Joyful crowds toppling statues, unsealing torture prisons, defacing regime iconography, ordinary people roaming freely through Al-Asad’s Presidential Palace . . . images such as these have left us in no doubt that history is being made, and in the most dramatic way: the old order—that had seemed so immoveable and all-encompassing—has gone. At the same time, the future is unknown, and for Syrians, inside as well as outside the country’s borders, joy of the new is interlaced with fears of what could come.
What can anthropology bring to our understanding of this current juncture in Syria’s history? What does the current moment afford us in terms of how we pose questions, not just about Syria but also social and political transformations more widely? What might it mean to say the regime has fallen (saqat al-nizam), and how might the diverse new realities signalled by this phrase be grappled with ethnographically and anthropologically? As contributors to this collection, we have worked with Syria across a diverse set of research questions. From our different perspectives, we attend to and enquire into what is playing out in Syria and how to read this unexpected moment.
Such photos gesture to a wider field of possibilities and questions: what work images can do in public life; what kinds of speech may circulate publicly; and where the people can be and cannot be in relation to rulers.
We think of this as a recalibration: not just a reassessment of power relations within a given social field, but an adjusting or reworking of the questions, categories, and modes of action and engagement that we and all actors/observers may employ in order to come to terms with and act within the fields of possibility that may be emerging. Processes of recalibration point to the diverse temporal adjustments and shifting social investments in a given field. As Sarah Sharma points out, such “recalibration occurs differentially and unequally” (2013: 18). Understood in this broad way, recalibration is not a task of “detached” scholarship but of any social actors concerned with Syria and its futures—futures which looked entirely different just half a year ago (Bandak 2024). By attuning our perspective to processes of recalibration, we aim to draw attention to the concrete acts of mobilising otherwise discarded and erased pasts, and to reflect on different temporal frameworks than those built on the notions of rupture, repetition, return, and recurrence.
Recalibration is certainly not just a figure of the current situation. Rather, as argued by Lisa Wedeen (2019: 2), it was also a process internal to the system’s own authoritarian rule. However, in the current phase of unbecoming of the regime, we see the salience of the term as pertaining to the entire social fabric as well as our analytical categories. Indeed, we are witnessing a liminal moment, which opens for a proliferation of new concerns, questions, and dilemmas, obviously born out of the Syrian past and present both inside and outside the country.
“Socks bearing caricatures of Bashar Al-Asad and his family” (embedded video)
For some, even more than toppled statues, it was seeing family photos of Al-Asad in his underpants, retrieved from a Presidential bedroom drawer, that brought home that the regime really had fallen. As well as signalling a shift in power-holders, such photos gesture to a wider field of possibilities and questions: what work images can do in public life; what kinds of speech may circulate publicly; and where the people can be and cannot be in relation to rulers and the whole question of rule.
By engaging ethnographically with the work of recalibration, this collection seeks anthropological understandings of how this liminal moment in Syria can be read in its unfolding.
Images of a tyrant in his underpants circulating on social media, transforming into memes, occasioning laughter, also raise the question of how people in diverse positionalities experience the reality that the old order has gone (Halabi and Salamandra, this collection). Beyond the consumption of images, what actually changes for people? This collection explores this question through the refashioning of social hierarchies; ways and structures of feeling; new ways of speaking; in relation to the domestic and intimate spheres; and in relation to modes of attachment to communal identities. The contributors explore the theme of “revolution” (al-thawra) through the force of the affective (collective states of exhaustion, joy, mourning, and hope) in constituting new political subjects and possibilities (Satik, Wedeen); the swirl of temporalities—the end of a “forever” dynasty, novel horizons, and the end of exile (C. and M. al-Khalili, Shamoun); and the lingering struggle between old and new forms of life and emerging constraints on political speech (al-Ghazzi, Shamoun). Similarly, important questions are posed as to who narrates and represents the new Syria (Masoud), and how the naming of current events compare to the revolutionary moment of 2011 (Tarnowski). An interrelated theme is the possibilities and tensions produced by return and the renegotiation of the relation between Syria’s “inside” and “outside” (Ferreri and Hsyan).
Several contributions address the mediatised experience of the new order: derision at the volte-face of elites (Bardawil); the transformation of the Sednaya Prison from a site of phantasy and fear to one occupying public attention differently (Bader Eddin); and critical transformations and incipient contestations in the public sphere, such as the rehabilitation of a formerly proscribed Islamist leader (Al-Azmeh) and the emergence of new voices and public media within Syria (Alhayek and Zeno, Masoud). Other essays bring attention to the way that economic and wider regional contexts, i.e. the massive destruction of civilian life in Gaza, global Islamophobia, and the dismantling of livelihoods in Lebanon, continue to impinge on both public consciousness and the lives of the displaced in particular (Al-Azmeh, Sajadian).
Breaking with the past is not always a clear-cut prospect amidst the complex realities of post-Asad Syria in which old and new are constantly colliding.
Taken as a whole, the collection explores how Syrians in diverse positionalities—from returning exiled scholars, prisoners, and artists, to revolutionaries, and displaced farm labourers—confront the reality that the old order has gone. In short, by engaging ethnographically with the work of recalibration, this collection seeks anthropological understandings of how this liminal moment in Syria can be read in its unfolding. Recalibrating questions around the legacies of the past in Syria is one such example. Exacting accountability, strengthening the rule of law, and transitional justice seem to have taken on a sense of urgency since the fall of Asad. But this moment of hope is rife with contradictions and vulnerabilities. Recent events have shown that the path forward is fraught with pitfalls. In April this year, a photo of Syria’s new Minister of Justice shaking hands with the former chief prosecutor of the Asad regime’s Counter-Terrorism Court at a meeting with judges and Ministry employees on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, sparked a controversy on social media. Understandably, the photo, which was posted on the official account of the Ministry on X, enraged many Syrians. They readily recognised the notorious judge, who made regular media appearances and kept an active social media profile. Charges leading to the arbitrary prosecution of thousands of dissidents and ordinary Syrians and to the execution of hundreds of detainees were issued during his tenure at the infamous Court (now dissolved as part of the new Syrian administration’s judicial reform measures). This unwitting handshake shows that breaking with the past is not always a clear-cut prospect amidst the complex realities of post-Asad Syria in which old and new are constantly colliding.
This collection does not seek to convey a total account, nor does it advocate for one specific reading of what has happened and is ongoing in Syria. That would be naïve. Rather, it asks us pensively to engage with the changed reality: which parts of the past can and should be buried with the fall of the regime, and which parts still need documenting for whatever kind of Syria is to emerge. The thread was written in the early phase of a Syria without Assad and then later tweaked/recalibrated slightly in the spring, but things of course continue to evolve and will do so in the time to come. We posit that the unfolding events in Syria raise questions about how to reckon with the unexpected in regional dynamics and what this means for retraining our ethnographic sensitivities. At this particular juncture, what we need is collective reflection, deliberation, and what we call here recalibration.
Featured image: Photographs of Bashar Al-Asad and his father Hafez Al-Asad retrieved from the Presidential Palace in Damascus, widely circulated on facebook.
