The following text is Nassima Neggaz and Ziad Majed's foreword to "Syria: Borders,
Boundaries, and
the State", edited by Matthieu Cimino and published by Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2020.
The book gathers a series of papers presented in a conference organized at the University of Oxford in November 2017.
“One, one, one, ‘Amuda
and Kafranbil are one, the Syrian people is one.” This was a slogan signed by
the local committee of ‘Amuda, a Kurdish town in North-East Syria, at the
beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011. “Muslims, Christians, all one Syrian
people” was chanted across the streets of Damascus, Homs and Aleppo at the same
time. Even the occupied Golan Heights territory was part of this all-inclusive
rhetoric: “Greetings from the bride of the north, ‘Amuda, to the bride of the
occupied South, Majdal Shams,” with Majdal Shams answering with “bows to you,
how beautiful would it be to live in the same country.”
At this early stage of the revolution
and its peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins that started in Deraa, all signs
pointed to a desired unified nation, a sense of a Syrian common identity, and
an overwhelming feeling of solidarity among ordinary people from various parts
of the country. In that process, the local dialectal differences of one region
were used in the slogans of another, and names of little towns and previously
unknown villages (for most of the population) were regularly evoked,
emphasizing the fact that Syrians were reconstructing ties and connections in
their “discovered” and desired country, that was for long possessed and
brutalized by the Assad regime. Humor was present to mock Assad, the Ba’ath
party and its rhetoric, break the wall of fear and create new forms of
expression, sayings and proverbs inspired by local traditions and popular
culture.
All these signs pointed to the
awareness, by a large part of the Syrian people, of the sectarian strategies
that the regime deployed to accompany its brutal repression of the uprising.
***
These hopes of a unified country were,
however, short-lived. Massacres committed by the regime forces and Chabbihas and
saluted by its supporters, forced displacement, torture and rape of detainees, and
the rise of a decentralized militarisation of the revolution led gradually as
of summer 2012 to a full-scale war. In late 2013, the Iraqi born Islamic State (Daesh)
raised its flag in the Syrian city of Raqqa, making it its de-facto capital a
year later, before the US led international coalition launched “its war on
terror” targeting it.In 2015, after three years of massive Iranian military
effort to save the regime, Russia declared war on the Syrian opposition groups
(armed by Turkey, Gulfy and Western states). The conflict witnessed thus in
three years changing national, regional and international dynamics,
interventions and configurations.
In fact, as early as spring 2012 onward,
the national borders of Syria did not delineate a coherent state any longer, Syria’s
territory’s spatial continuity was broken and the very cohesion of its social
fabric, already fragilized by decades of despotic rule and oppressive policies,
was altered and fragmented. What the posters of the early days of the
revolution had warned the world about had materialized, in the most inhumane and
unexpected ways possible. The fragmentation of Syria’s territory was as brutal
as it was rapid. A map of Syria in 2016 shows a mosaic of areas under the
control of different actors: while the regime and its Russian and Iranian
allies controlled the coast and areas along the Damascus-Aleppo axis, the Kurdish
PYD supported by the US led coalition took charge of the Federation of North
East Syria, the Islamic State occupied a large part of East and Central Syria,
the Syrian opposition held various discontinuous areas in the North, the Center
and the South, and the Jihadist group Jabhet Fateh al-Sham controlled a few
areas in the North Western part of the country. While Daesh began minting its
own gold dinars, the Turkish lira and the US dollar became used currencies in the
country along with the local pound. The borders of modern Syria, which had been
thought stable and socially internalized, had been challenged, opening up avenues
to new imaginations of space: the possibility of a Kurdistan, but also an umma
unified under an Islamic caliphate.
***
The Syrian case is a demonstration of
the complex nature of borders and boundaries, as well as their fluctuant and
transient character. As very polyvalent terms, borders and boundaries can denote
a dividing line that is natural, political, institutional, historical, legal, imagined,
cultural, social, hard or soft, visible or invisible. In the field of border
studies, borders (understood as mostly external) and boundaries (mostly
internal or imagined) are one of the most ubiquitous features of political
geography. A burgeoning field of interdisciplinary nature, border studies has
gained renewed prominence in the 21st century across the social
sciences and humanities, in line with the current global crises and
transformations of our world. Territorial disputes, resource management,
migrations, or globalization are among the key topics of this field: these
issues are deeply anchored in the Syrian case, as this volume skillfully
demonstrates. Central to thiscase and to the field of border studies is the
concept of the border as a process: borders are the outcome of processes of
bordering and othering, and as such borders are active forces characterized by
variability and contingency across space and time. They can be used and
manipulated by various actors: state, transnational, or internal players. The
Syrian case provides a formidable illustration of these processes at play. The Syrian-Israeli
border, despite being a feature of the Syrian regime’s resistance rhetoric, has
been the most quiet border over the past decades. As this volume shows, the
changing nature of borders in the Syrian case makes their study even more necessary
in the 21st century: far from vanishing, borders exhibit transformations
and different evolutions.
***
As the first volume dedicated to the
study of Syria’s borders from the mandate period till the rise of Daesh, this
book could not come at a more opportune time, both for a better understanding
of Syria, but also at the global level given the recent political, social, and
environmental developments. First, it is a timely work for a better
understanding of the present Syrian conflict, examined here through the lens of
borders as well as geographical space and imagination. The Syrian conflict is
the foremost example of a local one that has become a global crisis: from
international players leading proxy wars, transnational groups and foreign
fighters establishing their battles within its borders, to global migrations
and an unfolding humanitarian crisis that has impacted territories as far as
Europe or the United States and Australia. With the migrations of Syrian
refugees and the internationally-led attacks on Daesh, Syria’s porous borders
suddenly became a problem for the international community, one it could no
longer ignore. If it was too late of a wake-up call, the Syrian scenario is one
that reminds us of the necessity to care and solve crises before they
aggravate. Second, at the global level, it seems that borders have never been
so crucial for academic examination: their changing nature and their porosity
call for a greater attention to their future. While wars and instability are
driving many outside of their state borders, climate change is becoming an
alarming factor in the influx of population migrations. At the state level, but
also at the local and micro level, many communities are leaving their areas as
food becomes too scarce because, for instance, fishing or agriculture are not viable
options any longer. Other communities are chased outside of their borders such
as the Rohingya in Myanmar. These phenomena will, unfortunately, only aggravate
in the years and decades to come. This is why this book will be a valuable tool
not only for specialists of Syria and border studies scholars, but also anyone
interested in pressing global issues.
***
 |
| The Place - Tammam Azzam |
***
Each one of the chapters in this volume
is the work of a scholar who knows the local languages, has done fieldwork
during their career, and has used a variety of sources ranging from archival
documents, to local newspapers, interviews, geography and history school
textbooks, etc. Most scholars who have contributed to this volume have been
working on Syria or its neighbors for many years and are specialists in their
subject matter, be it Jordi Tejel on Syrian Kurds or Thomas Pierret on Sunni
Islamists in Syria, for instance. The depth and breadth of the chapters ranges
from micro-level analyses and ethnographies, such as Sule Can’s study of
Antalya’s ‘border landers’ or Kevin Mazur’s examination of Dayr al-Zur, to more
macro-level analyses such as Matthieu Rey’s work on the legacy of the Ottoman Tanzimat
on Syria’s modern borders, allowing for a historiography of border construction.
The Turkish, Lebanese, and Iraqi borders with Syria are examined in detail,
only leaving out Jordanian and Israeli case studies. A multiplicity of
disciplines, perspectives, and methods of investigation is presented here:
modern history, but also anthropology, geography, political science, or
sociology. It is the aggregation of these various perspectives and studies of
different actors that allows us to get a clearer picture of Syria’s challenges
and shifting borders and boundaries until the present day. Because borders are
defined by at least two states or groups, each border examined here looks at
various actors, such as the Turkish and French states in Seda Altug’s piece,
which showcases how the border was at times made impenetrable and at times
unsafe and chaotic to serve state interests. Key moments in Syria’s modern
history are examined in detail: the French mandate and the popular contestation
of its imposed borders on Syria by Idir Ouahes, but also Pan Arabism under the
Baath party, as both a key moment and ideology in the internalization processes
of Syria’s borders in Souheil Belhadj-Klaz and Mongi Abdennabi’s work.
Non-state actors and their representation of Syrian territorialities is amply
examined: Daniel Meier’s study on Hizbullah’s borderland strategy, but also Nehmeh
Hamdans’s work on the various territories of the opposition, or Matthieu
Cimino’s chapter on Daesh’s recasting of Syrian territory all offer in-depth
investigations of specific actors and their relationship to Syria’s borders.
***
The editor of this work is both a
colleague and a friend of ours. The genesis of this volume is a conference held
at Saint Anthony’s College in Oxford in November 2017 under the title
“Exploring Syria’s Borders and Boundaries.” Matthieu was then a Marie Currie
Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, working with Professor
Eugene Rogan. We, Nassima and Ziad, were both invited discussants to the papers
of the conference – Ziad was also the keynote speaker of the conference, with a
talk entitled “War crimes, crimes against humanity and territorial
fragmentation: are peace and reconstruction possible in Syria?” Both of us have
deep links with Syria, both academic and personal. Ziad has authored,
co-authored, edited and translated a series of publications on Syria, its
intellectuals and its modern political history. I (Nassima) lived in Syria for
a year studying at the French institute of Arab Studies (IFEAD) in Damascus. I
later wrote a paper on the impact of the Syrian revolution on Arabic language
in Syria, which won an academic award by the International Sociological
Association. I met Matthieu while being an Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in
Islamic History at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University
(2015-2017) and a Senior Member of Saint Anthony’s College. Matthieu and I had
shared interests in modern Syria, but also Iraq, as well as Islamic history. Matthieu’s
work combining political analyses of contemporary Syria with an exploration of
the historical sources of Daesh’s rhetoric is a case in point. He asked me to
be a discussant of his work during the Conversation Series of the Faculty of
Oriental Studies, where he presented his early project on Syria’s borders. Islamic
medieval geography manuals, as Matthieu demonstrated, played a key role in the
rhetoric of Daesh and its conception of the space, dar al-islam; the
analysis of the Islamic past was necessary to shed light on contemporary
ideologies and movements. We both worked with our esteemed colleague Professor
Eugene Rogan, Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Saint Anthony’s
College, and author of groundbreaking work on the topic of Ottoman borders and
state restructuring during the last decades of the Empire, notably Frontiers
of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850-1921 (2000).
***
Perhaps the most challenging borders
for the future of Syria are non-tangible
and symbolic ones: the border between a possible form of justice and the full impunity
that has prevailed for years; the one between those who have lost their lives, families,
homes and property and those who think they have won, i.e. the regime
supporters. It will take a lot of work, time, and a strong will to overcome
this deep fissure in the social fabric of Syria.
Nassima NEGGAZ, New College, Florida, USA
Ziad MAJED, the American University of Paris, France
