The Syrian Revolution: Emergent Knowledges and Declonial Praxes

The Syrian Revolution started in 2011 as a popular and democratic uprising against a totalitarian regime. The Syrian people wanted free elections, a multiparty system, and the end of the state of emergency. The revolution lasted several years before the regime was able to besiege and derail it. The initial demands for justice and democracy were slowly replaced by sectarian politics, while the revolt of dignity gradually metastasized into a civil conflict and a proxy war. This paper explores the politics and ethics of research in the context of the Syrian revolution. It examines the challenges of knowledge production in sites where violence saturates every aspect of life. An essential question revolves around the politics of the research and the mechanisms that guide it? A related dilemma for researchers of the Syrian conflict and the Arab revolts more generally is whether their priority should be to study and better understand a social phenomenon or, instead intervene in the social process. How does one determine the ethics of the research? Is neutrality possible or even desirable when the population is constantly exposed to the regime’s genocidal violence? Finally, what language should one use when exploring the Syrian revolt? Should one avoid the transposition of “Western” theories of revolution and social movements to a site such as the Syrian one? Is it possible to produce research that speaks to the Syrian people and is also understandable to a “Western” audience? Or is there an epistemic abyss that separates these two sites?