While thinking optimistically about politics is never wise, it is impossible not to share in the euphoria of Syrians for having, on December 8, welcomed the end of fifty-four years of brutal dictatorship. Syrians took to the streets—as well as Facebook, X, and Instagram—to celebrate, as many chanted, “‘forever’ has fallen” (saqata al-abad). That first Hafiz Al-Asad and then his son Bashar were graced with “living on forever,” had been a staple of regime rhetoric, but now the family’s dynastic ambitions had ended without the son’s son, another Hafiz, taking over. The revolutionary stalemate had come unstuck, and we’ve learned once again that nothing lives forever, not even dynasties. Among those pouring out of the liberated prisons, some were unaware that Hafiz Al-Asad was dead. Children born in captivity had never had a breath of outdoor air. The torture people endured was unimaginably cruel. Whatever comes next, this chapter of Syrian suffering is over.
The revolutionary stalemate had come unstuck, and we’ve learned once again that nothing lives forever, not even dynasties.
The night before the actual taking of Damascus, when events were moving at astonishing speed, the Syrian playwright Mohammad Al Attar took to Facebook from Berlin to declare that the moment, “despite the betrayal of regional and international politics and the shameful paralysis of the global community” brought “a flicker of hope born from immense pain.” Al Attar, prevented by German travel restrictions from returning home, invoked friends who disappeared, not knowing “if they are even alive. And I have the graves of many loved ones I wish to kneel before.”
Hannah Arendt wrote compellingly in On Violence about these moments when new beginnings seem possible:
Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use; and the question of this obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion, and, of course, by the number of those who share it. [. . .] Where power has disintegrated, revolutions are possible but not necessary. [. . .] Disintegration often becomes manifest only in direct confrontation; and even then, when power is already in the street, some group of men prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility (1969, 49).
Arendt, who can be as cryptic as she is resonant, seems here to be confusing power with violence, but there is something she captures about the unpredictability, contingency, and sense of autocratic violence’s fragility. While the threat of disintegration is never missing, people must be willing to organize and exploit it. Even then, nothing is guaranteed, but when people, in concert with one another, take responsibility, something unanticipated, new, and political can surprise us. This is precisely what we have witnessed happening in Syria.
When people, in concert with one another, take responsibility, something unanticipated, new, and political can surprise us
Why political transformation arrived now, rather than in 2011 when Syrians initially took to the streets, is assuredly a result, in part, of how the regime, backed by Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia, lost control when those backers withdrew their protection. Meanwhile, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the group that seized the territories ceded by Al-Asad’s beleaguered troops, was disciplined and properly supplied. People who in 2011 had supported the regime, however ambivalently, were exhausted by 2024 by a kleptocracy whose venality and cruelty were no longer even hiding in plain sight. It was all just glaringly, painfully apparent.
I have written elsewhere, how in the first ten years of Bashar Al-Asad’s rule, the regime was able to devise novel modes of ideological interpellation (borrowing from Louis Althusser), new ways of “hailing” citizens into Syria’s autocratic system. Generally, ideology operates by making social and historical anxieties seem natural and inevitable, arousing desires while simultaneously placing them in check. It works through mechanisms that complicate any clear understanding of belief and unbelief. It generates ardent loyalty but also ambivalence—and in the case of Syria this ambivalence, that toggle between desires for reform and the attachment to order, helped the regime recalibrate its relationship to rule—until it didn’t.
When catastrophe did not immediately materialise, the experience of euphoria seemed to solidify, gaining a kind of traction that pushed away fear and the immediate desire for score-settling.
The images in the early 2000s of a kinder, gentler, enlightened, chic Syrian regime, once popular protest was underway, were quickly shown to be but a thin veneer, hiding a brutality that brooked no dissent. These visions of glamor and glitz returned in the early 2020s, as if the regime had no other playbook on which to draw. A revealing portrait of the first family—with Bashar, Asma’, and their three children strolling amidst the ruins of war dressed in preppy, pristine clothes like an obscene advertisement for J. Crew—betrayed an ideological strategy that, far from denying the heartbreak and loss, sought to appropriate it. Yet Syrians of many stripes—in country and in exile—recognized the tired narratives as gross and false. With the blatantly kleptocratic spectacle on full display, the “fantasy bribe,” to use Frederic Jameson’s term, had ceased to operate as a rationale for political paralysis. It had become much harder for Syrians to know very well who was responsible for the overwhelming death and destruction—and simultaneously disavow this fact. With crippling economic sanctions, continual violations of state sovereignty, and a regime reliant on the narcotics trade for enrichment, it had become implausible for most to imagine how things could be even worse.
To be sure, once the regime fell, there were moods of intense uncertainty, even dread, as well as of exuberance. But when catastrophe did not immediately materialise, the experience of euphoria seemed to solidify, gaining a kind of traction that pushed away fear and the immediate desire for score-settling. Joy was allowed its moment—along with the sadness and grief. But as the new regime, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, missed various opportunities to commit to an inclusive democratic government or to hold perpetrators accountable, as people continued to experience everyday hardship, and as security arrangements remained precarious, the initial sense of joy curdled. As we know from the events of March, residual feelings of rage and revenge have come to expression in devastating sectarian violence.
I share in the happiness of all the Syrians who fought for the end of tyranny, and I choose for now to live between “past and future” —with our temporary access to both the beauty and the sorrow of this moment.
It is difficult to know what will happen now that the fifty-four years of the Al-Asads’ devastating autocracy are over. Following her return to Damascus for the first time since 2009, the sociologist Rima Majid wrote that the city “feels like a wedding in[side] a funeral.” The anthropologist Saphe Shamoun noted that returning to Aleppo was “like going home where no one was home.” This sense of the surreal, of euphoric disbelief that the nightmare was finally over, is part of the contemporary Syrian experience. So too is the lingering ambivalence among some whose worries about the new government or fears of local retaliation temper their sense of relief.
And there is the loss. The missing friends and family who are unable to share in the joy of this collective overcoming; lingering trauma from experiences of imprisonment and torture; new traumas, loss, and anger from retaliatory violence (often in a sectarian register and indiscriminate); the unbeckoned feelings of dread haunting the future, given both regional and domestic instability; the ongoing genocide in Gaza; civil society’s struggles to get divergent voices heard, and the formidable challenges to state-building—all make prognostications difficult, and probably unhelpful. But I share in the happiness of all the Syrians who fought for the end of tyranny, and I choose for now to live between “past and future” (again invoking Arendt)—with our temporary access to both the beauty and the sorrow of this moment.
Featured Image – Credits: Photo by Lina Sergie Attar, January 2025
Abstract: This piece thinks analytically about the balancing act required to hold the joy of upending Syria’s tyranny alongside the ongoing process of mourning. It invokes some of the formidable challenges that lie ahead in the longue durée of revolution, bringing to the fore experiences of euphoria, disappointment, recalibration, humor, fear, and loss. In conversation with artists/theorists and scholars, I explore the moment “between past and future” (Arendt), when new beginnings seem possible.
