Today, many in the West associate Syria with shocking violence. The country has been the scene of the most brutal war of the twenty-first century, and its name conjures associations of crimes against humanity, chemical weapons, systematic torture, forced disappearances, and refugee displacement of epic proportions.
Although this might be the first time that violence in Syria is regularly splashing across international headlines and television screens, violence is nothing new to Syria. Indeed, as Salwa Ismail skillfully demonstrates, it has been integral to its rule since Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970. In The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, Ismail argues that violence, in both its routine and spectacular forms, is a modality of government that structures relations between regime and citizens, as well as citizens’ own political subjectivities. It has thereby shaped Syrians’ understandings of self and others, fixed their “interpretive horizons,” and produced degradation, dread, and abjection as principal affective experiences of politics.
To illustrate these claims, Ismail analyzes an impressive range of primary sources, including memoirs, diaries, newspapers, novels, speeches, human rights investigations, and more than 150 interviews that she conducted in Syria between 2002 and 2011 or with Syrians exiles thereafter. The book’s first empirical chapter offers a chilling examination of how the political prison serves as a “template of rule.” It disciplines by humiliating, if not breaking, prisoners’ personhood, generating a relationship of power that then becomes continuous with the wider society. The chapter turns next to the notion of “the massacre” as another mechanism of rule, tracing the roots of Islamist insurgency in the late 1970s and its climax in the Assad regime’s killing of up to tens of thousands during its 1982 assault on the town of Hama. The next chapter adapts William Reno’s concept of “shadow state” (Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone, 2008 [1995]) to consider the political economy of control as practiced through the Baath Party, security establishment, clientelism, and co-optation, as well as their crisscrossing of sectarian and sociospatial lines. The third chapter probes memories of everyday life to show how schools and families have been key sites producing and reproducing citizens’ fear, debasement, and disengagement. The fourth chapter returns to Hama and considers how memories of the violence of the 1980s have, despite enforced public silence, been formative of Syrians’ understandings of the regime and its modes of operation. The fifth chapter turns to the performativity of violence through consideration of some cases of murder and slaughter since 2011, arguing that such horrors are staged, emplotted, and narrativized to create a sense of the uncanny that elides victim and perpetrator.
The sum of this multidimensional analysis is an examination of the politics of violence in Syria of unprecedented depth, breadth, and theoretical sophistication. The power of the book lays in its convincing demonstration of the continuity and coherence of violence as an apparatus of rule across levels of analysis (from the regime through various tiers of state and party agents to citizens themselves), locations (from detention camps to schoolyards to individuals’ inner worlds), and kinds of experience (from physical destruction of the body to the felt negation of dignity), as legible at different registers in diaries, literary works, spoken memories, and beyond.
This is a very significant achievement. Students of Syria will benefit from a far-reaching and comprehensive grappling with this facet of Assad rule. Students of violence will benefit from a masterful example of how to employ diverse sources to trace how distinct forms of violence aggregate into a system that saturates public and private life alike. Anyone bewildered by the brutality consuming Syria since 2011 will find clues in Ismail’s exposure of the ways that a politics of extermination and annihilation have long been “just beneath the surface” of Syrian political life. The current war has thus brought to horrific culmination a potentiality engrained in the very logic of regime–citizen relations. Today’s violence might shock, Ismail teaches us, but it ought not surprise.
Like any important work, Rule of Violence can leave readers with questions. The book paints a mosaic of the multifaceted manifestations of violence, and some pieces of that mosaic fit better than others. The book is most compelling where its empirical detail is most vivid, such as in descriptions of wrenching degradation in prison or suffocating school environments epitomized in the khaki of militarized uniforms. I found less compelling those sections where theory and academic jargon were more heavy-handed and, at least for this reader, obscured Ismail’s interpretive insights more than they illuminated them. Some of the book’s attention to political economy seemed tangential to the overall project. Issues such as the demographics of security and military recruitment and housing, illicit markets, the social and land conflicts generated by rural–urban migration, and 1980s and 1990s economic shortages were fascinating, but could have been more strongly connected to the book’s central argument. Ismail has much of interest to say about how class, corruption, sect, and space are constitutive of Syrian society and how precarity is constitutive of Syrian selves. However, interpretation of these material elements under the rubric of violence can seem like a conceptual stretch.
Mainstream empirical political scientists might note the book’s lack of some of the basic components of conventional disciplinary frameworks. In this regard, the book would have been better served by an overarching puzzle and an explication of how the posed argument answers that question. The preface alludes to puzzles: Ismail notes how Syrians’ “silence about Hama … was … puzzling” (p. viii) and her subsequent interest in “the question of the role of violence and memories of violence in shaping the Syrian polity” (p. ix). However, the book does not have a driving question that begs for explanation, and accordingly, its chapters do not clearly add up to such an explanation. A framing of this sort might have better connected the book’s various points and threads into a sharper theoretical takeaway that not only describes and interprets violence, but also clarifies how precisely that interpretation explains something about Syria that existing scholarship fails to explain.
To accomplish the latter, the book might have also included a review of literature on Syrian politics and a sharp statement of the unique contribution of this work. Ismail’s introduction expertly discusses Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Sigmund Freud, and other theorists, skillfully relating their work to Syria. Largely missing is a critical discussion of arguments put forth in existing scholarship on Syria and how Rule of Violence contests or extends them. Ismail briefly compares her approach to that of Lisa Wedeen (Ambiguities of Domination, 1999) (p. 100), but a fuller discussion of this sort at the outset would have better showcased the book’s novelty. This would have been valuable, because Syria watchers will likely find Ismail’s arguments to be consistent with what they already understand. Indeed, few who know Syria and Syrians would dispute the extent to which political violence shapes both.
In this sense, Ismail’s analysis might reaffirm and deepen existing ideas more than present path-breaking new knowledge or build counterintuitive theory. Its innovation lays in the thoroughness with which it probes and makes sense of violence in Syria as a system. In bringing together the multiple strands and manifestations of violence in one rich and erudite text, it is poised to stand as the most important reference on the topic. Anyone wanting to understand Syria and Syrians should grapple with this book.
