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Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World
By engaging with recent developments in the study of empires, this book examines how inhabitants of Roman imperial Syria reinvented expressions and experiences of Greek, Roman and Syrian identification. It demonstrates how the organization of Greek communities and a peer polity network extending citizenship to ethnic Syrians generated new semiotic frameworks for the performance of Greekness and Syrianness. Within these, Syria's inhabitants reoriented and interwove idioms of diverse cultural origins, including those from the Near East, to express Greek, Roman and Syrian identifications in innovative and complex ways. While exploring a vast array of written and material sources, the book thus posits that Greekness and Syrianness were constantly shifting and transforming categories, and it critiques many assumptions that govern how scholars of antiquity often conceive of Roman imperial Greek identity, ethnicity and culture in the Roman Near East, and processes of 'hybridity' or similar concepts.
eBook
Burning Country
In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria has become a warzone where foreign journalists find it almost impossible to report on life in this devastated land. Burning Country explores the horrific and complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new first-hand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists among many others. These stories are expertly interwoven with a trenchant analysis of the brutalisation of the conflict and the militarisation of the uprising, of the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of governments in Syria and elsewhere in exacerbating those violent processes. With chapters focusing on ISIS and Islamism, regional geopolitics, the new grassroots revolutionary organisations, and the worst refugee crisis since World War Two, Burning Country is a vivid and groundbreaking look at a modern-day political and humanitarian nightmare.
eBook
Syria : the making and unmaking of a refuge state
\"The dispossession and forced migration of nearly 50 per cent of Syria's population has produced the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. This new book places the current displacement within the context of the widespread migrations that have indelibly marked the region throughout the last 150 years. Syria itself has harbored millions from its neighboring lands, and Syrian society has been shaped by these diasporas. Dawn Chatty explores how modern Syria came to be a refuge state, focusing first on the major forced migrations into Syria of Circassians, Armenians, Kurds, Palestinians, and Iraqis. Drawing heavily on individual narratives and stories of integration, adaptation, and compromise, she shows that a local cosmopolitanism came to be seen as intrinsic to Syrian society. She examines the current outflow of people from Syria to neighboring states as individuals and families seek survival with dignity, arguing that though the future remains uncertain, the resilience and strength of Syrian society both displaced internally within Syria and externally across borders bodes well for successful return and reintegration. If there is any hope to be found in the Syrian civil war, it is in this history.\" -- Publisher's description
Book
The Syrian Revolution
Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resistance, this book demands we rethink the revolution. Having lived in Syria for over fifteen years, Yasser Munif is expert in exploring the micropolitics of revolutionary forces. He uncovers how cities are managed, how precious food is distributed and how underground resistance thrives in regions controlled by regime forces. In contrast, the macropolitics of the elite Syrian regime are undemocratic, destructive and counter-revolutionary. Regional powers, Western elites, as well as international institutions choose this macropolitical lens to apprehend the Syrian conflict. By doing so, they also choose to ignore the revolutionaries' struggles. By looking at the interplay between the two sides, case studies of Aleppo and Manbij and numerous firsthand interviews, Yasser Munif shows us that this macro and geopolitical authoritarianism only brings death, and that by looking at the smaller picture - the local, the grassroots, the revolutionaries - we can see the politics of life emerge.
eBook
The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism
The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 was the largest and longest-lasting anti-colonial insurgency in the inter-war Arab East. Mobilizing peasants, workers, and army veterans, rather than urban elites and nationalist intellectuals, it was the first mass movement against colonial rule in the Middle East. The revolt failed to liberate Syria from French occupation, but it provided a model of popular nationalism and resistance that remains potent in the Middle East today. Each subsequent Arab uprising against foreign rule has repeated the language and tactics of the Great Syrian Revolt.
In this work, Michael Provence uses newly released secret colonial intelligence sources, neglected memoirs, and popular memory to tell the story of the revolt from the perspective of its participants. He shows how Ottoman-subsidized military education created a generation of leaders of modest background who came to rebel against both the French Mandate rulers of Syria and the Syrian intellectuals and landowners who helped the colonial regime to function. This new popular nationalism was unprecedented in the Arab world. Provence shows compellingly that the Great Syrian Revolt was a formative event in shaping the modern Middle East.
eBook
Russia's Geostrategic Outlook And The Syrian Crisis (St. James's Studies In World Affairs)
In this groundbreaking study, international relations scholar Hicham Tohme offers a critique of current academic, scholarly, and public understandings of Russia's geostrategic outlook through the lens of the ongoing Syrian crisis. This critique is based on a reassessment of four key concepts that shape our knowledge of Russia's foreign policy. First, the Westphalian state system is an inadequate a point of reference when applied to a country that still perceives itself and behaves as an empire. Second, justifying aggressive foreign policy as a counterweight to a perceived deficiency in the legitimacy of Russian President Vladimir Putin's leadership oversimplifies Russian political culture and public values, which do not overlap with Western norms and institutions. Third, analysis of Russian foreign policy, as well as of Russia's global role, remains restricted to what can be best described as a \"post-Cold War framework, \", a static image of global history for the past thirty years. Finally, most geopolitical and foreign affairs analyses focus on diplomatic and foreign policy rhetoric, rather than foreign policy praxis, as the primary data on which to draw conclusions.Offering an alternate explanation, this study examines Russia's intervention in the Syrian crisis to reveal practices that have come to characterize its global strategy and outlook for the past decade. As such, Russian policy in Syria will be presented as part of a praxis that can describe many facets of Russian global disposition. This clearly places geopolitical practices, not rhetoric, at the heart of the analysis.Further, this book relies on the concept of habitus to explain how these practices inhere in a long tradition of Russian behavior, advancing the notion that they must be understood as part of a historical continuum of Russia's political culture, mainly when it comes to its perception of its neighbors. By adopting a non-Westphalian framework and escaping the epistemological and methodological foundations of traditional foreign policy analysis, this book seeks to answer two key questions: How can we best describe Russia's geostrategic predispositions? And how can we understand Russia's involvement in the Syrian crisis in light of this analysis?
eBook