On December 8, 2024, I received a flurry of WhatsApp messages from my friend Rawia. At the time, she was visiting her relatives in the countryside of Raqqa. Two months earlier, Rawia had asked me to send her money to flee the terrifying Israeli military bombardments that surrounded her husbandโs modest apartment in South Beirut and her parentsโ tarpaulin tent home in the Bekaa Valley. And now, two months later, she was asking for money to cross in the other direction. The cease-fire in Lebanon had been declared, Al-Asadโs regime had fallen, and Rawiaโs first impulse was to cling to the life she had precariously built in Lebanon throughout the war in Syria. Compared to my Syrian friends who were celebrating the prospects of finally returning home, Rawia found herself in a difficult bind, caught between two nations decimated by war and economic crisis, neither of which offered any semblance of the stability that she desired.
This is a moment filled with contradictions for many Syrians. Joy and relief, stirred by the fall of the regime, are threaded with memories of loss and uncertainty about what is to come. Scenes of freed prisoners and their relatives exist alongside the enduring grief of families whose loved ones remain unaccounted for. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have returned to Syria for the first time in over a decade, and yet there are many others, like Rawia, who grapple with how to maintain what they have built in exile in the face of growing pressure from their host governments to repatriate.
As Rawiaโs uncertainty makes apparent, Syrians are also contending with the material contradictions of struggle โ the question of how change proceeds, for whom, and under what circumstances โ that define any apparent break with the established order. For working-class Syrians like her, this involves the hard labor of imagining a different future set against the weight of the material circumstances that they have inherited, particularly the uneven legacies of Baสฟthism: a long history of violent repression, the promise of state-led development and redistributive land reform, and the protracted liberalization of Syriaโs economy that pushed Rawiaโs relatives into labor migration long before the war began.
For working-class Syrians like her, this involves the hard labor of imagining a different future set against the weight of the material circumstances that they have inherited.
My attunement to these histories comes out of a deep familiarity with one of Syriaโs poorest populations: farmworkers like Rawia from eastern Syria whose families have seasonally migrated to Lebanon for decades. For nearly two years, I lived and worked with them in camps scattered across Lebanonโs Bekaa Valley. Representing the largest and lowest-paid stratum of Lebanonโs agricultural labor force, many of these farmworkers have familial migratory ties to Lebanon that extend back to the 1990s, and some as early as the late 1970s. While most, like Rawia, are registered with the UNHCR, many others are undocumented and remain in various states of legal and political limbo.
What does the current transition mean for Syrian farmworkers like Rawia? Though it is impossible to speak in all-encompassing terms, a few factors stand out at this momentous juncture. One is that return offers few material guarantees to those struggling with the costs of rebuilding their livelihoods and homes in Syriaโs post-war economy. Exacerbated greatly by the devaluation of the Syrian pound under US-led and EU sanctions, many farmworker families are reluctant to return to an economy where building materials and many basic goods are costly or impossible to find and, equally importantly, where the possibility of a stable income remains far from guaranteed. While the recent agreement to lift sanctions is a welcome change that has brought a sense of relief to many Syrians, the accumulated impacts of war and sanctions on the countryโs infrastructure, health system, agriculture, industry, and finances will likely take years, if not decades, of reconstruction. Here, the complex inheritances of Baสฟthism matter in both a material sense and as a contested reference point about what should change, what public entitlements should be revived or maintained, and what model of economic development will take hold in Syria moving forward.
Virtually every farmworker I met throughout my fieldwork held tightly to the concept of a strong welfare state, affordable healthcare, free schooling, and equitable land distribution โ part of a recognizably older Baสฟth Party ideal of โArab socialismโ that even those who were very critical of the regime seemed to embrace. In practice, the Syrian state had been steadily retreating from this role for decades before the 2011 popular uprising began, especially throughout its liberalized transition to a โsocial market economyโ under Bashar Al-Asad, including slashing subsidies, privatizing and parcelling out land, and loosening agricultural tenancy and labor protections. It was precisely in this period of liberalization that Rawiaโs family, and many others, became dependent on remittances from labor migration to meet their basic needs. Farmworkers nevertheless continuously invoked this ideal of state-backed โguaranteesโ when explaining to me the sense of uncertainty they felt about returning.
Such attachments to a strong welfare state were as much a commentary on Syriaโs pre-war past as they were a testament to Syriaโs fraught history of class division and transformation.
Such attachments to a strong welfare state were as much a commentary on Syriaโs pre-war past as they were a testament to Syriaโs fraught history of class division and transformation, which is itself inseparable from the political economy of Baสฟthist rule since the party took power in 1963, followed by a coup against left-wing factions led by Hafiz Al-Asad in 1970. The historical roots of these class divisions are meticulously documented by Marxist historians, from the prolific works of Abdullah Hanna (mostly published in Arabic) to Hanna Batatuโs magisterial work. Pushing past the media punditry that often reduces Syriaโs complexities to neat sectarian mappings or, conversely, the ways that the Hayโat Tahrir al-Shamโs calls to Syrian โunityโ might operate as a cover for neoliberal market-led austerity, critical political economy perspectives such as these will prove invaluable to understanding the challenges that are to come, particularly as the early revolutionary ideals of the 2011 uprising are today being resurrected with a provisional sense of hope and determination.
A political economy perspective is therefore crucial for understanding why, although return has become a compelling prospect for many displaced Syrians since Al-Asadโs fall, it remains a complex dilemma that is deeply differentiated by socioeconomic circumstances. In Rawiaโs family, the past several months have involved making hard decisions about who will return and who will stay in Lebanon, at least temporarily, in hopes of maintaining some form of reliable income. Her family is now split between three places โ Beirut, where her older brother and husband are eking out a wage as delivery workers, the Bekaa, where her younger sister, brother, and sister-in-law are living in a farmworker camp and looking after her father and their children, and her familial village in the Raqqa countryside, where her older sisters, mother, sister-in-law, eldest brother, and their children have made the weighty decision to start rebuilding their home, in hopes that they will receive enough remittances to do so.
To speak of inheritances and contradictions in this context, thus, does not mean denying the sense of hope and desire for change that many Syrians feel at this moment. Rather, it means paying careful attention to how rural and working-class Syrians like Rawia bear the weight of historical transformations as they unfold. And it is to take seriously that beneath the intuitive appeal of national unity, a long and likely difficult path of struggle for a more equitable future lies ahead, especially in Syriaโs countryside.
Featured image: Syrian farmworkers heading to work in the Bekaa Valley. Photo by the Author, November 2019.
Abstract: This essay reflects on the perspectives of displaced Syrian farmworkers from the Euphrates region, with whom I lived and worked for two years at the Lebanese-Syrian border. Through a critical agrarian perspective, the piece draws attention to the vital importance of economic conditions at this momentous juncture: the contradictory inheritances of Baโthism, rural-urban disparities, the making and unmaking of land reforms, and histories of labor and class struggle in shaping Syriaโs past and post-Al-Asad future.
