The fall of Asad’s state of eternity on December 8th, the liberation of his regime’s prisons and security centres, the return of Syrians who had been forced into exile, the chants and celebrations—whether inside Syria or across the diaspora—all revived the hopes of the alternative worlds envisioned by the 2011 Syrian revolution in its calls for “freedom, justice and dignity.” Not only did this messianic moment open up, once again, future horizons for Syrians that had seemed foreclosed, but it also urged a rethinking of the trajectories, afterlives, potentialities and impossibilities of a revolution once declared defeated, and of the worlds against which it arose1.
How can we capture the nowness of this historical crossroads—the malleability of the present and the tension in this temporal struggle—before it forecloses once again?
Arriving in Syria on December 26th just days after the fall of the regime, one witnesses a new world taking shape in its struggle to dismantle the old one. The new world hasn’t fully taken over yet, leaving an openness in the field of possibilities of what otherwise forms of life might emerge. There is no ready-made answer to what Syria might look like, but there’s a possibility to have other possible worlds. How can we capture the nowness of this historical crossroads—the malleability of the present and the tension in this temporal struggle—before it forecloses once again? As C.L.R. James noted in his account of the Haitian Revolution, “… those rare moments when society is at boiling point and therefore fluid.” Syria’s new interim leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, has declared that the age of revolution is over; now begins the age of the state. In this liminal moment between new and old worlds, how do revolutions begin and how do they end?
Syrian border posts stood there, but there was no one to enforce the rules of the nation-state, nor were there any army checkpoints to humiliate, arrest or force Syrians into conscription.
On the road from Beirut to Damascus, Syrian border posts stood there, but there was no one to enforce the rules of the nation-state, nor were there any army checkpoints to humiliate, arrest or force Syrians into conscription. Nation-state structures, camps, border policies, refugee status, displacement, checkpoints have all contributed to the layers of humiliation Syrians have endured over the past decade. On the return journey eleven days later, the borders were under control. The photos of Asad and the slogans of the Baʿth party remain everywhere around Damascus, yet torn and scratched, speaking to a past that was, a present unfolding, and a latent future that is not yet conscious. You start seeing some cars in Damascus displaying photos of the new interim leader, while in Aleppo there are billboards carrying messages from the caretaker government. The green flag has replaced the red and is now omnipresent. I attempted to visit the former headquarters of the Baʿth party, but I wasn’t allowed in, as it had become the new headquarters of HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham). Despite the class struggle that shaped the 2011 revolution, free markets and privatization seem to be the dominant image that the new administration is painting.
As students of anticolonial movements, we have learned not to read them only as a teleological nation-building project towards sovereignty, but also as one of worldmaking.
The song ‘Raise your head high, you’re a free Syrian!’ has become the defining slogan against the humiliation of the Asad world. How can we read it back onto the promises of Arab nationalism and Nasser’s slogan: ‘Raise your head, brother, for the age of subjugation is over’? What worlds have Syrians inherited post-December 8th, and what remains unfinished from the anticolonial projects? How can the different waves of the 2011 Arab revolutions be explored vis-à-vis the October 7th al-Aqsa Flood, the consequent wars on Gaza and Lebanon and Israel’s recent invasion of southern Syria? The 2011 Arab revolutions’ slogan, ‘the people demand the downfall of the regime,’ was a call for alternative lives and it signified more than a mere demand for the transfer of power from one ruling class to another. As students of anticolonial movements, we have learned not to read them only as a teleological nation-building project towards sovereignty, but also as one of worldmaking. What can the moment of December 8th reveal about the worldmaking project of the 2011 Arab revolutions? What are the dignified lives that Syrians sought in 2011 and continue to pursue today, and how can the aspired worlds of 2011 render the question of revolution incomplete?
The monsters seem to be out as this new world struggles to be born.
For Syrians, grappling with new and old worlds means reckoning with an open wound and wrestling with the urgent question of justice. Asad’s prisons are now open, but the 113,218 forcibly disappeared remain missing. Will these prisons be filled again? Will new checkpoints appear? Photos of the disappeared cover the walls of Damascus. IDs and passports are tossed outside these prisons, where families desperately search through them in the hope of learning any news about the fate of their loved ones. While I was visiting the infamous security centre Branch 235, I saw a woman who had come all the way from the city of Deir ez-Zor. She was pleading with the guards to let her roam the cells, believing her brother might have left her a message on the prison walls. Walking through these prison cells and Syria’s destroyed neighbourhoods was the heavy task of staring into the face of the atrocious—to invoke the words of the Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh. These places felt as if they were inhabited by spectres, angels and deities coming—not only from the past, but also from the future. A violent past of death, destruction, displacement, torture, imprisonment and disappearance continues to haunt Syrians in this moment of revolutionary openness. But can Syrians “activate the emergency brake” and salvage the dead and the disappeared in a Benjaminian sense? For Benjamin, turning history into an incomplete past is to think about a present that is not yet conscious.
As I look back on my reflections from my visit to Syria, the monsters seem to be out as this new world struggles to be born (to borrow from Gramsci). The interim administration has missed various opportunities to establish an inclusive form of governance that can address the wrongs of the past. Many Syrians today fear that Syria is heading towards another form of authoritarian rule. The notion of transitional justice, as Robert Meister points out, carries within it the liberal illusion of a linear process unfolding in this liminal space between the end of evil and the beginning of justice. Yet Syrian statements of ‘never again’ have collapsed in the wake of the sectarian revenge massacres that erupted along the Syrian coast in March. At the same time, the US still holds the sanctions card against the new administration—the measures that have stifled the country and exacerbated its dire economic conditions—while Israel continues to strike and threaten Syria. What compromises does Syria have to make for these sanctions to be lifted? These recent events seem to suggest that the possibilities the moment of December 8th opened are now slowly foreclosing, and that the anticipated futures of 2011 are becoming, once again, future pasts. Al-Haj Saleh has recently declared that “Asad has fallen, but the revolution hasn’t won.” Yet if revolution is a continuous process of recreation as we learn from Fanon, entering that malleable moment when eternity fell is to contemplate the worlds that could have been and those that are yet to be.
Featured Image: “Darayya”. Credits: Photo by the Author, February 2025
Abstract: Arriving in Syria just days after the fall of the Asad regime, one sees that there’s a new world taking shape in its struggle to dismantle the old one. Eternity has fallen and in this liminal moment Syrians are revisiting the futures imagined in 2011. How does one capture the nowness of this fluid moment when possibilities are open? Will these future horizons soon foreclose, rendering, once again, the futures of 2011 futures past?
- I borrow this title from the Syrian publication Al-Jumhuriya. ↩︎
