Reading List: English-Language Scholarship/Journalism on Syria
As the Assad regime recedes into history, here are ten works that give insight into how Syria changed from 1970 to 2024.
From time to time I offer reading lists on key topics as a way of going beyond the news of the moment. This is the third list; the first, on the Muslim Brotherhood, can be found here; the second, on Salafism, can be found here.
Syria is the site of one of the most moving and gripping series of upheavals the present century has seen. Amid the dramatic events since November 27, with a coalition of rebels taking city after city in Syria and now overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad himself, some readers may be wishing for deeper background on the country. Here are ten English-language texts and the order in which I would recommend reading them. The organization is roughly chronological:
Hanna Batatu, Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics (Princeton, 1999). The distinguished historian Batatu, best known for his work on Iraq, also wrote a sweeping history of the Syrian peasantry and its role in the rise of Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000, in power 1970-2000) - “Syria’s first ruler of peasant extraction,” as Batatu titles one chapter - and the Ba’ath Party. Part IV of the book will be particularly useful to readers, offering a kind of 360-degree account of how al-Assad’s regime was structured at various levels, and how he related to major social-political forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, 1999). Wedeen’s work probes deeply into the rule of Hafez al-Assad . Wedeen asks why and how many Syrians acted “as if” they believed the outlandish claims al-Assad imposed on Syrians - such as the idea that al-Assad was the greatest pharmacist in Syria. The resulting work captures something fundamental about authoritarian Syria and about authoritarianism in general, namely that what al-Assad needed was not legitimacy but rather compliance.
Bassam Haddad, Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford, 2011). How, under Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad, did privatization and “crony capitalism” benefit the powerful? Concentrating especially on the period 1986-2005, Haddad shows that a logic of fostering and safeguarding “regime security” drove leaders’ decisions about whom to favor within the growing private sector - and Haddad argues further that prioritizing regime security and allowing “rampant rent-seeking” led to economic decline, with the Syrian consumer as the main loser. The book is useful not only for its specific focus on political economy, but also as an account of the transition from Assad the father to Assad the son.
Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge, 2013). Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country that was long under the rule of the Assad family and their network of co-religionists from the Alawite sect. How did the Sunni religious scholars (the ulama) relate to the regime, particularly after the Islamist rebellion from 1976-1982 and the brutal massacre by the regime in the city of Hama in 1982? Pierret argues in part that until the 2011 revolution broke out, “the political leadership managed to establish ambiguous, but nevertheless robust, partnerships with religious figures who had genuine credibility in the eyes of many Muslims” (3).
Wendy Pearlman, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017). Pearlman’s edited and translated collection of first-person accounts by Syrians focuses on the 2011 uprising, with substantial attention as well to the background and to the aftermath. The book gives major insight into how Syrians’ hopes that Bashar al-Assad would prove to be a reformer were dashed, and then how the uprising began and unfolded. The book is often moving and consistently gripping. Certain types of voices are featured more prominently than others - we hear mostly from opponents of al-Assad, and not as much from regime supporters, much less members of the Islamic State or other hardline groups - but undoubtedly that reflects the difficulties of collecting testimonies from those camps.
Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian Civil War (Random House, 2018). The collaborations between the pseudonymous Syrian journalist Hisham and the American artist Crabapple (see their piece on Aleppo in Vanity Fair here) produced some of the most compelling images of the war. To render cell phone images as illustrations might seem superfluous in one of the most mediatized, recorded, and photographed wars of all time, but as Crabapple says in this interview: “People live lives, even in war zones. Sometimes, when we just see photos of atrocity, we forget that these are humans in that atrocity, who scam and love and watch satellite TV and buy vegetables at the market and love their kids. Me and Marwan tried to show daily life, real life, of which war was a part but not the whole.”
Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East, Revised Edition (Yale, 2020). Going beyond the one-dimensional analysis that depicts Syria as a proxy war, Phillips looks at three key facets of international involvement in and impact upon Syria - (1) how structural factors at the regional and international level, such as the proliferation of weapons, contributed to the shift from peaceful revolution to civil war; (2) how foreign states’ early decisions circa 2011-2012 also contributed to that shift; and (3) how the actions of foreign states intensified and prolonged the conflict. Phillips focuses above all on the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (Chicago, 2019). Wedeen merits double mention on this list because of the depth of her analyses and because this book takes on questions that are related to but ultimately distinct from those posed in Ambiguities of Domination. This latter book deals with both the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary period. To me, the most interesting parts of Authoritarian Apprehensions have to do with (1) the “gray people” - fence-sitters, to simplify a bit - who were ambivalent about the revolution and about al-Assad and (2) the role of rumor and fear as “part of a discursive arsenal justifying the regime’s actual coercive presence in terms that stimulated people’s sense of vulnerability and responded to it at the same time” (154).
Heba Gowayed, Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (Princeton, 2022). No understanding of Syria could be complete now without taking into account the massive displacement that the civil war and regime violence have brought. Gowayed interviewed Syrians who either obtained resettlement in the United States and Canada or found asylum in Germany. Gowayed compares the poverty traps set for refugees in the U.S. to the more generous but also more restrictive Canadian immigration system to the even more materially generous but ultimately dehumanizing Germany system, where narrow views of credentials and Germanness made it difficult for Syrians to obtain full recognition as people and workers. Gowayed’s book pairs well with Wendy Pearlman’s edited collection (a follow-up to We Crossed a Bridge) called The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (W.W. Norton, 2024) - whose title is, I think, self-explanatory.
Jerome Drevon, From Jihad to Politics: How Syrian Jihadis Embraced Politics (Oxford, 2024). In this book, Drevon offers a serious account of the evolution of two movements - Ahrar al-Sham, as well as the group eventually called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) - and of jihadism itself. Drevon focuses on how the two movements became more politically nuanced, built institutions, explored state-building, and opened channels of interaction with non-jihadists and foreign states. The book is essential reading not just to understand the current moment but also for thinking about the broader arc of the revolution and civil war from 2011-2024. (Readers may note that I have not said much about the Islamic State/ISIS in this list. In part, that’s because a lot of what has been written about the Islamic State does not have a long shelf life, and/or does not provide deep insight into what the Islamic State meant for Syria. Anyways, to me, the best work on the Islamic State is by Mara Revkin, in her papers about the Islamic State’s legal system at the height of its power and about IS taxation practices and logics.)
These works are only a portion of the literature that exists, of course. Please feel free to suggest other titles in the comments.