Introduction
In May 2016, the price of bread in the Syrian province of Idlib suddenly skyrocketed. The abrupt increase came without warning. Residents of this opposition-controlled enclave woke up to find that prices of the foodstuff had doubled, even tripled or quadrupled in certain areas. What drove the sudden increase? A poor agricultural season in Idlib's hinterlands was not to blame: the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that in 2015 Syria had its best rainfall in a decade, producing a far superior wheat crop than the dismal drought-induced output of 2016.Footnote 1 Nor were municipal administrators at fault. Just the previous year, local governance councils in Idlib had established a single, uniform price for bread throughout the province, mimicking a longstanding subsidy programme administered by the Syrian government.Footnote 2 The ostensibly impersonal market or a sudden influx of displaced persons was not the culprit either. Demand for bread was exactly the same as the previous day. Instead, the price rise can be more accurately traced to a decision made far from the conflict's messy frontlines: Washington, DC.
In early 2015, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the United States’ Agency for International Development (USAID) opened an investigation into cross-border programmes sending humanitarian aid from Turkey and Jordan into Syria. These programmes distributed medicine, flour, and other humanitarian supplies to residents of opposition-held enclaves. The province of Idlib had been one of its main recipients. Oversight of these programmes presented constant headaches. Those involved noted challenges resulting from the inability to directly monitor aid distribution, transparency concerns regarding commercial tenders for supplies and nepotism by contractors, among others. The potential for fraudulent and unscrupulous practices was high. In May 2016, the OIG acknowledged the discovery of a ‘network of commercial vendors, NGO employees, and others who have colluded to engage in bid-rigging and multiple bribery and kickback schemes related to contracts to deliver humanitarian aid in Syria’.Footnote 3 Upon this discovery, USAID asked certain NGOs to halt procurement of supplies and suspend a portion of aid deliveries.
At the centre of the OIG's investigation was GOAL, Ireland's largest international non-governmental humanitarian aid organisation. GOAL was also the largest distributor of flour to Idlib province at the time of the inquiry, providing supplies to approximately 20 per cent of the province's bakeries. The inquiry forced GOAL to suspend these shipments. Without the steady supply of flour to which bakers and local governing bodies had grown accustomed, the price of bread rose steeply, drastically altering the subsistence patterns in several of Idlib's communities. I am not interested in this story for its sensationalist details or the clear lack of political acumen it demonstrates, but because it poses important questions regarding how ostensibly ‘external’ actors reach into Syria and shape key developments inside the country. How can we understand the confluence of forces shaping the country's conflict? More specifically, what analytical prisms can illuminate the ways in which decisions taken at a geometric distance impact Syrian lives and the political manoeuvres that surround them?
In order to address these questions, and problematise certain assumptions in the study of politics more broadly, this article seeks to interrogate the epistemological monopoly of territory and scale in relation to analyses of the Syrian conflict. Both the ‘spatial fetish of territory’Footnote 4 and the failure to distinguish ‘between scale as a category of practice and category of analysis’Footnote 5 distract attention from equally, if not more important entanglements and interconnections shaping the lives of Syrians. Since the escalation of violence in late 2011, a broad array of ‘foreign’ actors has folded into Syria, connecting people and places together across the shortest and longest of distances. Donations from charitable organisations to besieged communities, transactions among commodity traders and government agencies tie imperial cores with hitherto unknown Levantine villages; Turkish border posts with Ukrainian wheat markets; Lebanese ports with blockaded Syrian towns. These linkages are far from banal. They shape the lives of Syrians, not to mention shifts and exchanges on the battlefield. Yet their importance is not well captured by conceptions of the modern international that have come to monopolise Anglo-American international relations. Nor are they more accurately portrayed as the product of regional rivalries among states and their ‘proxies’ on the ground.Footnote 6 In both cases, sweeping generalisations grounded in popular dogmas (anarchy, sectarianism, power politics), severely inhibit attention to crucial empirical processes. We deduce that lines of support, assistance, and hostility do not respond to the borderlines of the interstate system or straightforward scalar boundaries, yet such details are rarely pursued for what they can tell us about space, or pondering spatiality differently. Conventional geometries of power seem particularly difficult to shake off.Footnote 7 To remedy such lacunae, this article draws on insights from critical human geography to think ‘topologically’ about the proximate and distant relationships shaping the lives of Syrians. In particular, it seeks to expand the ways we conceptualise the multiple connections that work to produce political authority by honing in on one object crucial to its enactment: bread.
This article will demonstrate the promise of such an approach in four parts. It begins by offering a critique of the spatial assumptions that underpin much of the literature produced on the Syrian war, outlining what prevalent frameworks elide in their analysis. In the second section, an alternative is put forth. Drawing on the work of John Allen, I suggest why thinking topologically better equips us to understand articulations of political authority in the country. The third and fourth sections analyse bread provision during the Syrian conflict to illustrate the utility of this approach, highlighting the partnerships, intermediaries, and connections that subsume this crucial governing practice in two very different parts of Syria. The more fluid set of relationships to be explored will make clear why prevalent conceptualisations of space are not up to the task.
Drawing on scholarly and personal knowledge of the country, I attempt to assess wartime governance and food provision without direct access to Syria since 2011, due to security restrictions. Research was conducted between 2013–18. It draws on in-depth interviews (n = 83) conducted by email, video conferencing, instant messaging and telephone conversations with civilians, activists, Local Coordination Committee (LCC) members, traders, government officials, and journalists. Many were interviewed on more than one occasion. The article additionally benefits from a robust qualitative sample of respondents collected outside of Syria, which includes interviews (n = 92) with Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, many of whom remain in contact with relatives in the country and some of whom travel back to Syria regularly. I supplement interview data with secondary source literature and open-source material ranging from NGO and international organisations’ reports to newspapers and YouTube videos. Almost all informants inside Syria asked to remain anonymous in view of the personal and professional risks involved in providing information on the topics discussed. Due to these constraints, I use pseudonyms and anonymous quotes for information collected in confidential interviews. Unlike much of the current civil war scholarship, I have shunned the search for ostensibly value-free data so as to conduct a large-N analysis. There are certain questions that conducting interviews or surveys from afar simply cannot claim to answer. The assertions made herein should all be considered in light of the serious limitations on qualitative research inside Syria. Undoubtedly, lacunae are rife and further research is needed.
Territorial and scalar attachments
Perhaps the most ubiquitous limitation in analyses of the Syrian conflict are approaches that reify territory or scale as ontological entities. In the former, territories are partitioned and parcelled into bounded units of authority and control. Whether ‘controlled’ by the opposition or the Assad regime, they are portrayed as a ‘series of blocks’Footnote 8 across which power flows effortlessly, as in the colour-coded maps of territorial jurisdiction so often deployed to represent the current state of the conflict. In the latter, local, national, and regional scales are assumed; the question is simply one of identifying the level at which political processes of interest operate.Footnote 9 Both approaches are underpinned by a strict, Euclidean geometry. They treat spatial categories as given rather than produced. Resulting analyses leave us with a familiar sense of flat landscapes with identifiable centers. Boundaries divide and enclose space. Power over jurisdictions can be located and extended over distances that can be measured and delineated. Importantly, authority in this geometric arrangement is exercised over bounded territorial plots or neatly demarcated scales. Such assumptions impact less our understanding of ‘the facts on the ground’ – Who? What? Where? – than the efforts to analyse – Why? How? – what is going on. Put simply, we cannot account for the ‘spatial reworkings of authority’ that shape so much of what goes on around us today.Footnote 10
Take, for example, Sam Heller, a Century Foundation Fellow and one of the more prominent American analysts of the Syrian conflict. In a 2017 article, Heller argues against the trope that Syria had devolved into an indiscernible muddle. He posits instead that a relational analysis of various actors in the war reveals coherent patterns of action. ‘There are dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individual factions and sub-factions vying for control of part or all of Syria … yet those thousands of elements aren't somehow just bouncing off each other like atoms.’Footnote 11 He continues, ‘They move in identifiable patterns, drawn along by how they're linked to each other and to a handful of international poles.’ But how should we understand the linkages and poles to which they are tied? ‘We have to think in terms of what you could call the “center”’, Heller argues. ‘All elements and players in Syria are defined to some extent, by their relationship to the national Syrian state in Damascus – the center.’ Heller's recourse to a ‘center’ as the necessary nodal point by which any part of Syria gains relevance assumes that space is a flat, undifferentiated surface. State power either extends outwards or fails to do so, shaping all else in its path. His analysis neglects that ‘centers’ of government are multiple and that what requires explanation are the very practices through which Damascus is able to ‘act as a centre’.Footnote 12 Despite his detailed knowledge of micro-level developments, especially in difficult to access opposition-controlled enclaves, Heller's account remains wedded to an outmoded spatial geometry.
Scholarly accounts in international relations suffer from similar limitations. In his detailed account of the ‘external factors’ fueling The Battle for Syria, Christopher Phillips argues that narratives focused on the internal dynamics fueling the war are insufficient. Rather, the conflict ‘simply cannot be explained without a detailed understanding of the international dimension’.Footnote 13 Six countries (Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, US) form the basis of his account. While Phillips seeks to emphasise the ‘interaction of internal and external actors’,Footnote 14 he repeatedly recurs to a rigid spatial geometry in which there are clearly demarcated, qualitatively different ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’. Whereas Phillips sharply observes the intricacies of Qatari financial assistance and Russian military support, the practices that make it so that resources can be felt by Syrians are invariably subjected to a preconceived map of the world. The national scale pre-determines units of analysis, and the power of foreign patrons extends almost effortlessly across space. Although Phillips seems quite cognisant that neither political influence nor the exercise of power correspond to such fixed moorings, these inklings are never exploited for what they could reveal about spatiality, or thinking about space differently. Syria remains a fixed territorial platform upon which nefarious machinations occur, a mere stage upon which an international political drama plays out.Footnote 15
These spatial suppositions are not limited to scholars of international relations. In his insightful Morbid Symptoms, Gilbert Achcar unpacks the funding of Islamist groups by the Gulf oil monarchies. He surmises that, ‘the only counter-revolutionary option was therefore for Riyadh to co-opt the uprising along with Doha’.Footnote 16 The extension of power from an identifiable location here is thoroughly unproblematic. Qatari and Saudi Arabian intentions easily infiltrate Syria by funding local allies. Achcar moves further in this direction when he emphasises how ‘networks of private donors and fundraisers, as well as institutional and religious networks’, from the Gulf all ‘contributed to tilting the balance among the Syrian dissidents’ towards those waving a ‘Sunni-sectarian banner’.Footnote 17 None of this is incorrect, yet we are left without a sense of how exactly Syrian political actors are drawn close, which practices of reach were employed by Gulf monarchies and religious groups to minimise distance so that their ostensible allies could draw on resources at their disposal.Footnote 18 Although the impact of such funding may very well correspond to what Achcar details, emphasising foreign supporters or obscure religious networks are of little help when it is the practices through which these actors exert leverage and influence, rather than the resources that lie behind them, that one wishes to understand. My point here is not that external allies or financial assistance are irrelevant as variables, but that notions of space premised on territory or scale are far too blunt an instrument through which to comprehend how they are made relevant in practice. Of course, some scholars have proven more sensitive to the connections and spatial practices crucial to deploying resources and enacting political authority in Syria.Footnote 19 Yet for many, an over-reliance on territorial or scalar imaginaries means the ability of different actors to exercise reach and enact leverage or presence is too often assumed, rather than explained. Spatial binaries such as national/international, inside/outside, local/global can only take us so far.Footnote 20 They conceal a world of complexity, distort an array of sociospatial processes and obscure the intricate relationships that shape articulations of political authority.
Turning to topologies
In his essay compilation The Impossible Revolution, Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh reflects upon the tangible presence of external actors in Syria after watching Islamist forces seize the Bab al-Hawa crossing near the Turkish border. ‘It became clear that the conflict was no longer contained within Syrian borders’, he asserts, ‘but had spilled over to regional and international borders, with its sectarian dimension gaining momentum and intensity’.Footnote 21 Later on, Saleh laments that, ‘Syria has become a no-homeland, exposed to every kind of incursion.’Footnote 22 Yet the question remains: How can such ‘incursions’ and the political outcomes they work to engender be understood? The driving insight behind thinking topologically is that power relationships are not so much located in certain scalar containers or extended easily across territory but work instead to arrange the places of which they are a part.Footnote 23 Space becomes a process in the making,Footnote 24 one that takes its form and contours through a mix of elements, ‘some close by, others folded in from afar’.Footnote 25 Distance based on geographical location ceases being a given, lines of control and assistance can no longer be mapped based on extension. This is not to argue that there are no territorial or scalar logics at play in the practices through which actors seek to accrue influence and exercise power.Footnote 26 Rather, it is to postulate that such perspectives take for granted the very phenomena they seek to scrutinise. They assume that power assembles in time and place rather than explaining how actors are able to employ resources and capabilities so as to ‘make their presence felt through relations of proximity and reach’.Footnote 27 In this respect, the explanatory potential of topological approaches lies in their orientation towards ‘the specific relations in play’,Footnote 28 and to the twists and turns through which actors make their presence felt in the here and now of daily life.
From bordersFootnote 29 and NGOsFootnote 30 to the study of debt ecologiesFootnote 31 and the spread of market rationality to unexpected locales,Footnote 32 topological approaches have been deployed in relation to a host of empirical concerns.Footnote 33 Here I want to foreground its utility for thinking about the various ways in which political authority, through brief examples related to bread provision, is performed – examining how institutions, materials, and practices coalesce to create articulations of power that ‘can only be disentangled or unfolded heuristically’.Footnote 34 While problematising the elegant boundedness of state sovereignty, political geographers have demonstrated how relational conceptualisations of space better allow us to explore manifestations of political authority that do not correspond to a territorial or scalar template.Footnote 35 Their work has illustrated how territory and scale emerge as the product of socio-technical and discursive practices.Footnote 36 Yet even in many of these works, as well as among those working in the actor-network tradition, there remains a sense of a flattened landscape through which power and resources travel, a ‘series of lines and connections extended horizontally from site to site across an even landscape’.Footnote 37 In contrast, topological analysis emphasises the ‘qualitative properties of space (as opposed to the geometric)’,Footnote 38 where it is the way things and actors are related that matters, not just the fact of their networked connection. It does not disregard the tracking of networks or the examination of organisational advantages or resources but rather seeks to hone in on the processes and embodied practices through which these come to matter.
By foregrounding process, relation, and connection, topological thinking can help us unpack how political authority is practised and assembled, often in ways that defy conventional mappings. Rather that locate power in institutions or geographic containers, we can begin to think about how technologies of government coalesce as part of a spatial arrangement in which private agencies, NGOs, foreign governments, and local organisations all exercise powers of reach through which they seek to make their presence felt.Footnote 39 Performances of political authority emerge here not simply from the deployment of resources or de jure sovereignty but from a ‘multiplicity of modes of connection, continuity and discontinuity’,Footnote 40 and the situated arrangements and relationships in which they are expressed. In the case of Syria, thinking topologically entails approaching opposition and regime-held territories not as a priori geographic units connected to foreign patrons, but as non-bounded sites in a constant process of creation, shifting attention to the practices that shape the terms of political encounter in specific places.Footnote 41 The crucial point is that to account for articulations of political authority, we need to explore ‘a more transverse set of political interactions’, than the static conceptions of space with which we operate tend to allow.Footnote 42
Bread provision in wartime Syria
A longstanding governmental practice through which the Assad led Ba‘thist (1970–) regime performs political authority is the provision of discounted bread. Since the early 1970s, the Syrian government has supported wheat production and subsidised retail prices for what is popularly known as khubz al-dawla (bread of the state).Footnote 43 While the proportion of government expenditures allotted to education, public employment, and pensions were reduced considerably following Bashar al-Assad's accession to the presidency in 2000 and the subsequent turn towards a ‘social market economy’, oil and food subsidies remained stable,Footnote 44 accounting for nearly 15 per cent of government spending prior to the outbreak of protests in 2011.Footnote 45 Since the escalation of violence later that year, the Assad regime has treated the bread subsidy as an unquestionable governmental obligation towards its citizenry.Footnote 46 And while opposition actors (mu‘ārida), whether in the form of revolutionary councils (majālis thawriyye), armed factions (faṣā’il) or the various exiled groups ostensibly representing opposition-held Syria, have gone to great lengths to upend the regime's governmental practices, almost all have sought to emulate the provision of discounted bread.Footnote 47 Not even those groups most openly inclined to enacting diametrically opposed models of government, such as Jaysh al-Islam and the Islamic State, have spurned the allure of the Assad regime's longstanding practice of daily nourishment.
They have done so because subsidising bread shapes patterns of domination and belonging while forming the contours of community.Footnote 48 In Syria, it remains a crucial mechanism through which political authority is performed, a technology of government that shapes relations between rulers and ruled. Yet securing the wheat and flour necessary for enacting this welfare programme has become an arduous challenge, for both opposition groups and the Assad regime. The burning of crops during battle, the displacement of farmers, rising fuel costs, and the scarcity of other inputs (seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides) have combined to drastically alter the country's agricultural landscape.Footnote 49 Once self-sufficient in wheat, the country's output declined from 4.913 million tonnes in 2010 to 1.3 million tonnes in 2016.Footnote 50 Unsurprisingly, bread prices have seen dramatic fluctuations.Footnote 51 Nevertheless, both the Assad regime and various opposition groups have gone to great lengths to stabilise bread supply in areas they seek to control.Footnote 52 How have they done so? Through what links, connections, and practices is the provision of bread pursued and political authority performed?
Defying distance: Bread provision in Assad-controlled Syria
By the end of 2012, the Assad regime had lost control of a vast swathe of arable lands to the Free Syrian Army. Farmers in parts of the country under its control were often unable to transport their wheat harvests to regime-held silos. With strategic stocks in the latter diminishing rapidly, shortages of bread were feared. The implementation of economic sanctions by the European Union and the United States in mid-2012 further hampered the Assad regime's ability to address the expected shortfall through imports. While these sanctions did not restrict the import of foodstuffs, banking restrictions and asset freezes meant many companies were unwilling to do business with the Syrian government. As a result, it was forced to fill the growing import gap through an array of mechanisms. Most of the time, the General Establishment for Cereal Process and Trade (HOBOOB), the body charged with overseeing the wheat supply chain, announces international purchasing tenders. These target companies and traders in Eastern European countries, suppliers unaffected or not discouraged by sanctions. On other occasions, when such tenders are unsuccessful, the regime subcontracts wheat acquisition to Lebanese traders and shipping companies. The latter act as middlemen in order to conceal a ship's final destination.Footnote 53 To finance these purchases, the regime repeatedly drew on Russian and Iranian credit lines. Through such links, along with the early manipulation of UN food relief programmes, government authorities were able to prevent food shortages while checking inflationary pressures during the first three years of the conflict.Footnote 54 Ruthless repression of opponents was carefully combined with strategic provision to selected communities.
In 2014, following the Islamic State's conquest of much of Raqqa province, further shifts were required. With little access to the products of Syria's agricultural heartland and major grain silos in the northwest,Footnote 55 prominent government officials promised to use a second $1 billion Iranian credit line issued in 2015 to ‘secure the flow of essential goods and materials’.Footnote 56 The Islamic Republic has also repeatedly sent large deliveries of food and humanitarian supplies to the port of Latakia.Footnote 57 In spite of these resources, shortages were feared and stocks ran low, as the conflict severely disrupted supply chains.Footnote 58 Despite the closure of more than half the country's bakeries, the destruction of fertiliser and yeast factories as well as seed distribution offices and wheat silos, the Assad regime has been able to supply government-controlled parts of Syria with discounted flour for almost the entirety of the conflict. Yet, its proficiency in supplying bread cannot be simply assumed by virtue of its alliances with Russia or Iran. Rather, efforts were made to bring ‘people and things together in new configurations’ to ensure this outcome.Footnote 59 The array of catalysing forces involved are numerous. Before wheat arrives in Syria, Ukrainian farmers plant seeds distributed by local companies and government bodies. Labourers then harvest wheat before sending supplies to ports on the Black Sea. After arriving in Latakia or Beirut, wheat is disbursed to silos for storage or government-owned mills to be converted into flour, which is then distributed to local bakeries where khubz al-dawla is produced. None of the forces, both human and non-human, act alone in this process. Their efficacy, so that wheat produced in far way Ukrainian farms feeds hungry Syrians, ‘always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces’,Footnote 60 that stretch and twist across geometric distances.
Who are some of the key actors in this process? Consider, for example, the prominent role played by regime-aligned businessman in the import of wheat. Large suppliers have been increasingly unwilling to transport bulk shipments to Syria. As all exports to the country are subject to numerous restrictions and regulations, fewer companies are willing to implement the controls needed to ensure full compliance, driving down the size of trades. With many public sector organisations under sanction or lacking in liquidity, Syrian laws were modified to allow for private sector companies to import products that were once the sole purview of the government.Footnote 61 New companies connected to influential businessmen such as Rami Makhlouf and Ayman Jaber quickly emerged.Footnote 62 These companies parse the market for food supplies and take on the risks that container-shipping firms, larger banks, and grain traders are unwilling to countenance. Others, such as the Aman Group, work as brokers for grain deals for the government agency (HOBOOB) charged with wheat procurement. By purchasing commodity contracts on its behalf, the group, run by the Foz family from Latakia, profits from generous commissions while concealing the purchaser of the cereals. Through ties to these brokers and businessmen, the Assad regime establishes a connection with purveyors of grain, which did not sell their goods to the previously self-sufficient Syrian market. At a time when it was cheaper to bring wheat from the Black Sea than the province of Hasakah due to internal levies enacted by armed groups,Footnote 63 this sleight of hand allows the Assad regime to shift risks and rewards beyond the regulatory reach of sanctions. As one wheat trader based in Beirut put it: ‘You never quite know whom you are dealing with, and that is the point.’Footnote 64
Through the creation of front companies, newfangled shipping lines and discreet commercial links, a circumspect logistics network quickly emerged around the commerce of grain, one that only procured wheat but also generated large profits for allied businessmen. The latter have ‘taken on greater roles in facilitating trade and payments’, frequently acting as a front for government agencies unable to import goods.Footnote 65 By acquiring enough grain to ensure bread supply, they both shield residents from inflation driven by the erosion of the Syrian pound's value and enable the regime to maintain the fiction of seamless provision to those living in areas under its control.Footnote 66 A father of four in the Damascene district of Abu Jarash underlined the importance of such outcomes: ‘There is no way I could feed my family without subsidized bread (khubz al-dawla). Inflation has affected everyone and there are some foods we no longer buy but bread is essential. The regime knows this and always provides it.’Footnote 67 The capacity of the regime to call partners into new alignments so as to draw in resources turns on its adeptness at folding in seemingly distant resources in line with perceived necessities and the demands of rapidly changing situations. The gap between near and far is bridged by relationships and mediated practices of reach; distance is but a product of such interactions.
Faced with challenges brought about by sanctions and conflict, the Assad regime devised new pathways through which to secure crucial supplies ranging from petroleum to sugar, weapons, and wheat. The accessibility of subsidised bread stands in stark contrast with the recurring shortages, oscillating prices, and sporadic scarcities seen in opposition-held areas, especially those besieged by government forces.Footnote 68 This disparity has been one of the crucial mechanisms through which the regime has been able to slowly expand its hold on the country and quash revolutionary aspirations after briefly appearing to be on the brink of collapse in 2014. While such assistance could easily be portrayed as a straightforward expression of foreign support for the Assad regime, a form of influence that extends from one country to its proxy or ally, scrutiny of bread provision makes clear that there is more at play. Crucial here are the practices through which the regime obtains resources in order to leverage a presence in the lives of Syrians whom it seeks to rule, so that the water that irrigates farms in Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa is converted into calories to feed citizens in Tartous, Hama, and Damascus. Scale, territory or the prism of proxy war obscure more here than they reveal.
I do not mean to suggest that the political priorities and resources of the ‘centre’ are of no consequence, but that such priorities require associations and collaborations to be achieved.Footnote 69 And such modes of connection have repeatedly proven crucial to minimising unrest and performing authority among those in regime-held areas. In several interviews conducted over Skype in March 2018, respondents acknowledged the wide availability and low price of bread at the time, especially in comparison with opposition-held parts of the country. Others emphasised the high price of other foods when compared to khubz al-dawla. One resident of the al-Midan neighbourhood of Damascus explained how ‘the regime has raised the subsidized price but bread is still very cheap. We could not live without this bread.’Footnote 70 Another resident from al-Shaghour expressed surprise at how the foodstuff was so consistently supplied: ‘We have not lacked bread for one day since 2011. It is impressive. I do not know how the regime does it but every day there is enough at my local bakery.’Footnote 71 The ‘true’ political preferences of such citizens are impossible to know, yet the folding in of distant resources, the capacity to make certain supplies available in the here and now of daily life, works to enroll them in performances of political authority, closing down potential alternatives by entrenching the ‘architecture of state power in their everyday life’.Footnote 72 The coherent presence the Syrian state performs at the bakery masks a far more unstable achievement: that of a central institution continually connecting and coordinating with different actors so as to establish a presence in particular settings.Footnote 73 As one baker in Baramkeh, a district not far from the University of Damascus, put it: ‘The regime provides all of my flour, which I think comes from Ukraine. The deliveries are consistent. A truck arrives from the flourmill every week, deposits my quota and I bake for my customers. No one lacks for food. The state is with us every day.’Footnote 74
Finding flour and making bread in Dara‘a
In the Dara‘a province of southern Syria, opposition actors sought out ways to respond to a citizenry craving both liberation from the Assad regime and a more equitable set of governing practices.Footnote 75 After the regime cut off flour deliveries and a host of other services in late 2011, cross-border relationships became increasingly crucial to this endeavour.Footnote 76 Before the conflict, the Syrian government had complete control of the wheat supply chain in Dara‘a. Flour was produced via a sizeable industrial mill in the provincial capital (Dara‘a al-Balad), from where it was distributed to local bakeries and sold at subsidised prices. After the takeover of the capital city in spring 2015, the government ceased wheat shipments to the flourmill. To ensure the latter was not used to mill local wheat or supplies purchased elsewhere, it proceeded to bomb the facility, which remained out of use through 2018.Footnote 77 In response, rebel groups and local coordination councils – civilian governance structure that built upon activist committees established during the initial protests – sought out ways to replace the government-controlled bread supply chain.
Despite being a key crucible in the 2011 uprising, Dara‘a province has diverged from other opposition-controlled parts of the country. Driven by the comparatively small size of lands under rebel control as well as a high dependence on Saudi funding and Jordanian logistical support, the province has been, until a ceasefire declared in February 2016, subject to more stable forms of rule than other ‘liberated territories’ (al-manāṭiq al-muḥarrara) in the North (Idlib and Aleppo), where governance has been far more fractured, inconsistent, and uneven.Footnote 78 Moreoer, Dara‘a's distinctiveness is partly driven by the practices through which non-Syrian actors have reached into the province. During the first two years of the conflict, food aid was largely funnelled through UN agencies (FAO, World Food Programme [WFP]) and nascent insurgent support networks based in Amman. The delivery of supplies increased in 2014, when the UN Security Council passed two resolutions that authorised channels for the cross-border delivery of humanitarian aid into Syria. While the distribution of this assistance was always conditioned by political loyalties and kinship – given the localised nature of rebel factions – the availability of food improved dramatically.Footnote 79 Crucial here were relationships that guaranteed the flow of resources into the province, which were distributed in turn by Dara‘a's local councils. Despite their geographic distance from Syria's other opposition enclaves, these bodies were not isolated organs of rule. Nor was governance the isolated exertion of armed groups, as it is so often portrayed in the rebel governance literature.Footnote 80 Rather, an unstable amalgam of local coordination councils, tribal groups, revolutionary factions, NGOs, humanitarians, diplomats, development contractors, and donor governments sought to meet the embodied concerns of communities in the province.Footnote 81 As violence deepened and the Assad regime's withdrawal persisted, these actors gave form and substance to opposition rule.
In 2013, USAID began working with local councils to provide flour to bakeries in Dara‘a. Piloted first in Aleppo, USAID partnered with the Amman branch of the Assistance Coordination Unit (ACU), a group affiliated with the Syrian National Coalition (the collection of opposition groups recognised by several countries as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people), to deliver flour to towns and villages deemed worthy of assistance. Designed to maintain stable bread prices, the programme required close coordination between a number of forces. First, private contractors and NGOs commissioned by USAID purchase flour from private millers in Jordan, usually made from Ukrainian or Russian wheat. Supplies are then delivered to the border, where the ACU would, through Syrian employees, deliver to local councils. In addition to the inevitable complications related to distribution inside Dar‘a, flour shipments were also subject to snags and hitches in the country from which it was dispatched. In order to operate, companies had to first gain the approval of the Jordanian Foreign Ministry, which never outlined its approach to or relationship with oppositions groups in southern Syria. Without such authorisation, cross-border deliveries were not feasible. Employees of these organisations made clear that decisions made in the Jordanian bureaucracy were crucial to determining whether Dar‘awis received their daily bread: ‘Our deliveries depend on the Jordanian foreign ministry and intelligence agencies. Without their approval, no major deliveries can go across the border.’Footnote 82 Further complications often arose once inside Syria, where the ACU had to navigate a warren of armed opposition factions under the nominal umbrella of the Free Syrian Army.Footnote 83 Despite American efforts (2014–15) to increase collaboration through a Military Operations Center based in Amman, the so-called ‘Southern Front’ remained more a loose coalition than a coherent amalgam.Footnote 84 Given their role in providing security and warding off regime forces, navigating these groups was crucial to bread provision. In sum, the activities of armed factions, private contractors, host governments, and foreign donors all had a variegated effect on bread provision in Dara‘a.
To improve coordination the Jordan-based branch of the Syrian Public Establishment for Grains (SPEG), an agency working under the umbrella of Ministry of Finance and Economy in the Syrian Interim Government, took control of the regional supply chain in 2015. It drew on funds from several donors (Germany, the UAE, US, UK, Kuwait) to build a logistical infrastructure that would keep bread prices stable and affordable amidst access challenges and constant bombardment. In a matter of months, the SPEG began to operate wheat silos and flourmills, as well as installing new ones. ‘Our main job is to coordinate with everyone involved in the wheat supply chain and oversee its operation’, stated one member of the SPEG, ‘we are constantly monitoring bread demand in different towns and finding ways to obtain supplies in Jordan and send them to Dara‘a.’Footnote 85 Throughout 2015, the SPEG funded the refurbishment of a silo in the town of Garz, which soon acted as a hub for much of the south, and the construction of an industrial mill near the Jordanian border at Nasib.Footnote 86 The latter quickly became the largest source of locally milled flour in the province, producing between 120–50 tonnes per week, exceeding the output of all the other mills in Dara‘a combined. Provincial residents reported a noticeable decrease in bread prices following the SPEG's establishment.
Notwithstanding these successes, dependence on the Nasib mill was high, and imported flour was still required to meet local demand.Footnote 87 Flourmills and bakeries were continuously bombed by the Assad regime.Footnote 88 Others were forced to close due to the lack of key inputs such as fuel, water, and yeast.Footnote 89 Pricing competition from government wheat traders also proved a significant challenge, as the Assad regime sought to appropriate local production by paying higher prices to farmers in the province. Unable to collect much in the way of taxes and increasingly bereft of financial assistance, councils were frequently unable to purchase locally produced wheat. Hence the mounting dependence on the USAID programme and others like it.Footnote 90 As one local council member put it: ‘If external assistance is terminated, we have no way to make up the shortfall. Even if we stockpiled local production, it would not suffice. We simply do not have enough wheat and cannot mill enough flour.’Footnote 91
Producing bread in Dar‘a was thus a topological problem. Confronting this challenge required folding in resources and expertise often at some geometric distance from the province, and keeping them in sufficient proximity and coordination to produce bread. This process was heavily dependent on a key set of intermediaries, who circulate materials, funds, and information across the Syrian border and into communities confronting state violence.Footnote 92 By 2015, this amalgam of NGOs, humanitarian agencies, Jordanian government officials, and Syrian revolutionaries both inside and outside the country, came to undergird governance in much of Syria's liberated south. ‘We try to make sure funds and technical assistance from foreign donors make their way to those who need it most’, affirmed one Syrian ACU employee based in Amman, ‘Our job is to ensure support from outside reaches local councils inside Dara‘a. This is how we support the revolution.’Footnote 93 Development contractors may pursue very different ends, but their means are not all that different: ‘The company's goal is to build the governance capacities of Syrian communities’, an employee of one company told me, ‘We draw on funds mainly from European governments to support the development of governance structures inside the country so as to restore some level of stability in a conflict environment. Ensuring flour gets into opposition areas is crucial to this endeavor.’Footnote 94 Whether such efforts are successful depends on an array of factors. What is clear, however, is that bread provision, and the political authority it works to enact, comes together through processes and relationships that are hardly coterminous with territory or scale, owing far more ‘to the imagination of Escher than Euclid’.Footnote 95
Inter-tribal conflicts unleashed after a ceasefire decreed in February 2016 were followed by a host of sieges imposed by the Syrian government.Footnote 96 Both worked to radically limit access to supplies from Jordan, as trading and smuggling routes were curbed or taken over by regime forces. In July 2017, a multi-agency report ‘found gaps in every step of the wheat-to-bread supply line’ in southern Syria. Local milling only met ‘15% of the flour needed to serve the population’, and ‘all 94 local councils identified the lack of flour as the biggest challenge to meeting bread need’.Footnote 97 In early June 2018, Dara‘a's provincial council prohibited the sale of wheat to traders and collection agencies affiliated with the Syrian government. While the council had long sought to limit such sales, the decision marked the first concerted attempt to strictly enforce these transactions. It did so in preparation for an anticipated dearth in wheat supplies engendered by yet another decision made in Washington, DC. According to one USAID official, the agency had decided to radically scale back its flour provision programme in southern Syria some weeks earlier.Footnote 98 Citing the ‘current landscape in southwest Syria’ as well as ‘the increasing number of stabilization actors and limited cross-border access for humanitarian partners’, USAID had decided to reduce assistance by 30 per cent.Footnote 99 The writing was on the wall. Just weeks later, the Syrian government, with Russian assistance, completed military operations displacing more than 200,000 people in the province. The regime offensive drastically reduced areas under opposition control, as well as the pathways through which a diverse set of opposition actors sought to perform their authority. Distance is not easily dissolved, articulations of political authority are not effortlessly assembled. Once established, topological relations need to be practically maintained. Failing to do so fostered the end of opposition rule in Dara‘a.
While I have not had the space to explore military assistance, trade patterns or biopolitical endeavours beyond bread provision, the conceptual argument I have made can account for how exercises of power and exertions of influence defy scalar and territorial mappings. Further empirical research is needed to trace the ways people, organisations, and things connect Damascus to Tehran, Idlib to Istanbul, and how actors seek to maintain these connections so as to ensure reliable supplies of food, funds, and firepower. More too is needed on the distribution of agency in the Syrian conflict – a tension that courses through this article. Although I have returned to certain human actors and organisations rather than distributing agency more widely, more research is needed on the ways non-humans relate to and shape the routine practices through which governing authorities enable or disable, entice or alienate those they seek to rule.Footnote 100 None of this means we should overlook blanket acts of violence overwhelmingly employed by the Assad regime, which remain among the most conspicuous registers of power in Syria today. Nor the fact that different opposition actors have varying goals and ways of governing, as well as different capacities to call upon financial and military resources at a geometric distance. Rather, my point is that at a time when the parsimony of scale and territory clearly no longer convinces, it seems more pertinent than ever to consider the spatial prisms through which we analyse politics. In the case of Syria, thinking topologically pushes us to eschew easy categorisations of the conflict as a proxy war to scrutinise instead the concrete practices and technologies of government that shape how military victories are won, civilians starved, and political authority performed.
Conclusion
By making the pathways of a material object the focus of inquiry, this article has sought to unravel an important set of connections between seemingly dispersed sites, as well as the labours, materials, and activities that must gather and cohere so as to produce bread and perform authority. In this respect, I have sought to extend and enrich relational approaches to governance by thinking topologically so as to illuminate one of the biopolitical registers through which power is practised in contemporary Syria. I have sought to make clear that the Assad regime's ability to leverage resources to feed people on a prolonged basis is not just a question of foreign ties, domestic resources, or powerful allies, but how these are drawn on and employed, the various ways they are used to advantage so as to fold into people's daily lives. As a political scientist, the shift I advocate in our conceptions of space is driven neither by disciplinary attachments nor to promote alluring metaphors, but by its explanatory promise.Footnote 101 Syria is transected by a range of forces whose activities and practices clearly complicate the neat maps of territorial control and regional alliance so commonly used to explain the dynamics of the country's conflict. It seems patently unwise then to reify scale and territory when flows of influence, power and resources clearly do not respond to such orderings. To counter such impulses, I suggest we examine the multi-valent forms of connection that topological thinking helps elucidate.Footnote 102 The result may sometimes resemble a rather messy ensemble of forces, complicating our attempts to impose uniformity and infer universal patterns from social phenomena that occur in bounded units. Yet the alternative is not only to obscure much of what has happened in Syria since the onset of peaceful protests in March 2011, but to remain ensnared in analytical frameworks that often work to reinforce the very power geometries we seek to disrupt. For our imaginative geographies are not simply depictions of reality, as Edward Said long ago cautioned; they are performative, and impact the world.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Brent Eng, Zeina Azmeh, Ali Nehmé Hamdan, Tamer Elshayal, Daniel Neep, Dima Krayem, Omar Sirri, Hester van Hensbergen, and Nadine Osama for critically engaging with this paper. I would also like to thank the many Syrians who patiently and generously answered my questions and discussed the contents of this article.
