoot, scantily dressed, small bodies toiling in the crowd. “They should be in school.”
Mind you, at the event, begging was not allowed. Panhandlers were chased away by the private jawans, armed with long batons, very eager to use them, stationed visibly at each entrance. Toma wondered to what extent the jawans-with-truncheons “solution” to “the begging problem” was cleared with the organizing committee—whose charge it was to assure the event stayed on course toward its haughty goals of global equality. For sure, the clubs were used in the outside world—the world that these seventy-five thousand to one hundred and thirty thousand people all came to protest.
“Are the beatings OK if they happen outside the gates?” Toma is asking questions like that. “I could never bear being on that Organizing Committee.”
There was, however, plenty of tea and coffee on offer everywhere, brought to everyone—a little more to the “delegates” with lower levels of melanin, a skin color situation the hot beverage workers were very familiar with. Mumbai is a truly tourism-infested city. Those delegates might even give a 100% tip on the 5-rupee price—for the tea poured from large pots to small throwaway plastic cups, a nice counterpoint to the event protesting plastic pollution. All that service was rendered by tiny, unbearably cute children.
It struck Toma, as he stood there, amidst all the chatter about child labor, that the conversation never went past the initial revulsion and moral panic. All those people, supposedly the best the global north has produced, armed with sharp critiques of hydrocarbon colonialism, or global militarism, or product chains, using their privileged access to knowledge for the best possible political purpose, had a hard time discerning what it is that they are looking at when they see five-six-year-old proletarians doing truly labor-intensive service. For them. That the children’s toil might be supporting the ambitious strategies—of rising above the rural survival threshold—of entire families in a village a stone’s throw away. That the 100% tip—the generous transfer of 14 instead of 7 dollar-cents in exchange for a small cup of tea—will teach those children, and their adult relatives, that they should be selling tea for the rest of their lives. To low-melanin strangers.
That is where the global critique came to a complete halt. Right at the line around the European “delegates’” own global selves. The thought of the violence of their own retirement portfolios, amplified by the privileges bestowed upon them by their melanin-deficiency, just didn’t seem to come to them. They had spent the equivalent of ten, twenty times each of those children’s extended families’ total annual income—just flying to Mumbai.
“Was I the only person having those thoughts?”, Toma ponders today. Maybe they also had them—and filed them along with all other instances of discomfort, under a rubric labeled “not-to-be-talked-about.”
The plenary session took place on the maidan—a meadow the size of several football fields. It consisted of a large stage before a giant audience space, the latter covered with industrial tarp sheets tied together, a quilt to seat the righteous of the world. An enormous navy-blue arena of plastic—encircled, once the crowd descended on it, by layers upon layers of sandals, shoes, flip-flops. Footwear of all kinds. As if entering a person’s home, or a temple, the participants took off and left “outside” their foot covering. A show of respect. And keeping the oilcloth perhaps a tiny bit less dusty.
A group of ten-fifteen Italian students arrived, chatting merrily. Guessing from the clothes, on a return leg of a roundtrip flight between Milan and Kathmandu. Locs, woven sacks, the works. Asserting the power of a supposedly righteous kind of appropriation galore. Leaving their shoes on, they entered the field. The crowd opened for them, forming a human alley. They took the offer matter-of-factly, went right to the middle, and sat down. Shoes on, soles facing outward. The crowd absorbed them. Toma lost sight of them.
Speeches: politicians, progressive intellectuals, strongly encouraging the audience that “we should do more.” Toma is not sure who the “we” is, and more of what. Then came Junoon, a politically engaged band from Pakistan. Performing in India. A geopolitical first. Palpable excitement overall and an exuberant audience response, especially among the crowd from the Subcontinent.
On the last day, the shift of the jawans-with-the-truncheons at the gates ended at six pm. The World Forum became even more social, with the arrival of a thousand or so panhandlers through the now un-jawan-ed, truncheons-free gates. Likely not the sociality the organizers had in mind.
Toma flew back to country dinghy from Mumbai two days later. At the airport, he was selected for a “detailed customs check” by a gentleman dressed in an immaculate white uniform. He took Toma to a separate room—his luggage had already been placed on a table. The officer reached into Toma’s now-open suitcase and, with the gesture of a magician, he pulled out Toma’s tag—Toma’s name and country dinghy—and asked, “you like that kind of thing?”
A rhetorical question. The officer turned to his men and quipped, half-Hindi-half-English—Toma could make it out, the officer probably wanted it that way—how Toma came here “to allay his White guilt”. A real joker. Polite giggles from the men to their superior officer, fixed stares at Toma. He liberated Toma from his remaining rupees. A “processing fee,” he winked. He tossed a small tip to the man who “handled” Toma’s suitcase. The rest disappeared into his uniform. Very politely he walked Toma to his gate, doing small talk in a self-ironical tone. He had a truly sharp and witty sense of humor.
By the time Toma arrived at his gate he learned that his seat got re-assigned. On board he realized he was sitting next to a passenger who kept talking to him nervously throughout the entire eight-hour flight.
The World Social Forum has never returned to Mumbai.
Rumor has it—it’s the child labor.
The World Social Forum (WSF) is a global social movement organized as an open environment, a meeting space for activists, NGOs and progressive social movements committed to democracy, equality and preservation of the planet, in opposition to the “World Economic Forum”—the meetings of owners and management of big capital and top brass of the world’s most powerful states held annually in Davos, Switzerland. The first WSF meeting was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. The event in Mumbai, India—held twenty years ago—was the first time WSF had its global assembly outside Brazil.
With the triumph of Javier Milei in Argentina’s November 2023 national election, the country has followed the contemporary global trend of electing far-right governments. Through his frequent television appearances as an “economic expert”, Milei successfully mobilized voters against the country’s dominant political elites, which he denigrated as “la casta” (“the caste”). Ordinary Argentines, in this narrative, were being cheated and disserved by an elite class who benefited from a wasteful and inefficient state. Milei’s rhetoric, which solicited votes from workers and the poor, invoked a utopian vision of society driven by free competition between agents whose performance in markets is the only cause of their success or failure. In this vision, the capitalist market naturally rewards the best, while the “State” and other “collectivist” forms of what Milei deems to be “autocracy” corrupt the market and nourish what Milei labels “parasites”.
Through a virulent and aggressive discourse, the newly elected government and its followers have recoded social cleavages to divide and cast in opposition different sections of labor. Those employed by the State and by cooperatives, whose incomes come from social assistance, are deemed “lazy,” “useless,” and “unproductive” and are accused of taking advantage of “good people” who are oppressed by excessive taxes and regulations. Thus, cooperative “Popular Economy” organizations (known as piqueteros) and public sector workers (including teachers, scientists, and medical doctors) are both deemed responsible for State waste. Social leaders and union representatives, in particular, have been designated as part of “the caste” and accused of defending their personal interests over those of workers. Arguing in this way, libertarians, like Milei, have denied that individual interests can be advanced by collective organization.
This Manichean vision of evil collectivists and angelic individualists underpins Milei’s idea of crisis. In arguing that the nation was in a “terminal crisis” because of the political and economic order of “la casta”, Milei has promised respite for suffering Argentines by radically reshaping the relationship between the “economy”, “society”, and “politics”. In presenting himself as an outsider, he capitalized on the widespread social discontent, frustrations, and disappointments of ordinary Argentines. Milei sought consent for radical liberalization schemes, and his November 2023 electoral victory appears to have validated his agenda. Judging by the electoral results, consent to these policies seems firmly rooted in working people. According to survey data, Milei gained the vote of over half of informal and formal workers and almost 64% of the self-employed. However, only 45 days after Milei took office, 1.5 million people mobilized across the country in a general strike against the liberalisation program, preceded and followed by a series of local and sectoral protests and strikes.
This scenario raises some questions: Do voting patterns in the election indicate that Argentine workers have taken a profound “right turn”? Alternatively, is Milei’s victory only a contingent rejection of the prior government at a critical conjuncture? Are post-election protests an expression of fear by “the caste” (as the government claims)? Or have workers broken with the assumption that radical marketization is the answer to their individual problems? And what lessons can we draw about working-class dynamics from prior moments of popular consent to liberalisation? In this post, I attempt to answer these questions by revisiting an earlier moment in Argentina’s history, when President Carlos Menem took office and implemented sweeping liberalisation measures.
Memories of Yesterdays: The 90s reloaded?
In many respects, the current sociopolitical scenario resembles the early 1990s, when Menem began his first term in office amid a hyperinflation crisis and launched an aggressive program of economic liberalisation. It was a time of “globalization” when the pro-market “Washington Consensus” was globally ascendent. The neoliberal road that Argentina took was part of a global attempt to stabilize a shaky geopolitical order. The program was broadly supported by Argentina’s main corporations and the entire capitalist class, which launched a broad offensive against labor rights and working conditions, backed by a narrative of “cultural change”, which mirrored official discourses about “modernization” and “being integrated into the world”. During two terms in office, Menem’s government reshaped the conditions of reproduction of Argentina’s working people, deepening their monetization and privatization, while reconfiguring the country’s labor markets.
There are significant commonalities in working people’s experience between the moment of contested “restructuring” of global capitalism in the 1980s-1990s and now. Revisiting that earlier moment can therefore help us better understand popular consent to Milei’s pro-market, right-wing policies in the present. Below, I outline these commonalities, drawing on data from fieldwork conducted in 2000-2002, 2005-2007, 2010-2012 and 2014-2018 with steelworkers (Soul 2015), their communities and their unions, as well as data from ongoing fieldwork with workers and communities linked to the agro-industrial sector.
The politics of Argentina’s neoliberal (Menem) and libertarian (Milei) governments are distinguished by their sweeping attempts to eliminate all state-backed and collectively shaped conditions that support the reproduction of working people. Upon taking power in 1989, Menem sent to Congress two bills that deregulated state education, health, and security institutions, and enabled labor flexibilization. Similarly, President Milei issued a “Decree of Necessity and Urgency” (DNU) and has sent to Congress an ambitious bill entitled “Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines”. Together, these measures aim to enact a massive social-political reset by removing all “collectivist” and “regulationist” mechanisms, while de-regulating the economy, privatizing social provisions, and dismantling institutions that mediate market competition in areas like health services, education, sports, and cultural production. Both the Menem and Milei governments promoted far-reaching labor reforms aimed at facilitating dismissals, extending probation periods, making working hours more flexible, and expanding informal labor relations. They also intended to restrict the right to strike and union activity in the workplace, to impose individual bargaining over collective bargaining, and to cut unions’ financial resources.
In the “private” sphere, enterprises and companies during both periods entered a dynamic characterised by workplace closures, employee lay-offs and mass dismissals, new managerial strategies and technological innovations, and prominent claims about “cultural change” by managers and businessmen. Both then and now, corporate spokespersons asserted a need for radical changes. Recently, Paolo Rocca, the CEO of Techint Group, one of Argentina’s major industrial corporations, expressed support for the government’s plans for “resetting” Argentina’s economic structure, and asked other businessmen to commitment to “sacrifices” that would be needed to enhance national performance in a competitive world market. In workplaces, employers are already enforcing the bill’s provisions, overruling those stated in existing collective agreements, and thereby undermining the working conditions of new employees.
These measures, implemented amid a post-pandemic employer offensive and rising inflation, have been justified on the basis of three ideological claims, which I have also identified among steelworkers and will examine below. However, the outcome has not been unambiguous consent to these measures by ordinary workers. This is because the threats posed to their material conditions of reproduction have also motivated workers, even individuals who voted for Milei, to struggles against these measures.
Changes are “necessary and unavoidable.”
When I discussed the Menem years with anyone employed in the state-owned steel plant where I conducted my research in the 2000s and 2010s or in the surrounding community, it was surprising how persuaded they were about the necessity of restructuring. A common refrain was: “We knew it was this or nothing. Things could not continue as they were. There were no other solutions.”
In 1989, when Menem took office, annual inflation was over 3000%. In 1990, it was over 2000%. As a result, it was impossible to schedule industrial production. But it was also impossible to budget for family expenses, like food, schooling, holidays, or the purchase of household appliances. A Thatcherist belief that “there is no alternative,” which working families immersed in chaotic hyperinflation adopted, paved the way for consent to Menem’s reforms. Workers knew the offensive was coming. But they felt it was pointless to resist.
After COVID-19 restrictions ended in 2021, Argentina’s economic situation worsened. The government’s financial difficulties and escalating inflation became topics of everyday discussions. In 2023, when Milei won the election, formal employment and incomes for ordinary workers were decreasing. Most new jobs created in recent years have been informal, self-employed, or based on individual, unprotected contracts (monotributistas). The increased precariousness of ordinary Argentines has fed into a sense of suspension, instability, and “dislocation” (Polanyi 1947; Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018).
As in the 1990s, the popular assumption is that regressive restructuring is necessary to restore stable conditions of reproduction. Milei has turned this assumption into a government program, while endeavouring to transform the silent resignation of ordinary Argentines into active consent.
Sacrifice is necessary to recalibrate the effort-reward equation.
Both, Milei’s and Menem’s governments asked the population to “sacrifice” for the nation in order to remedy a terminal national crisis. When he took office, Milei asserted that it would take two years of sacrifice to abandon decadence and to embark on the road to prosperity. On Christmas Day 2023, the Minister of Economy posted on X a message to the population, thanking them for their sacrifice and support for austerity measures. By “sacrifice” he meant enduring the negative impact of a 118% devaluation of the Peso Argentino, the deregulation of prices for basic goods, and the cutting of food assistance to community organizations.
The notion and logic of sacrifice is at the core of many workers’ effort-reward equation: the renunciation of immediate pleasure, wellbeing, and fun will allow for future material, social and affective achievements. The concrete contents of “sacrifice” change from generation to generation, and between different labor situations. However, “rewards” remains quite the same: better living conditions, understood as owning a house, getting a car, and raising children without privations. The relationship between efforts and rewards mediated by “sacrifice” is intimately connected to a valuation logic: getting valuable things requires effort. Therefore, working people’s well-being is always related to “sacrifice”, and sacrifice is linked to hard work.
As increasing aspects of workers’ daily reproduction are monetized and privatized, neoliberal hegemony has restructured the effort-reward equation. This reinforces individualistic assessments of the effort-reward equation and devalues remaining collective practices and institutions involved in daily reproduction. Over the last years, the neoliberal effort-reward equation has been cracking due to increasing inflation, decreasing power purchase, and worsening working conditions. Therefore, many workers have experienced a sense of their own effort being under-valued, while that of “lazy and useless” people is overvalued (Kalb 2022).
Milei promised to restore the effort-reward equation after a period of “sacrifice” marked by austerity policies. Far from rejecting Milei’s appeal as unfair and manipulative, working people in Argentina see it as a call for collective sacrifice necessary to restore the real value of things and of effort. The assumption that public workers or popular economy cooperatives “steal” a share of the social product that they do not contribute to producing underpins the moral vindication of personal deprivation: “I pay what I can afford; nobody gives me anything.” The perceived need for a temporary sacrifice thus informs social acceptance of Milei’s agenda.
Order must be restored to market relations.
Menem and Milei both advocated radical social marketization as the path to a social order that promised individual fulfilment, well-being, and happiness. To this end, private property is key. The logical chain of private property – market relations – freedom was established by classic liberalism. Neoliberal and libertarian discourses have intensified this claim and its relevance for establishing social order. Consequently, Milei’s government has attempted to remove regulations on prices and on public service fees that have been crucial to working people’s reproduction. In claiming that these regulations create a social fiction that devalues peoples’ efforts, Milei argues that their removal is necessary to the restore the “natural” market order of things—that is, to restore the “true” value of individual effort.
Managerial policies have similarly promoted individualization as a way to erode collective practices that support the power of unions in workplaces. An assumption shared by workers in the 1990s and now is that their effort is devalued because of conditions that trade unions have created to protect lazy people. For example, subcontracted workers see the devaluation of their own effort as correlated to the “privileges” enjoyed by permanent workers. Consequently, in times of crisis, competition among workers (for a job, promotion, or bonus) intensifies.
The power of this logic lies in its general character: the “people” are abstract market actors who can become rich through their independent effort. The centrality given to individual initiative partly counteracts the daily sense of powerlessness and failure that working people feel when trying to achieve their goals and obtain “rewards”. The promise of success through individual effort is thus attractive not just for informal precarious workers, but also for formal workers suffering deteriorating working conditions, unfair taxes, and the devaluation of their wages.
The persuasiveness of this logic is based on the material aspects of social reproduction under capitalism. Currency devaluation and inflation not only de-structure everyday lives but are powerful mechanisms for increasing the appropriation of surplus value from working people to corporations, managers, and business owners. By presenting “free market” relations as objective and natural, neoliberals before and libertarians today can present the full deployment of “the market” as a condition for resetting conditions of reproduction, and for re-situating individuals in their appropriate social location. This entails a fabulous recoding of relations of exploitation, dispossession, and violence, and the de-legitimization of collective solutions to common problems.
Silent consent and popular unrest
In sum, I argue that recent dislocations in Argentina underpin consent for pro-market policies. On the threshold of neoliberal and libertarian governments, Argentinian working people experienced dislocations rooted in the “impersonal” and “abstract” mechanisms of inflation, stagnation, and devaluation. Hyperinflation, conceived as “monetary violence” (Bonnet 2008), paved the way for neoliberal consent, while steady stagnation, deepened by the pandemic, eroded the “market” capacities of ordinary people. Since capitalist market relations are the background of social reproduction, the crisis created serious obstacles to ordinary people’s everyday reproduction. That is why the “normalisation” of market relations – even if it entails “sacrifice” – appears to be a viable route to a fair equation of effort and reward. The individualisation that this logic promotes is understood by people as increasing their control over their lives. This logic seems to be especially persuasive for young informal workers. However, in promoting marketization, competition, and individualization as the driving forces of working people’s reproduction, the government must destroy the dense network of cooperative and collective links that underlie working people’s everyday lives.
The general strike on 24 January 2024 was the highest point of post-election popular mobilization. Since then, a series of collective actions have raised a broad array of demands over, for example, public education, social assistance, protection for community organizations, and public transport tariffs. These demands go beyond labor conditions and wage claims. They highlight working people’s desire to preserve a non-commodified sphere of reproduction, and for core democratic rights. For the time being, resistance to Milei’s policies lacks a more expansive political agenda to contest “market relations” as the core of everyday reproduction. Nonetheless, Milei cannot easily discredit the social unrest as just “the caste” defending its “privileges”. It is too soon to assume that consent for market liberalization has been eroded and that those who voted for Milei are now mostly in the streets. But at the very least, the general strike has shown that complete marketization is a contested project. Hopefully, in the days ahead, in the struggle over capitalist restructuring, working people will manage to forge their own “resetting”—one that goes beyond the market as “the natural order of things”.
Julia Soul is a researcher at CEIL – CONICET Argentina. Her current research is about crisis and transformation of the working class in Argentina and Latin America since neoliberalism. She has conducted fieldwork with steelworkers in Argentina, and México and in international unions for more than 15 years, and with agribusiness workers since 2022. She has been a member of Taller de Estudios Laborales since 2002.
References
Alberto, Bonnet (2008) La hegemonía menemista. El neoconservadurismo en la Argentina. Editorial Prometeo. CABA
Kalb, Don (2023) “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 23(1), 204–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12484
Soul, Julia (2015) SOMISEROS. Configuración y devenir de un colectivo obrero. Editorial Prohistoria. Rosario
Cite as: Soul, Julia. 2024. “Between Confrontation and Silent Discipline: Working-Class Dilemmas under Javier Milei’s Far-Right Government in Argentina” Focaalblog 8 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/03/08/julia-soul-between-confrontation-and-silent-discipline-working-class-dilemmas-under-javier-mileis-far-right-government-in-argentina/
On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the recently privatized and formerly publicly owned carrier of Hellenic Organization of Railways. The word ‘Assassins’ and the phrase ‘Your profits, our deaths’ were written on the walls of the headquarters amidst clashes with the police.
On the morning of that day, Greece had woken up to devastating news. During the night, a passenger train headed to Thessaloniki from Athens, mostly carrying students, collided with a freight train traveling in the opposite direction. The collision was so fierce that the first two wagons were literarily pulverized, leaving 57 dead. As it turned out, an inexperienced Stationmaster with limited equipment at his disposal had manually put the two trains on the same track by mistake. For a full twelve minutes, passengers and personnel on both trains were on collision course without any human or non-human intelligence detecting it. In the following days much more serious and larger rallies and riots followed.
‘Mitsotakis, fuck you!’ – the original condition
The crowd, amongst others, was chanting a melodic slogan ‘Mitsotakis, fuck yοu!’. This vulgar slogan had first emerged during the big forest fires of 2021 when the wooded northern region of Evia Island and the forests of Parnitha mountain in the north of Athens had been abandoned to burn due to a peculiar “general evacuation” policy. New Democracy, the conservative governing party, had won the elections of 2019 to an extent by utilizing another horrible catastrophe, the fires of Eastern Attica in 2018. At that time, New Democracy blamed the governing SYRIZA party for failing to save the lives of the 103 who died in the fire. However, instead of trying to reinforce the civil protection infrastructures and increase the budget for fire brigades and forestry service, New Democracy has preferred to recruit a few thousand new police officers and thus enforce a heavy policing of forest fires. With the new policy, entire municipalities are evacuated by force so as to avoid deaths by all means in order to come out with a lower body count than the previous government.
The consequence of this policy of evacuation and abandonment was not only the destruction of forests, but also of agricultural land, flocks of animals, bees and entire villages that burned to ashes as nobody was there to protect them (on the fires and the archaeological heritage see Poulimenakos & Dalakoglou 2021 in FocaalBlog). As TV channels sent their crews to report from the evacuated towns and villages of Evia, someone videobombed a live broadcast and stood behind the reporter shouting, ‘Mitsotaki, fuck you!’, in a spontaneous expression of anger towards the evacuation policy that had destroyed his livelihood. Soon, “Mitsotakis, fuck you!”, became a slogan with a melody, chanted by football fans during games and by audiences at music concerts. To understand the rapid nationwide spread and popularity of this anthem, we now take a closer look at the New Democracy government record.
The Mitsotakis government had applied the same principle of minimum death tolls at any cost during the Covid-19 pandemic by enforcing one of the hardest lockdowns in the western world with curfews and severely restricted mobility under state surveillance. For many months, every citizen had to send a text message to the Ministry of Interior Affairs and give a “valid” reason before leaving their house. Defectors were heavily fined by the police. As with the forest fires, now the systematic destruction of health care infrastructures under the austerity regime imposed after the financial crash was offset by calling in the police as a civil protection mechanisms and the government’s main tool for controlling the pandemic.
“Mitsotakis, fuck you!” – the current condition
These structural continuities of policing (rather than resolving) an infrastructural crisis explain why one week after the train crash tragedy, on March 8th, Greece saw the biggest popular mobilization since the 2010-2015 era of insurrections against the imposition of structural adjustment programs by the IMF-EU-ECB troika. The main rallying cry of the protests was the phrase “text me when you get there”, a reference to the overprotective Greek family relations symbolized by frequent parental requests to send messages when travelling (even for over-30s). Now used by the protesters, the phrase is a tragic and powerful reference to mourning parents who will never receive a reply from their children who were on the train.
Image 1: Photo from one of the many demonstrations on the 8th of March. The sign reads: “text me when you get there”. Source: alphavita blogspot
The protests were so massive and persistent that they forced the Prime Minister to postpone the upcoming elections for an undetermined period. Meanwhile, the government’s political communication experts massively underestimated the train tragedy’s impact on Greek public opinion. Mitsotakis’ initial government statement blamed the accident on the stationmaster and omitted any reference to years of chronic under-investment in traffic infrastructures during the privatization of the railway company. This only increased public anger. An alliance of trade unions declared a general strike, whilst pupils occupied their schools and students their universities. Within five days, the government’s public relations experts advised Mitsotakis to accept partial responsibility to calm things down. Yet again the obnoxiousness and arrogance of the PM and his cabinet led to another PR catastrophe when Mitsotakis stated that the 57 victims of the train crash had ‘sacrificed’ themselves in order to improve national railways, flanked by the Minister for Development who called the 57 deaths ‘an opportunity’ for the country. With no time left for the government or the railway company to come up with another damage control strategy, people on social media, in neighborhoods and work places saw the train crash as an emblem of the precarization of everyday life after more than 13 years of extreme neoliberal government budget cuts.
“Don’t you dare to put the blame on an isolated human error”, or, “we live by chance in this country”, and, “this was not an accident but a murder”, were popular expressions that linked mourning and anger with a demand for exposure of underlying causes of the incident such as chronic degradation of railway infrastructures, budget cuts, staff shortages, lack of automated security systems that could correct human errors and prevent accidents. The poor state of other hard infrastructures came to light, contradicting the neoliberal mantra that service standard would skyrocket after privatizations. The German-owned airports in Greece’s peripheral cities suffer from staff and electronic equipment shortages while foreign equity investment in the Chinese-owned port of Piraeus never reached the promised level. The carefully crafted hegemonic narrative of private sector supremacy over the old state-controlled economy that had gradually gained control of hearts and minds (Mavris 2017) since the Greek crisis fell apart like a house of cards. Recent opinion polls show a reversal of political preferences with the ruling party losing significant ground amongst a general decline of trust in capitalist democracy.
Greece’s Inverted Shock Doctrine
What is happening in Greece today seems to be the exact opposite of what Naomi Klein argued in her stellar book on the “Shock doctrine” (2007). According to Klein, the severity of an immense collective trauma leads to numbness and disorientation that freezes collective action and presents excellent opportunities for the ruling classes to impose otherwise highly unpopular policies. In Greece, disorientation and numbness characterized society during the long period of inflation, privatizations, budget cuts, and impoverishment since 2008. Yet, these processes seemed abstract, confusingly linked to both local and global economic processes, and, hence, difficult to pinpoint in space and time. That vagueness certainly ended with the collective trauma of the train crash. The tragic crumble of a very material and tangible element of public transport infrastructure, similar to the earlier case of the Evia Island forest fires, turned into a metonymy for the crumbling relations between the Greek public, society, on the one hand, and the alliance of private capital and the state apparatus on the other hand. As we know from ethnographic research, “infrastructures are a principle materialization of the relationship between people (citizens and non-citizens alike) and otherwise abstract state and supra-state authorities” (Dalakoglou 2016:823). Infrastructures consist of the realm where the social contract between a state and its citizenry is taking tangible forms and is felt in the everyday life. It is the realm where the game of hegemony is most likely to be gained or challenged (Srnicek 2014).
Another crucial dimension of the conjuncture within which the massive mobilizations against the state-capital ruling class alliance now take place is that in recent weeks Greeks learned that for the first time in history residential properties are no longer protected by law from dispossession even at rather insignificant household debt levels. The Greek Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of private equity funds, allowing property auctions to redeem household loans purchased from banks as initial lenders, leaving hundreds of thousands who have struggled to repay their mortgages in despair about their future and another crucial aspect of the national social fabric in distress.
The residential house in Greece is more than bricks and mortar that put a roof over one’s head. It represents intra-generational solidarity and strong family bonds, with parents struggling to buy a house to provide economic security for their children. In other words, the house represents a form of informal social security provided by the family rather than the state. Typical to the substitution of an absent welfare state with informal family solidarity in Mediterranean societies, Greece never had significant numbers of council housing like the UK for example. Family solidarity provided a safety net in difficult times and certainly so during the recent 13-years long crisis with people in their 30s or even 40s living with their parents or grandparents.
Infinite density and the specificity of neoliberal austerity
We argue that the tragic train crash made visible the specific and tangible failure of public infrastructure and thus gave austerity specificity in time and space. The disaster encapsulates an “infinite density” of societal deadlock between the protagonists of privatization and austerity on the one hand and the very fabric of the social contract in Greece on the other hand, in which every form of social consensus is collapsing. With the neoliberal state’s privatized public services failing to fulfill the promises of upgraded public infrastructures to the benefit all and the informal forms of social reproduction gradually dismantled, the Greek nation-state moves towards a power vacuum. It is no coincidence that the majority of protesters are young people from the so-called generation z. This generations feels that all aspects of the social contract are expiring and they will not enjoy the benefits and stability of the public sector that their parents had. Instead, they will have low-paid jobs in the private sector and will probably not inherit a house to live in because they cannot afford to pay the increased inheritance taxes (Knight 2018) or because their parent’s house will be disposed by private equity funds. The train accident made shockingly evident that in today’s Greece even a routine train journey is not safe, that nobody “is there” for the people. “We live by chance in this country”, one of the protest slogans states.
Yet, a careful observer of public transport users after the train disaster sees this realization of state negligence turn into an increased care for each other. People now help older passengers and others in need on and off busses in the absence of special ramps. They talk to each other and give courage to each other for the day ahead while ranting against the government (perhaps even using the public slogans discussed in this article). “We are the infrastructures” is what we are often told during recent ethnographic research. Maybe this new confidence will create a vision of new social organization beyond the state, capital and also beyond the family. One new slogan points in this direction; “Mono o laos tha sosei ton lao” (“only people can save the people”).
References
Dalakoglou, D. (2016) “Infrastructural gap: Commons, State and Anthropology. City, 20:6, 822-831, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1241524.
Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.
Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He is investigating the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.
Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris & Poulimenakos, Giorgos 2023. “Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece” Focaalblog 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/14/giorgos-poulimenakos-dimitris-dalakoglou-disaster-infrastructures-and-the-inverted-shock-doctrine-in-greece/
Zavaleta: “[Apparent states] appear to be Western… in all respects but somehow they are not. What misfires here is a structural concept of sovereignty that is ultimately incompatible with the condition of non-centrality in the world, at least in history such as it has occurred until now…. They have only a vague sense of self-certainty, that is identity. We can therefore also call them uncertain states.” (2018: 69 Itals mine)
In the 28 January issue of Viento SurPepe Mejia writes, “The dismissal of [Peruvian President] Pedro Castillo, on 7 December, was the starting signal for the organization and celebration of mobilizations that began in Puno, a territory rich in lithium and uranium and the target of large extractive companies.” (Mejia, 2023) He goes on to provide a concise summary of the situation in Peru and sets it within a brief history of the relationship between the rural people of the Andes and the Lima pitucracia on the one hand and the contracts with foreign-owned extractivist corporations that go back to the guano era on the other.[1] By contrast, in an article by Tom Phillips in the Observer two months after the outbreak of events, headed ‘My city is destroying itself’: Juliaca under siege as death toll rises in Peru’s uprising, a kind of crazed self-destruction is described as victims of ‘corruption’ burn tires and the military holes up at the airport. There’s no discussion of Peru’s history, no exposure of the contracts Mejia mentions nor the least attempt to explain to the unfamiliar reader why the re-writing of Peru’s constitution is a central demand of these people.
On the other hand, perhaps the reason the established press writes so little about Latin America’s fourth largest nation is because Peru, as such, does not really exist. Writing about Bolivia and Peru’s war with Chile from 1879 to 1884, Rene Zavaleta Mercado, ‘the Bolivian Gramsci’ as he was sometimes called, ascribed Chile’s victory to the failure of its allied adversaries to constitute coherent states, the ‘integral state’ to which Gramsci had referred. For Zavaleta the effect of the war was to produce for Chile what he called a ‘constitutive moment’ the elusive essence that may or may not bring forth a coherent national social formation, “something potent enough to interpolate an entire people….it must bring forth a replacement of beliefs, a universal substitution of loyalties, in short, a new horizon of visibility.” ([1986] 2018: 75). His historical method was to seek to identify such moments their momentary success and, so often, the failure of their promise.
Image 1: “Even despite Argentinian promises Chile outweighs Peru and Bolivia.” (Cartoonist. El Barbero. 1879; Source: Wikimedia Commons
For Peru it may be that there has never been such a constitutive moment, elusive, temporary or otherwise. Writing of the hundred years following the war the economists Thorp and Bertram subtitle their book, Peru 1890-1970 (1978) ‘an open economy’. It was a society controlled from Lima that was open for business and closed for the ninety-percent of its citizens living in the Andes or their kin struggling in the shanty towns of the capital. In the strictest sense, in the Durkheimian sense, it wasn’t even a society. Perhaps it still isn’t. Writing a quarter century after Thorp and Bertram Debbie Poole and Gerardo Renique (2003) referred to it as “the privatized state.” And here we are twenty years later with Peru scarcely ever mentioned in the European or North American press and when it is the treatment is superficial and pathetic, an ignorance of history and a kind of willful refusal to ask the kinds of questions one would need to know about an open economy and a state so privatized as to be incoherent.
Dismissing Castillo to renew the ‘surplus without a state’
Apparently, the rural working people of Peru and their kin and comunaros/as living in Lima’s shanty towns are unhappy with the school-teacher president they elected, Pedro Castillo, being declared a traitor and thrown in prison by the Congress. Why? Is there some history that might help us to understand – even quite recent history like the fact that the President of the distrusted Congress that impeached Castillo is José Daniel Williams Zapata, an ex-army general who at the rank of colonel was involved in the massacre of 61 people (23 of them children) in Accomarca back in 1985? Or still more recently, the fact that the constitution for which they want the same kind of re-working that got so much attention in the western press when it occurred in Chile, is the one Fujimori, like Pinochet before him, produced to give legal form to his authoritarian neo-liberal regime.
Meanwhile in a country so entirely open to foreign privatized interests surely more useful for the inquisitive reader than the burning of tires and the frying of a cop in his car, is the fact that 2023-24 will be the period when a vast array of the contracts Fujimori signed with foreign companies will come up, not just the extractive ones in oil, gas, copper, lithium etc. but the banks and hedge funds that financed them. There are more than 900 contracts up for renewal. Could this be newsworthy for the likes of the Observer and other western media? Apparently not. Yet, speaking of the proposed renewal of these contracts Mejia notes in the above-cited reporting from Viento Sur, “The term of the contract is generally 30 to 40 years and no one can change the term. This contract law cannot be modified for any reason. Nor can it be modified even if the people go on strike or the congressmen want to annul it.” He adds that in these contracts the ratio of the profits retained in the country to those exported is 18:82 (Mejia, 2023)
Image 2: Graphical depiction of Peru’s product exports 2019 (source: By Datawheel – Interactive Visualization: OEC – Peru Product Exports (2019) Data Source: BACI – HS6 REV. 1992 (1995 – 2019), CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107580340)
Zavaleta spoke of “Peru, the paragon of a surplus without a state.” (2018: 71) Reflecting on the elusive ‘abstract state’ that momentarily may achieve a kind of coherence in a conjunctural moment, a bedrock that might give character to subsequent national projects, Zavaleta spoke of the ‘fruitfulness’ of the surplus to produce a constitutive moment. Among other things sterility results from two factors: the inability to produce coherence when such vast amounts of surplus value are being sucked out of the social formation; and the distributive failures by the national bourgeoisie of what little is left (Zavaleta, 2018; see also Marini, 1981, 2011). Is it then possible that it is not Peru that is ’uprising’ but a variety of regions of Peru each having to deal with its own particularities: a past made up of histories of distinctive struggles not as yet combined nationally; and a present characterized by the distinct contracts each has with the capitalist firms extracting local resources be it the decades old experience with copper in the central Andes or the incubating ones around lithium in the south.
I want to put meat on the bones of such a suggestion by first describing a period I am familiar with in the central Andes when, in Zavaleta’s terms Peru failed to produce a constitutive moment, and then provide brief descriptions of the kinds of contracts that are so determinant of regional conditions from one part of the country to another.
Criollos and Montoneros
Let me turn back to that failed ‘constituent moment’ for Peru during the Pacific War of 1879 to 1884 with Chile that Zavaleta spoke of. Lima, that is to say ‘Peru’ fell ignominiously soon after the war began. But when General Caceres retreated into the central highlands a different kind of war ensued. (Manrique, 1981) Apart from anything else just who was fighting whom. On arrival in the Mantaro Valley it was in part through the influence of his cousin the hacendada Bernarda Pielago that he was able to raise a force of guerrilleros from among the pastoralists that worked in and around her properties in the highlands. In those initial days the emerging montoneros referred to Caceres as taita (familiar term: uncle); by the end, in response to a demand that they descend to the valley to report to the general, their leader sent the message, “Tell Caceres I am as much a general as he is and will be dealt with equal to equal.”[2] It’s the kind of story so familiar throughout Peruvian history, one to repeat itself again and again. Speaking of the Pacific War in the highlands in 1989 I wrote, “The war thus gave birth to a fatal combination – a self-confident peasantry and an expansionist landlord.” (Smith, 1989: 67)
Plus ça change: in the context of what we read about today, it sounds familiar: a situation in which expansionist landlords perhaps have been replaced by expansionist extractive companies. As the following paragraph makes clear it was for the highland people of the central region ‘a constitutive moment’.
[As the war wound down] the montoneros, once mobilized, remained so. But the composition of their enemy shifted. At the beginning of hostilities these montoneros were fighting the foreign invaders; at the end they fought alone against a wide range of opponents – landlords, the commercial classes of the valley, and the agents of the state [especially Caceres]. Such an experience made a profound impression on their culture of opposition, colouring their attitude toward political confrontation for the century that followed. (ibid:68)[3]
Nevertheless, the ability to divide and conquer saw the end of that moment then, as perhaps today too.
Yet in a sense the period of the montoneros has the elements of a constituent moment for the highland regions of the central Andes. When Mejia remarks of Peru’s Andean people, “No necesitan tener un título para salir a la calle y conseguir sus reivindicaciones,” he is alluding to the many times when rural people have resisted by simply occupying space: “They don’t need title deeds to go to the streets and recuperate what belongs to them.[4]” In 1948 the Huasicanchinos of the central highlands faced off against the army to occupy the lands of Hacienda Tucle and Hacienda Rio de le Virgen resulting in the concession of considerable territory by the latter hacienda. The 1956 reivindicacion in the province of Cuzco in which Hugo Blanco played a major role was written up by Eric Hobsbawm as a case of neo-feudalism. The labour relations and strategy of resistance was quite different from the 1948 confrontation in the central highlands that I had described (for the framework of resistance strategies see also Hobsbawm, 1969). Yet, it planted the seeds of widespread land occupations in Cusco in 1962. Even within regions themselves tactics differed. On the west side of the Mantaro Valley in the central Andes, the massive campaign of endurance carried out by the Huasicanchinos from 1968 to 1972 resulted in the complete occupation and destruction of Hacienda Tucle and Rio de la Virgen. (Smith 1989; 2014) Yet it differed from the insurgence around Comas to the east of the valley in the late sixties, which itself was different from that of the Tupac Amaru guerrilla close by. (Hobsbawm, 1974; Flores Galindo & Manrique, 1984) A difficulty then, in making a broad assessment of what is going on in ‘Peru’ as a whole is the persistent differences that its many Andean regions face, surfacing time and again in moments of crisis.
From guano to copper to lithium
Currently over forty mining contracts in southern Peru, almost all of them copper, have been paralyzed by popular occupations and blockages, reducing Peru’s copper output by 30% at a time, Bloomberg reports, when copper prices are at their highest. The effect is to halt any attempt at renegotiating Fujimori’s contracts this year. “About $160 million of production has been lost in 23 days of protests” it reported on 27th January. The article concludes “The unrest also jeopardizes the rollout of $53.7 billion in possible investments at a time when the world needs to accelerate decarbonization and boost minerals required for electromobility, according to BTG Pactual analyst Cesar Perez-Novoa.” (Attwood, 2023) The analyst is speaking here of course not of Peru’s longstanding role as a copper exporter but the future contracts for the extraction of lithium.
Agreements for regional resource extraction projects to fund local development such as schools, medical facilities and of course infrastructure (the latter as vital to the miners as to the communities) are pathetic from the outset and unfulfilled to the point of fiction as they unfold. The process is facilitated by mining companies like the giant four, Southern Peru, Yanacocha, Antamina, and Chinalco, signing contracts with Peru’s national police. (EarthRights International, 2019) Use of the police obviously enables the terrorization of locals but has the additional advantage that it allows for the criminal prosecution of protests stoppages and so forth rather than the more cumbersome civil cases that would otherwise be needed.
Meanwhile if brute force isn’t enough, a common practice in sidestepping social contracts of this kind is to offload one mining company to another (often a subsidiary), the conditions of the sale being the abandoning of the obligations of incomplete components an existing social contract. Meanwhile tying up issues of ownership, profit-sharing and social responsibility in lengthy legal proceedings is so common that formulaic contractual obligations to communities can be written into contracts with the full knowledge that they will be held up indefinitely in legal wrangling.
Typical is the following: in 2021 the Macusani Yellowknife lithium extraction project, the largest in Peru, owned by Plateau Energy Metals, itself recently acquired by the Canadian American Lithium Corporation, was disputing 32 out of the 151 concessions it has in southern Peru midway between Cusco and Juliaca. Even so its CEO was able to reassure Resource World Magazine, “While it is standard practise for the legal departments of regulatory bodies in Peru to appeal rulings such as this, the company is confident that, given the strength of judgements in the past the appeals will not be successful,” assuring investors that “common sense will prevail,” and that anyway, while locked up in the courts, the company would push ahead with the mobilization of drill rigs to commence the next phase of development. (Resource World, 2022)
Meanwhile in the much older copper and zinc mines and refining centres to the north – La Oroya and Cerro de Pasco – where foreign contracts are so longstanding that social responsibility conditionalities have to be fought as rear-guard actions, the issues frequently have less to do with recently unfulfilled obligations than generations-long threats both to rural livelihoods and to the possibilities for ongoing social reproduction, in short life itself. On the one hand the pastures in the highlands proximate to those fought over by the montoneros of the past have been so poisoned or simply disappeared as a result of the smelters at La Oroya that endless legal battles for compensation are simply a way of life. On the other hand, in Cerro de Pasco, one of Peru’s main mining cities, children have high blood lead levels, anemia, learning problems, headaches, and nose bleeding leading to endless requests for medical help given that demands for better living conditions over generations have produced only minor results. (Cabral, E & M. Garro, 2020)
The contracts are ubiquitous from one part of Peru to another, be it the southern Andes, the new and old extractive industries of the centre and north, or the oil deposits of Amazonia. But the past histories and present experiences of resistance have their own characteristics.
As the Mexican journalist Luis Hernández Navarro remarks (2023), Peru “is a disabled State that cannot do anything, because everything has to be contracted with private companies.” He refers to Peru’s Quechua name Tawantinsuyo ‘The Four Adjoining Regions,’ And such is the case, four or myriad, Peru remains an incoherent state each of whose regions has had its distinct struggle that from time to time resulted in an all but ephemeral constitutive moment but failed to combine into a synchronous national movement.
Gavin Smith is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and has worked in South America and Western Europe. Apart from ethnographic monographs he has published two books of essays, Confronting the present, 1999; and Intellectuals and (counter-)politics, 2014.
Smith, Gavin. 1989: Livelihood and resistance: peasants and the politics of land in Peru. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Smith, Gavin. 2014 Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: essays in historical realism. Berghahn. Oxford.
Thorp, R. and G. Bertram, 1978: Peru 1890-1977: growth and policy in an open economy. Columbia University Press, New York.
Zavaleta Mercado, Rene. 2018: Towards a history of the National-Popular in Bolivia 1879-1980. Trans. Anne Freeland. Seagull Books. Calcutta
[1]Pitucos/as is a familiarity used to describe the posh, lazy and shallow elite of Lima. Guano is the Quechua word for sea dung high in nitrates used for fertilizer. The so-called Guano Era during which nitrates were extracted in vast quantities by foreign companies ran from 1802 to 1884 and was a key factor in the War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1884, sometimes referred to as the Saltpetre War.
[2] This was in response to Caceres’s invitation to descend to Huancayo for a war conference. On arrival he and his lieutenants were put up against a wall and shot.
[3] The extent of the montoneros’ successful mobilization against the haciendas over the period is reflected in the number of livestock held before and after the campaign by the two largest of them. Laive: 38,000 sheep before, none after; Tucle 42,000 sheep before, 3000 after. (Smith: 1989: 74) Needless to say in the period that followed the haciendas of the central highlands, most of them owned by those who had collaborated with Chile, expanded without interruption until the 1960s
[4] There is no proper translation for reivindicaciones a term used frequently in the context of rural labourers’ occupation of lands stolen from them.
On 30/10/2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of the Workers’ Party won an exceptionally close runoff election against the current far-right president of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. For volunteers of a community kitchen (Cozinha Solidária) of the leftist Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), Lula’s victory represents an enormous relief and a hope after the long period of anxiety during the election campaign. Nevertheless, his victory does not mean “the end of hell or the entrance into paradise”, as Maria (all names are pseudonyms), one of the volunteers cooking in a Cozinha Solidária noted.
The hell she speaks of means the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which almost 700,000 people in Brazil died of Covid-19, while the president made jokes about patients with respiratory distress. Hell, moreover, means the hunger that the women themselves experience and fight in their volunteer work. In recent years, Brazil has returned to the world hunger map of the United Nations. According to the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security, circa 30% of Brazilian households are currently food insecure. In addition to the Covid-19 pandemic, suspension of state welfare programs, inflation and price increases have led to this development. The aftermath of this period will not be over when Lula takes office early next year.
Hell and paradise are metaphors that reflect the volunteer’s worldview, which is strongly influenced by the Christian system of belief. The all-female chefs of the Cozinha Solidária where I conduct ethnographic fieldwork since March 2022 regularly frequent Catholic or Evangelical churches. Besides that, the women are also part of the political struggle for housing in demonstrations and occupations of urban land. In their everyday lives, they balance left-wing political militancy and religiosity. They are politicized through the social movement and entrenched in their peripheral community. All the kitchen’s volunteers working there currently are also mothers and most of them work or worked in paid cleaning jobs in addition to their volunteer work.
In this article, I portray the period between the first round of voting on 2/10/2022 and the runoff. How did the cooks negotiate the fear of a second electoral victory by Jair Bolsonaro? A look at the Cozinhas Solidárias sheds light on the positioning of hunger and domestic labor within the election campaign. The perspective of the cooks’ stresses the importance of religiosity to people’s lives and political decisions. After localizing the Cozinhas Solidárias within the Homeless Workers Movement and explaining their emergence and functioning, I consider reflections and concerns about the election, starting from the perspective of the cooks, to arrive at an assessment of the consequences of the election results.
Cozinhas Solidárias of the Homeless Worker’s Movement
The Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) was officially founded in 1997 as the urban counterpart of the rural reform movements of the Landless Workers Movement (MST). The first occupation took place in Campinas, a city close to São Paulo. Nowadays, the MTST is present in 13 Brazilian states, but most occupations are still concentrated in and around the city of São Paulo. The strategy of the movement is to occupy unused land in the periphery of large cities and to obtain expropriation with reference to the legally established duty of fulfilling a social function of the inner-city areas.
Victor Albert traces the history of the movement: In the first decade after its founding, it had little success with the strategies of the Landless Workers Movement. This changed, on the one hand, because of social mobilizations during the housing market crisis and the 2013/2014 World Cup, and on the other hand, primarily through cooperation with the Lula government’s state housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida. The movement was often able to obtain home ownership for the squatters through the State Program and thus acted as an agenda for identifying new building land for the state program.
During Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, which replaced the Minha Casa Minha Vida program with the Casa Verde e Amarelo loan program and classified the MTST as terrorism, their construction projects from the Minha Casa Minha Vida era continued to be completed, such as 216 apartments in São Paulo’s West Zone in March 2021.
Figure 1 Kitchen as part of occupation, Photo: Elena Reichl March 2022
Figure 2 Cozinha Solidária at lunch time, Photo: Elena Reichl October 2022
The idea of Cozinhas Solidárias was already inherent in the community kitchens that are part of every land occupation of the movement. The occupations of new land areas begin with the construction of tents made of tarpaulins and bamboo. In newly emerged occupations, community kitchens are the first shanties to be set up to nurture the squatters and provide a place of political organization and community economy. Each occupation has numerous of these kitchens, which are the heart of the groupings, the small neighborhoods within the barrack settlements. The kitchens inside the squats are primarily for the squatters who run and finance them.
What is new about the Cozinhas Solidárias is that they now address the peripheral neighborhoods outside the occupations. Diverse people from the nearby neighborhoods frequent the cozinhas solidárias, for example schoolchildren, old people, or workers at their lunchbreak. They pick up hot lunches for free that were prepared and distributed by volunteers like the women mentioned in the beginning of this article. The Cozinhas Solidárias acquire their donations in the form of money from large-scale campaigns and as crops by collaborations with, for example, supermarkets and the MST. Cozinha Solidarias’ dependence on food has brought the MST into close contact with its urban counterpart.
The Homeless Workers Movement founded the first Cozinha Solidária in São Paulo in March 2021, during the peak of the Covid-19 Pandemic, under the motto highlighted by MTST coordinator Guilherme Boulos, “we do what the government does not“. The movement now operates 31 of these kitchens throughout Brazil. By expanding to peripheral neighborhoods in general, the movement claimed a direct confrontation of the cutbacks in state welfare programs under the Bolsonaro government.
Hunger was particularly central to Lula’s election campaign, highlighting how his earlier government had helped to remove Brazil from the United Nations world hunger map, on which the country turned back after the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. In fact, it was through Bolsa Família, as Massimiliano Mollona elaborates,that this government from 2003 to 2008 reduced the population rate below the poverty line from 36 percent to 23 percent. Bolsa Família incorporated the preceding Zero Hunger “Fome Zero” program in 2003 and, as Anthony W. Pereira argues, promoted the democratization of citizenship claims through effective, relatively unbureaucratic redistribution. On the other side, Bolsonaro has introduced the social program Auxilio Brasil at the end of 2021, which is modeled on Lula’s Bolsa Familia but without any long-term strategy or monitoring and therefore has beencriticized as an election campaign method.
Before the Runoff Election
A morning a few days after the first round of voting in one of the cozinhas solidárias in the periphery of São Paulo: In addition to preparing rice, beans, chicken, and fried cassava, we talked about Bolsonaro’s visit to the Freemasons. The video is from Bolsonaro’s 2017 election campaign but gained popularity only in October 2022 via its rapid spread on social media. The context mattered little. Bolsonaro had been campaigning for votes among Freemasons and rumors were spread that he might be a member. We chatted about the experiences some of the women had as cleaners for members of the Freemasons whom they accused of performing diabolical rituals. On the subject of religion, we also came to a remark that one of them had overheard during services in their parishes: Their pastor had announced that whoever voted for Lula would go to hell.
Ludmilla was indignant: “The place for priests is in the church. What is this about politics?” “They won’t vote for him [Jair Bolsonaro] because of the Freemasons” Retorted Maria. Ludmilla: “I am afraid that they might do it after all.”
Jair Bolsonaro has many evangelical supporters who, as some of the cooks, consider the Freemasons a diabolical sect and hence expressed their disappointment. On a more general level, religiousness played a key role in the election campaign. Padre Kelmon, who was denied the recognition as a priest by the Catholic Church, ran for president as one of the eleven candidates of the first electoral round. He just received 0.07 % of the valid votes and was called a “folkloric candidate”. For Bolsonaro’s election campaign, his candidacy nevertheless had an important function. He supported Bolsonaro during the first TV Globo debate, to which all candidates were invited. Instead of asking critical questions, he accused Lula of wanting to establish an anti-religious dictatorship in Brazil. Lula, meanwhile, tried to win over conservative church followers through critical statements on abortion and Christian affirmations, as he recently did in a letter to evangelicals.
In the community kitchen, I hear different Christian songs sung by the women every day. “God bless you” is a common phrase used by those receiving the hot lunches, to which the cooks respond with “Amen”. Unlike the students and coordinators of the movement, for whom religion takes a back seat to communist utopias, the cooks and squatters balance left-wing political commitment and the struggle for housing with religious affiliations in their work.
A domestic worker comments on the election
For Lula’s election campaign, starvation, but also ‘gusto’, was a central theme. During this election, Lula’s repeated statement that the people must be able to eat picanha and drink beer again became famous. Ludmilla, a cook at the community kitchen before the runoff election, said she talks to Lula when she sees him on TV. “Lula, stop talking about picanha. When did I eat picanha? Lula, I cleaned the toilet of my patron [where she worked as a maid] during your government.”
Figure 3 Banner that says “First domestic worker in the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo” at the event “Women from the periphery with Lula and Haddad”, in which some cooks of Cozinha Solidária participated, Photo: Elena Maria Reichl, October 2022
Although she supports Lula, she feels unrepresented by his promises of the return of expensive barbecue after the huge price increase during the Bolsonaro regime. Actually, picanha has never been part of her lifeworld. Domestic workers, who are for the first time politically represented in Brazil, gain more political and class-consciousness. In the first round of voting, PSOL candidate, former domestic worker, and occupant of the MTST Ediane Maria, won the post of State Representative in the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo as the first domestic worker to occupy this political position. Like Ludmilla, Ediane Maria had migrated to São Paulo from Brazil’s northeast to work as a domestic worker. Ediane Maria will now represent Ludmilla’s perspective in São Paulo. No easy task in a parliament where the PL, Bolsonaro’s party, won by far the most votes.
Anti PT and “anti-establishment” propaganda
The outcome was close, with Lula winning 50.9% and Bolsonaro 49.1% of the vote. Bolsonaro’s party’s most effective campaign method still seemed to be the “anti-corruption agenda” Flávio Eiró already analyzed after the 2018 election.
Although the court case that led to Lula’s conviction was annulled as illegal in 2021, opposition to Lula’s PT party because of corruption scandals remains widespread. This is despite the fact that Bolsonaro has also been accused of institutionalized corruption, namely the use of public funds in the form of secret budgets to buy approval in Congress.
Bolsonaro still manages to position himself as ‘anti-establishment’ in front of large segments of the population, who spread the slogan “PT never again” and in the aftermath of the election “crimes pay off in Brazil” on the internet. Widespread among his electorate is also a rejection of conventional media and academia. Election forecasts predicting a higher approval rating for Lula than he actually received in the first round of voting confirmed this skepticism. The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral’s decision to cut Bolsonaro’s TV time due to fake news also fuels the debate about media bias. Bolsonaro supporters were already acting violently in some cases, such as federal deputy Carla Zambelli, who a few days before the election chased a black journalist with a firearm under the pretext that he had pushed her.
The End of Hell?
During this interim period between the two votes one clearly sensed the fear that Bolsonaro might not recognize the election results, as he had already spread rumors that the ballot boxes were rigged. On day one after the elections, while Bolsonaro remained without statement about his loss, his supporters blocked roads within the country to protest alleged electoral fraud. Attempts at electoral fraud did indeed occur, but not on the part of PT supporters: The electoral court investigates against the federal police, who blocked roads for hours in the northeast and near indigenous communities, from where most votes for Lula were expected, under the pretext of carrying out road controls.
Even without a coup, Lula’s victory will mean hard work against right-wing fronts in state and federal parliaments, but above all against what is called ‘bolsonarismo’ in society. The cooks of Cozinha Solidária are well aware of this. Nevertheless, there will be relief for their movement when Lula takes office next year. He has already announced his intention to rehabilitate the program Minha Casa, Minha Vida. Fighting hunger was moved again to the center of the political agenda. Currently, discussions are underway within the MTST to make Conzinhas Solidarias a public policy and to hire the cooks on a regular basis until the acute hunger crisis is resolved. This would mean the end of dependence on donations and volunteerism. Lula, who had already visited a Cozinha Solidária this year, nurtured hope for this possibility.
Elena Maria Reichl is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology of the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, and member of the Project „Sorting with Care. Human Categorization in Post-Humanitarian Contact Zones“ that is part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1482 “Studies in Human Categorisation” funded by the German Research Foundation.
Cite as: Reichl, Elena Maria 2022. “End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST.” Focaalblog 2 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/11/02/elena-maria-reichl-end-of-hell-brazils-election-and-a-community-kitchen-of-the-mtst/
