The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria: 50 (Cambridge Middle East Studies, Series Number 50)
Cambridge University Press, 8/23/2018
EAN 9781107698604, ISBN10: 110769860X
Paperback, 240 pages, 22.7 x 15.5 x 1.2 cm
Language: English
Over much of its rule, the regime of Hafez al-Asad and his successor Bashar al-Asad deployed violence on a massive scale to maintain its grip on political power. In this book, Salwa Ismail examines the rationalities and mechanisms of governing through violence. In a detailed and compelling account, Ismail shows how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities, defining their understanding of the terms of rule and structuring their relations and interactions with the regime and with one another. Examining ordinary citizens' everyday life experiences and memories of violence across diverse sites, from the internment camp and the massacre to the family and school, The Rule of Violence demonstrates how practices of violence, both in their routine and spectacular forms, fashioned Syrians' affective life, inciting in them feelings of humiliation and abjection, and infusing their lived environment with dread and horror. This form of rule is revealed to be constraining of citizens' political engagement, while also demanding of their action.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
the government of violence
1. Violence as a modality of government in Syria
2. Authoritarian government, the shadow state and political subjectivities
3. Memories of life under dictatorship
the everyday of Ba'thist Syria
4. Memories of violence
Hama 1982
5. The performativity of violence and 'emotionalities of rule' in the Syrian Uprising
Conclusion
the rule of violence – formations of civil war
Postscript
References
Index.