Presentation by Ali Nehme Hamdan
Thursday, November 6, 201411:00 AM - 1:00 PM
11377 Bunche Hall
Beyond Lesser Syria: Spaces of the Syrian Civil War
In a now-classic piece in political geography, Agnew (1994) railed against the “territorial trap” of international relations theory, arguing for a framework capable of charting a geopolitical reality no longer defined by state borders. In post-colonial states like Syria, such advice strikes a powerful cord given the legacy of its “artificial” borders and the complex interactions among global and local actors that produced them (Barr 2013; Seale 2010). Yet the discursive work of these borders continues to affect political struggle in Syria below the surface. As the violence in Syria enters its third year, its increasingly “sectarian” character has engendered a number of problematic spatial imaginaries, in the academy, popular media, and among participants in the violence which are far from neutral representations. Some of these center on borders themselves as historical artifacts, while others attempt to redraw maps of the region along sectarian lines. Yet in whatever guise, spatial imaginaries profoundly shape how and where we study political violence in the case of Syria. This exploratory paper examines the spatial processes that produce sectarian violence in Syria from afar, drawing on insights from political geography – in particular, critical geopolitics and the so-called “relational turn” in geographic theory. I begin with some definitions for the purposes of clarity. I then transition to a discourse analysis of territorial approaches to the conflict, focusing on the “failed state” and “identity politics” narratives of the Syrian civil war and situating these within their disciplinary contexts in the academy. I then define and examine how geography’s recent “relational turn” might give us the language to transcend the trap adherent in territorial analyses of Syria’s civil war, and illustrate the increasing salience of this perspective in the popular media. I will conclude with a few notes on the limits to such an approach, as well as questions for future research. It is a central concern of this paper that territorial imaginaries of the conflict, which stress proximity over connectivity, underplay those actors and processes contributing to the conflict whose spatial dynamics are less straightforward, preferring to demonize or de-historicize rather than examine them in their own right. Iran’s exclusion from Geneva 2 is a case-in-point. Returning these to the light allows for a more robust conversation about where to locate relevant causes of civil war onset, duration and thus prospects for peace in Syria.