Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State

Matthieu Cimino, Matthieu Cimino

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030448776
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

This book explores the history of Syria's borders and boundaries, from their creation (1920) until the civil war (2011) and their contestation by the Islamic State or the Kurdish movement. The volume's main objective is to reconsider the "artificial" character of the Syrian territory and to reveal the processes by which its borders were shaped and eventually internalized by the country's main actors. Based on extensive archival research, the book first documents the creation and stabilization of Syrian borders before and during the mandates period (nineteenth century to 1946), studying Ottoman and French territorialization strategies but also emphasizing the key role of the borderlands in this process. In turn, it investigates the perceptual boundaries resulting from the conflict, and how they materialized in space. Lastly, it explores the geographical and political imaginaries of non-state actors (PYD, ISIS) that emerged from the war.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Cimino (ed.)Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the StateMobility & Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44877-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Matthieu Cimino¹

(1)

Oxford, UK

Matthieu Cimino

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Since March 2011, Syria has been engaged in a major revolutionary process that started in the southern city of Daraa. Located at the Jordanian border, the city was, until the uprising, one of the advanced outposts of the Syrian defense system against Israel and, pertinently, home to several regiments. Due to this considerable concentration of Syrian soldiers, mainly of Sunni origin and including many officers, Daraa provided a significant number of defectors (munshaqīn), who then constituted the “historic” nucleus of the Free Syrian Army (hereafter, FSA), at least for southern Syria (Winter 2013). In 2013, during a first series of interviews conducted at the Syro-Jordanian border with members of the opposition from the coordination committees (tansīqiyyāt) and the FSA,¹ one of the interlocutors told me that, in reaction to the imbalance of the conflict, the latter was ready to “accept help from everyone, including Israel”; moreover, he continued in jest, “we might even give them the Golan back; where do we sign?” With this anecdote, the interviewee demonstrated the lack of interest shown by the opposition in territory, even for the Golan,² which was portrayed by the Syrian regime as a key political issue, and had since the early 1970s constituted the very foundation of its arsenal of legitimization (Hinnebusch 2006).

Although the Golan Heights had for decades been the subject of a systematic propaganda campaign in the major cities of Syria,³ in 2013 this issue seemed negligible in comparison with the opposition’s desire to put an end to the authoritarian regime of the Assad family. Thus, from the start of the uprising, it was clear to most observers of the Syrian conflict that territorial motives were not at the heart of the mobilizations. On a daily basis, the so-called local nationalist actors of the opposition were not territorializing their demands. Besides, not only were the current borders of Syria not a mobilizing factor in the conflict, it even seems that they had largely been internalized. As Vignal (2017) puts it, “Syria’s national construction, which had taken place within borders originally imposed by external actors, was not only acknowledged as a practical reality but constituted the framework within which Syrians had come to define themselves” (Vignal 2017: 809). In the weekly demonstrations, the opposition’s claims were directed against the Assad family, calling for the end of authoritarianism, and regime change (Ismail 2011).

Nevertheless, the wide-ranging civil war, largely depicted by the regime as a “sectarian plot” (Cimino 2014), also attracted foreign fighters. Mercenaries and militia came to lend a hand to both the opposition and the regime, while local Syrian factions were stuck in internal conflicts around the definition of the identity of the revolution. In that context, two non-state actors, namely the Islamic State and the PYD,⁴ which had each taken control of various territories, quickly engaged in contradictory state-building processes for the creation of, respectively, a Sunni caliphate and an autonomous Kurdistan. Although the Islamic State’s caliphate project was defeated by the war launched by the US-led Coalition,⁵ and Syrian Kurdish political actors have always been very cautious about the creation of an autonomous state—be it transnational or territorially limited to Syria—preferring a form of “decentralized” (lā markaziyyah) confederalism, the fact remains that these different and contradictory projects revealed that a contestation of Syrian territory and its colonial boundaries was a factor for some actors, both exogenous and endogenous to Syria. This situation was made possible by a series of factors, namely the Syrian regime’s “self-fulfilling prophecy” policy and the early backing of Islamist militants (Mohand 2011); the internal fragmentation of Syria (Heydemann 2013); the porosity of its external borders (Harling and Simon 2015); the involvement of external actors (Wimmen and Asseburg 2012); and more.

However, although a considerable number of books, scientific articles, and other think-tank notes on the subject have been published since 2011,⁶ few works have approached the Syrian conflict through the prism of the country’s borders. Indeed, Syrian boundaries have never been fully investigated by the academic community, unlike those of the Ottoman Empire (Ben-Bassat and Ben-Artzi 2015; Rogan 2002), Palestine (Sfeir-Khayat 2009; Ball 2012; Paul 2020); or Lebanon (Meier 2013). While some works deeply address particular aspects, such as territorial disputes (Jörum 2014), there is still a lack of major research on Syrian borders. Until 2011, this could easily be explained by the authoritarian nature of the regime and the subsequent difficulties for researchers to work there and to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. Now, as this research has become possible, this book aims to open the door to the field of border studies, which remains largely under-explored in favor of more conventional approaches in sociology or political science.

Indeed, border studies is a relatively fragmented area of research. “Obscure” (Paasi 2003) and, above all, polysemic, the notion of the border is observed from multiple angles, regularly offering new perspectives in history, political science, anthropology, philosophy (Balibar 2009), and also cultural studies in the definition of “otherness” (Rovisco 2010). From a theoretical aspect, this book is based on three postulates:

1. (1)
   Investigating a border implies asking the question: where? (Prescott 1999; Minghi 2017). Where is the border? What is its history, and what processes explain its location? If this aspect is today often marginalized in favor of purely processual logics, it is nonetheless fundamental, as preeminent as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Borders materialize the sedimentation of states in our world of Westphalian sovereignty (1648): They constitute markers of division between two areas of authority. Sometimes invisible to the eye, often drawn on the ground, these lines are first of all concrete and tangible symbols, especially for the people who encounter them on a daily basis. The where therefore is crucial. In the case of Syria, exploring the borders consequently requires an examination of colonial and diplomatic history.

   First imposed by the territorial conquest, borders then materialize the process of state formation (Anderson and O’Dowd 1999). Once the situation is frozen on the ground, it then has to be cartographically translated; at the “age of Empires” (Hobsbawm 2010), this translation was carried out in the anteroom of the European diplomatic salons. Then, as the state accumulates power and becomes centralized, its authority spreads to the peripheries. As such, once created, the border must be maintained and stabilized (Barth 1998). As a “privileged place of assertion of political power” (Montenach 2016), it is part of an operational process aimed at maintaining its physical and symbolic integrity; it must therefore have a meaning both for the state but also for the local population. In the first case, the central government will strive to “rationalize” the border by installing customs officials and the military. The border then becomes a tool for defining the envelope of the state through visible markers, such as railways or surveillance posts. The state gives itself authority to manage the incoming and outgoing flows and, if necessary, to modify the demographic balance in order to secure the space and make it more compatible with its own interests. In the second case, local actors—those of the borderlands—will appropriate the border, adapt to it, or try to reconfigure its meaning and role by subverting it, notably through smuggling or revolts. After the conquest of territory, therefore, both state and local practices give an empirical sense to the border.
2. (2)
   The other aspect is the how. Once the location is known and fixed, the line becomes a process. On a daily basis, the border plays a major role in building the collective imagination of a society, as a marker of otherness (the other is on the other side) and therefore as the envelope of a cultural sanctuary. Cartography plays here a key role as it provides a visual representation; as “powerful social and ideological tools” (Culcasi 2006), maps reflect previous conquests and the territorialization of the state. They constitute the unifying tools of a nation by ensuring “prestige and pride in social groups” (Monmonier 1991; Crampton and Krygier 2006). By producing maps, the state reminds us that it is first of all a “power container” which must preserve its integrity and stability, as well as a “wealth container” eager to conquer larger territories (Taylor 1994). Above all, however, the state produces maps to formalize and legitimize the process of territorialization.

   Yet, in the words of Van Houtum and Naerssen (2002), the where and the how constitute two distinct fields of research, “with their own centers of expertise, their own journals, their own tutelary figures, and (therefore) very few connections between them”. However, the exploration and understanding of borders—be they territorial or symbolic—implies the need for a multifaceted approach: What is the colonial history behind it? How was it ideologically constructed and then legitimized? And, above all, how is the border viewed and represented by the local populations and actors?
3. (3)
   As a result, over the years, the study of borders as simple political lines has been largely sidelined, in favor of a focus on considering boundaries as processes. This led to a multiplicity of approaches and, as Paasi (2005) pointed out, to the “bursting of the discipline”. While some major theoreticians called for uniformity of concepts and models (Newman 2003; Liikanen 2010), others postulated the “impossibility of a single model, a large border theory” (Paasi 2009). In this book, although we wanted to avoid the pitfalls of dispersion as much as possible, the differing approaches of history, political science, sociology, and sometimes even anthropology are all represented. The aim is to present, through three different axes, the most recent research on the Syrian conflict, while following a chronological framework.

   Thus, this book is the result of a conference hosted in November 2017 entitled “Exploring Syria’s Borders and Boundaries”. Enabled by funding from the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program and the Maison Françaised’Oxford (MFO), the latter and the University of Oxford (Saint Antony’s College and The Oriental Institute) brought together researchers working directly or indirectly on Syria, whose work had led them to investigate the significance of its borders. Over two days, these researchers shared their reflections, the substance of which is gathered in this collective work. Before presenting the spirit of the book, I extend my warm thanks to all the participants, and in particular to Dr. Ziad Majed and Dr. Nassima Neggaz whose, respectively, keynote speech and discussions considerably contributed to the reflections.

   From these three axes, Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State, is therefore divided into three parts. First, the objective is to retrace the colonial history (be it Ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. From the Mandate to Assad’s Dynasty: Constructing, Contesting, and Legitimizing Syrian Borders (1920–2011)
• Part II. Struggling for the Borderlands: The Syrian Revolution (2011) and Its Aftermath
• Part III. Imagining and Manufacturing the Borders: Non-state Actors and Their Representations of Syrian Territory (2011–2017)
• Back Matter