In early 2011, as anti-government protests swept across the Arab World, Syrians were watching with a mixture of fear and anticipation to see if the wave of protests would reach their ‘Kingdom of Silence’. A few dispersed, peaceful demonstrations took place early that year, calling for political reforms, but were largely inconsequential. Things took a dramatic turn on 15 March, when fifteen boys were arrested and tortured in the southern city of Daraa for spray-painting pro-revolutionary slogans on their school’s wall. When their fathers and elders went to the authorities to claim them, they were humiliated and turned away. Very quickly, demonstrations intensified, initially in Daraa, demanding the boys’ release. The regime responded with military violence: maiming and killing unarmed protesters, which led to the diffusion of protests across the country. By July 2011, hundreds of thousands had taken to the streets, many calling for regime change.

Predictably (see Kalyvas, Reference Kalyvas2012), the more ruthless and indiscriminate state violence against the protesters became, the more civilians sought protection from, and sometimes joined, militarised factions. State violence generated anger more than fear, and defecting soldiers started introducing arms into the movement, while hundreds of soldiers were executed for refusing to fire on protesters. Increasingly, many were convinced that taking up arms was both justified and necessary in the face of the regime’s lethal force.

Amidst this upheaval, various external actors and regional powers intervened, further fuelling violence, and dragging the country into a proxy civil war. The war produced a multitude of factions with diverse objectives, interests, and allegiances, turning the conflict into a web of alliances and hostilities. The revolutionaries, once unified in their call for regime change, splintered into competing groups. The rise of extremist ideologies further added to the complexity, transforming the war’s nature and leading to devastating consequences for civilians caught in the crossfire. This ran parallel to an equally intense struggle for ideological dominance and a sort of Gramscian war for ideational and mnemonic hegemony.

The role of intellectuals and artists in this war of ideas – and in the uprising more broadly – was heavily debated both in private social circles and the digital public sphere. Recognising their potential influence, the regime tried to recruit many – particularly those popularised through a burgeoning TV industry – for a public campaign intended to legitimise its narrative: the uprising was a ‘foreign conspiracy’, and protesters were ‘mercenaries or terrorists’. Dramatic polarisation ensued among writers and artists under escalating pressure to make their positions and allegiances public. Some sided against the protests, offering public performances where they expressed distrust towards the movement or cautioned against ‘the conspiracy’, echoing the regime’s rhetoric without necessarily siding with it. Others had to flee the country under duress and at the risk of detention.

For example, one participant in this study, novelist and screenwriter Nihad Sirees, described how the government had started asking writers and artists to participate in media interviews aimed at using their symbolic capital to delegitimise the protests. Knowing the consequences of refusal, Sirees decided to leave the country when he began receiving such interview requests (personal communication, 2018). Others, like journalist and activist Amer Matar, were arrested several times before being able to leave the country. In June 2015, the Syrian Network for Human Rights reported that twenty-two artists had been killed in Syria and fifty-seven arrested or kidnapped since March 2011. No statistics on killed and imprisoned writers are available, but there are several reports of the death and enforced disappearance of writers at the hands of security forces since March 2011, including anarchist intellectual Omar Aziz, medical doctor and activist Abdulaziz Kheir, human rights lawyer Khalil Matouk, dramatists Zaki and Mehyar Cardillo, blogger Tal Malluhi, and playwright Adnan Zarra’ai, to name a few.

With intensifying violence, the militarisation of the movement, and successive disappointments in the political arena, the hope in the potency of popular mobilisation that had marked the uprising’s early months was replaced, over time, with hopelessness and political cynicism. Combined with threats to their lives and safety, this made the question of whether to flee increasingly urgent, even among intellectuals who had long insisted that they could only work effectively from within Syria. Many fled the country: some escaping persecution, others having lost hope in a different political future, and still others simply evading the hardships of war.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by 2016, 4.8 million Syrians had fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq; 6.6 million were internally displaced; and about 1 million had sought asylum in Europe (UNHCR, 2016). Of the latter, Germany took the lion’s share: by 2016, there were more than 300,000 cumulative Syrian asylum applications, making Germany the top receiving country in Europe (UNHCR, 2017). France took far fewer, with slightly over 3,500 applications approved (UNHCR, 2016). However, the proportion of writers and artists who settled in Paris was significant (Salem, Reference Salem2016), as was that of those in Berlin. This was possibly influenced by the vibrant and attractive cultural scenes in these two metropolises and by a long tradition of intellectual exile, particularly in Paris, which ‘has perhaps attracted more foreigners (especially intellectuals) than any other city in the world’ (Kramer, Reference Kramer1988, pp. vii–viii). This was also facilitated by France issuing Syrian artists and writers entry visas for cultural events as early as May 2011 (Al-Yasiri, Reference Al-Yasiri2015) and increasing the number of residencies for Syrian writers and artists in Berlin (Arab News, 2016).

This book directs attention to these diasporic cultural milieus to understand how their members have interacted with social, cultural, and political change in their homeland since the 2011 uprising. It examines the contextual and relational factors that have impacted meaning-construction processes (how they made sense of revolutionary promise and hope), and how the revolutionary movementFootnote ¹ itself, and the traumas associated with it, have influenced their praxis as writers, artists, and performers. More specifically, it seeks to understand why the hopeful and agentic discursive field they strove to create in the uprising’s early months became increasingly frail in its ideational and political impact over the revolutionary movement’s development.

These questions arise against the backdrop of a global outlook marked by a ‘crisis of critical faith’, symptomatic of the waning of millennial aspirations (Michael, Reference Michael, Di Leo and Hitchcock2016), and the tragic ending of ‘the romantic comedy of global emancipation’ (Scott, Reference Scott2005) after the collapse of the socioeconomic and political hopes that animated anticolonial and independence movements in the twentieth century. Against this backdrop, one senses the urgency of the question: how does operating in a discursive field tinged with diminished historical hope impact the political role of critical intellectuals, particularly for those of a generation for whom such hope was revived by the revolutionary movements of 2010 and 2011 only to be quickly and violently crushed? Remembering with June Edmunds and Bryan Turner (Reference Edmunds and Turner2005, p. 575) that ‘generations from the “margins” may be out-of-phase with mainstream generations’, it is probable that hope in the possibility of change was not out of reach for all intellectuals everywhere. The events of 2011 indicated this, if only temporarily. Because it must have required some degree of historical hope to suffer the kinds of risks and sacrifices many participants in this study (and others) have. And yet, as Edmunds and Turner insist, while the social location of those fleetingly hopeful intellectuals is important, their generational politics – that is, the place of hope within their global generation – must be conceptualised from the standpoint of cultural globalisation (Reference Edmunds and Turner2005).

Contemporary thinking about public intellectuals is polarised between ‘declinists’, who mourn a bygone era when intellectuals engaged with, and had an impact upon, policy (e.g., Jacoby, Reference Jacoby1987; Furedi, Reference Furedi2006; Posner, Reference Posner2009), and those who celebrate an imminent renaissance of new forms of public intellectualism shaped by new technologies (Drezner, Reference Drezner2009; Dahlgren, Reference Dahlgren2012). In politically democratic contexts, the weakening of public intellectualism is sometimes attributed to democratic politics themselves, where critical intellectuals are largely free to express their views unhampered, and yet very few want to listen (see, e.g., Desch, Reference Desch and Desch2016). But the picture can hardly be more hopeful under dictatorships, where public intellectuals may have a keener audience and an arguably clearer, more urgent, and critical role to play, but where their activity is severely constrained by censorship, persecution, and the impossibility of participating critically and independently in political structures of power. None of this, of course, is particularly new. However, political processes and subjectivities have been fundamentally altered by new modes of knowledge production and distribution, including the changing dynamics of discursive influence brought about by new media. These dynamics become particularly striking during crises, episodes of contention, or political transitions, where apparatuses of repression are unsettled or suspended. In such moments, new media offer unmediated access to broad publics, and the discursive acquires a heightened sense of urgency and import.

One might then suggest that it is in the midst of traumatic historic events, particularly revolutionary movements, that intellectuals can develop a uniquely important role and influence, having retained an eager audience appreciative of the urgency of their critical mission, and acquired, if all too briefly, a freedom of expression typical of transitional episodes. But even in such liminal moments, as the book will show, the influence of intellectuals is volatile and can quickly be lost. The Syrian example shows that even where dissident intellectuals gained unique standing and influence in the early months of the movement, it was eventually displaced by competing discourses offered by other groups (e.g., jihadist ideologues or regime supporters), often because they had greater appeal to wider segments of society, but sometimes because they were accompanied by threat of force. Moreover, there is a danger to this empowerment-disempowerment process. As Patrick Baert (Reference Baert2015) theorised, the delegitimisation of one carrier group not only makes room for, but in fact strengthens, competing carrier groups and their discourses. In Syria, this was detrimental for both democratisation aspirations and future social reconciliation prospects. In addressing this, I investigate the ways in which the movement’s exilic intellectuals situate themselves socially and politically in their own field and in the wider world. Do they see themselves as a distinct social group, a class-in-themselves, or even a new elite?

How does the current configuration relate to ideal types that describe the various positionalities of the intellectual? For example, what is the place of the ‘authoritative intellectual’, who feels that their epistemic authority entitles them to speak out with moral vigour about a wide range of topics and with some claim to universality? And what of the ‘dialogical intellectuals’, who ‘engage with local actors dialogically to produce polyphonic and open-ended trauma narratives’ (Ushiyama & Baert, Reference Ushiyama and Baert2016, p. 471)? How have communication technologies aided the rise of the ‘embedded intellectual’, integrated within, dialogical with, and epistemically egalitarian towards the public (Baert & Shipman, Reference Baert, Shipman, Thijssen and Others2013)? And where is the ‘specific intellectual’ in Syrian intellectual history, a positioning that denounces universal claims and emphasises understanding a specific field (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Gordon1980)? Who is the ‘common intellectual’, discussed by Beydoun (Reference Beydoun2012) in the context of the Syrian revolution, and who are the revolution’s movement intellectuals?

These questions invite an exploration of the nature and impact of the reception of home and host society audiences and cultural actors. More importantly, they prompt us to consider the impact of exile and its traumatic sequelae on intellectual traditions and political praxis.

The organising question that arises from connecting these problems, then, is two-tiered: How have exiled Syrian intellectuals contributed to the construction of meaning surrounding the Syrian Revolution, and what sociohistorical undercurrents have impacted this meaning-making process?

The book aims to answer these questions by shedding light on the role of exiled Syrian intellectuals in the context of the revolutionary movement, exploring their impact on discursive fields and progressive democratic aspirations, while acknowledging the complexities and limitations of their influence in the broader socio-political landscape.

To this end, qualitative research methods were adopted for a four-year empirical study conducted between 2017 and 2021, using approximately eighty hours of recorded in-depth interviews with twenty-nine exiled Syrian intellectuals in France and Germany. The study also involved extensive analysis of articles, books, interviews, films, and other intellectual interventions and artistic outputs presented by participants. Participant observation was used to corroborate findings from interviews and document analysis, allowing me to fill gaps related to the interviews. While the research questions could have been addressed through document analysis and interviews alone, this ‘minimal ethnography’ contributed helpful observations about the field. Informal conversations on themes emerging from the interviews helped me validate and deepen findings while providing some understanding of the social contexts and the individual life-worlds in which the observed social and intellectual phenomena were arising. A ‘minimal ethnography’ was sufficient for this work because it is not an exercise in social anthropology but in cultural sociology. That is to say, I was more interested in the ideas that were circulating within the field and shaping it than in its daily practices, habits, rituals, and norms.

The study refrains from providing a rigid, objective definition of intellectuals, as it aligns with Bourdieu’s idea that clear-cut definitions of intellectuals end up ‘destroying a central property of the intellectual field, namely, that it is the site of struggles over who does and does not belong to it’ (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1989, p. 4). Indeed, I do not attempt to define the intellectual as an objective endeavour. For the purpose of sampling, a broad definition of the intellectual was adopted whereby an intellectual is an individual who creates knowledge, defined as communicable ideas that convey cognitive value, including artistic expression and reasoned opinion, as well as demonstrated fact. That being said, we will return to the question of who is an intellectual later in this introduction.

Participants were identified in three steps. For established intellectuals, I tracked the current country of residence for the ninety-nine intellectuals who signed the ‘Statement of the 99’ in 2000. This well-known intervention was made by ninety-nine Syrian intellectuals during the Damascus Spring (2000), calling for ending the forty-eight-year state of emergency law, releasing political prisoners, allowing exiles to return, liberating public life from surveillance, and reinstating free speech and freedom of assembly. I singled out those currently residing in Paris or Berlin. Four of the interviews were conducted online with writers based in other cities in France and Germany but who were socially part of the Paris and Berlin milieus. As a second step and to identify more presently engaged and active artists and intellectuals, I selected authors and contributors living in these two countries from the list of authors in relevant anthologies, books, and magazines such as Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Front Line (Halasa, Mahfoud, & Omareen, Reference Halasa, Mahfoud and Omareen2014); A Syrious Look: Syrians in Germany – A Magazine about Culture in Exile (2016); and On Syrian Cultural Work during the Years of Ember (Elias, Najme, & Syrian Centre for Political Research, Reference Elias and Najme2016). I finetuned the resulting longlist through theoretical sampling based on themes emerging from early stages of data collection and analysis, as well as additional suggestions and recommendations from discussions with participants identified in the previous step.

For the purpose of sampling, an ‘exiled intellectual’ denoted a Syrian or Palestinian-Syrian intellectual who fled Syria before or after 2011 to escape violence and/or avoid political persecution. Some participants had been living in Europe for personal reasons before 2011. They are exiles in situ inasmuch as they can no longer return to Syria due to their political opinions. Having said that, I recognise that two of the study participants have taken that risk. They remain exiles inasmuch as their visits were exactly that – risks taken. My choice of the term ‘exiled’ (rather than ‘displaced’, ‘refugee’, or ‘immigrant’) owes to the literary undertones of the compound. Firstly, ‘exiled-intellectual’ has become part of an imaginary that builds on the experience of Jewish and Palestinian intelligentsia in the 1940s and 1960s. Secondly, the term lends an ‘ethos of dignity and autonomy not uncommon in the writings of exiles’ (Halabi, Reference Halabi2017, p. 100). And thirdly, it is better aligned with intellectuals’ self-identification, for while the term ‘refugees’ evokes ‘large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance’, exile suggests a ‘touch of solitude and spirituality’ (Said, Reference Said2013, p. 181).

The total number of completed interviews was twenty-nine, consisting of twenty-two men and seven women. The minoritarian composition consisted of three Christian participants, corresponding to a population percentile of 10 per cent; six Alawite participants, significantly higher than the population’s 12 per cent; and twenty Sunnis, somewhat lower than the population’s 74 per cent. Palestinian-Syrians constituted about 7 per cent of the sample and Kurds only 3.5 per cent compared to the population ratio of 10 per cent. The representation of minority groups does not accurately reflect population percentages. But given my use of theoretical sampling, this is understandable and rather inevitable. Furthermore, the discrepancies in relation to the general population are neither surprising nor inexplicable. Women are under-represented among the intellectual ‘class’ everywhere (see Evans, Reference Evans, Fleck, Hess and Lyon2008). It is also broadly believed that the artistic and literary professions in the Arab region were historically dominated by religious minorities for a variety of reasons that will be discussed in Chapter 1. In more recent years, Syrians from Alawite families benefited disproportionately from government grants to study abroad, including in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and returned to academic positions in those fields. Thus, their apparent over-representation in the sample is likely a result of their over-representation within the milieu itself.

I commence from an understanding of the milieu as an ‘emergent system’, key to which are, following Durkheim (Reference Durkheim1964), two attributes: size and cohesion. I understand the Paris and Berlin Syrian cultural milieus as participants in the larger field of Syrian culture in exile. And while I interviewed a few participants in France and Germany (four) who were not residing in Paris or Berlin at the time, the two cities were selected for ethnographic work, particularly participant observation, since it is within them that the cultural milieus I examine are based. Interviewees living outside the two capitals were part of that milieu, interacting with it and situating themselves within it both digitally and in embodied interactions.

Despite the significance of transnational production networks in their cultural movement (cf. Lang, Reference Lang2019), Syrian exiled intellectuals, I believe, continue to constitute a social field (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu and Emanuel1996) inasmuch as they operate within an area of society with specific rules and forms of capital whose dispersion has not diluted its cohesion. Syrian intellectuals in exile remain an interacting collectivity connected by a shared language that separates them from host societies, and by transnational digital social networks that, for many, constitute the primary space for social interaction, competition, and expression of a social identity rooted in and politically invested in their shared struggle or trauma and shaped by interaction and competition among individuals and groups.

This larger social field, of course, constitutes intellectuals and cultural actors outside France and Germany. Had this study opted for a remote interviewing approach, many would have been included. However, given the role of participant observation for corroborating interview data, and the importance of in-person interviewing when querying themes as delicate and personal as the ones I delve into, it was necessary to select a few sites for ethnographic fieldwork. Paris and Berlin were selected not only because of the high concentration of writers and artists in them, as discussed earlier in this introduction, but also because they have become hubs for the type of intellectual that I focus on: generally cosmopolitan, progressive, and secular. This is due to their appeal and historical reputation as cultural centres, the presence of an existing intellectual field, particularly in Paris, and because they offer more opportunities for artistic and intellectual expression. It is also due to the presence, particularly in Berlin, of important nodes in the transnational production networks financing the cultural movement of Syrian exiled intellectuals. That being said, several of this study’s participants started their forced migration routes through Turkey or Lebanon but continued to seek further migration towards Paris or Berlin, where they could find a more supportive environment for their artistic and intellectual ambitions.

Contrastingly, countries like Turkey and Qatar offered fewer opportunities for naturalisation and artistic sponsorship, which meant that, broadly speaking, they attracted Syrians who were keen to live and raise families in a Muslim society due to their own lifestyle choices or religious commitments. It is important here to note that Turkey and Lebanon were often the first points of departure in the Syrian journeys into exile due to their geographical proximity and relative accessibility. Appelt (Reference Appelt2023) describes how:

Indeed, many of the participants in this study started their migratory journeys in Lebanon or Turkey but continued on to Europe as the state and society in both countries became increasingly hostile towards Syrian refugees, leading to multiple waves of migration onwards towards Europe (Appelt, Reference Appelt2023).

Selecting two distinct sites, Paris and Berlin, enabled a deeper understanding of the similarities and nuances in their engagement with the local communities, transnational connections, and access to resources, leading to more complex observations and some insightful findings. Paris, with its rich artistic heritage and history of providing refuge to intellectuals, has been a magnet for exiled Syrian intellectuals seeking an environment conducive to freedom of expression and artistic exploration. The city’s longstanding tradition of supporting intellectuals in exile, coupled with its cosmopolitan nature, has in many ways shaped the practices and networks of the Syrian intellectual community residing there. On the other hand, Berlin, with its own dynamic cultural scene and history of political transformation, offers a different set of opportunities and challenges for exiled Syrian intellectuals, particularly of a younger generation. Berlin’s position as a hub for contemporary art and its growing reputation as an inclusive and cosmopolitan city made it an attractive destination for those seeking a more experimental and innovative space for their artistic and intellectual pursuits. By immersing myself in the Syrian cultural milieus of both cities, I sought to uncover the ways in which the experiences of exiled Syrian intellectuals differ in these distinct urban settings. Through this comparative lens, I aimed to reveal how their interactions with local communities, engagement in transnational networks, and access to resources were shaped by the unique characteristics of each city. Moreover, this comparative approach allowed me to explore how the experiences of exiled Syrian intellectuals in Paris and Berlin might intersect, diverge, or even complement each other. By identifying common themes and contrasting aspects, I could interrogate the broader implications of exile on intellectual production, political engagement, and the formation of cultural identity. In summary, the choice of Paris and Berlin as fieldwork sites was not arbitrary but a deliberate and strategic decision based on their status as historically significant hubs for Syrian culture in exile, whose unique characteristics contribute to a richer understanding of the roles and contributions of exiled Syrian intellectuals in the context of the revolutionary movement and their broader impact on progressive democratic aspirations.

Who Is an ‘Intellectual’?

As an ideal type, the term ‘intellectual’ appeared in France in the late nineteenth century, travelling and transforming transnationally throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, resulting in some local specificities. Despite these nuances, the notion remains linked to its European origin and derives strongly from metropolitan discourses around what it means to be an intellectual. In such discourses, a separation is often assumed between intellectuals as producers of meaning and interveners in social and political matters of public interest, and religious authorities as potential interveners in the same.

In the sphere of Arab intellectualism, I closely follow Azmi Bishara’s (Reference Bishara2016) observation that the term muthaqqaf – Arabic for intellectual – is often used to denote a member of the intelligentsia. However, like him, I use it to refer to someone who engages with matters of public interest drawing on a transdisciplinary knowledge base. Here, as Bishara emphasises, the intellectual is a generalist engaging with meanings that extend beyond their specialism and is also ‘public’ in their engagements – that is, they engage directly in the public sphere concerning issues of state and society. While acknowledging that there were certainly pre-modern constructions that partly carried out roles we associate today with intellectuals (see also Bishara, 2017), when deciding who fits the category of ‘intellectual’, I am guided by Ron Eyerman’s (Reference Eyerman2011) understanding of intellectual as an ‘inherited role’, where to be an intellectual is to be socially recognised as one.

Eyerman (Reference Eyerman1994) identifies two ways of studying intellectuals. The first understands intellectuals as social actors performing the function of articulating ideas, problems, and solutions in public discourses. The second sees being an intellectual as an aspiration and a performance, an ‘inherited role’ that is ‘part of a tradition’. Here, Eyerman (Reference Eyerman1994, p. 97) agrees with Bourdieu that there is no intellectual ‘in-itself’. Rather, the intellectual is best understood as an emergent category where ‘being an intellectual is also a matter of being recognised as such’ (Eyerman, Reference Eyerman2011, p. 465).

In approaching the category muthaqqaf, this study draws on Eyerman’s second method, viewing the muthaqqaf as an emergent, socially specific category performed based on an ‘inherited’ and often pre-scripted but dynamically evolving role. In other words, I study a milieu within a field that is socially recognised as the intellectual milieu – wasat al-muthaqafeen – within the Syrian social and public spheres, partly on account of engaging with matters of public interest.

As a normative category, ‘intellectual’ or muthaqqaf in many Arab countries, including Syria, historically denotes a social type positioned in opposition to both religious authority and state ideology (see also Kassab, Reference Kassab2019). Bamyeh and Salvatore (Reference Bamyeh, Salvatore, Salvatore, Tottoli, 234Rahimi, Attar and Patel2018) suggest that across the Middle East, from the early twentieth century, the intellectual is identified as ‘an alienated person’, tracing this alienation to modern educational systems. Egypt’s Grand Mufti Muhammad Abduh, for example, argued that such systems produced resentful individuals who lacked knowledge about an Islam integral to their society and daily practices for the majority of its members.

In other words, this study focuses on a broadly secular intellectual movement in Syria, recognised in the contemporary Syrian social field as ‘muthaqafeen’ or intellectuals. Rather than delving into the broader sociologies of knowledge production involving all types of knowledge producers, this research hones in on a relatively cohesive social milieu. It seeks to understand the role and significance of intellectuals in the context of the Syrian revolution and war, acknowledging the vast and inexhaustive nature of the broader field of producing ideas and meanings in this complex setting. By narrowing the scope to the socially defined milieu of muthaqafeen, the study aims to shed light on the distinct contributions and dynamics of this specific group within the broader Syrian meaning-production landscape. To this end, the next section will offer a historical overview of the intellectual field in and around Syria to establish the necessary context for subsequent discussions on topics such as Islamism, field dynamics, and ethico-political positionalities.

A Historical Overview of the Field

The potentially expansive and vague nature of the topic of ‘intellectuals’ and the dearth of research specifically focused on Syria in this area necessitate drawing upon literature that explores intellectuals as a modern phenomenon within the Eastern Mediterranean region.

For decades, Albert Hourani’s influential work, Arab Thought in the Liberal Age (Reference Hourani1983), has shaped our understanding of Arab intellectual history. Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hourani identifies two intertwined systems of thought: liberal secularism and Islamic reformism. According to this narrative, liberal secularism, influenced by European political culture, aimed to establish democratic political systems and emphasised individual welfare and freedoms. On the other hand, Islamic reformism sought to assert the universal truth of Islam while incorporating neglected elements of the Islamic tradition eroded by Western-influenced liberalism. This perspective places Arab thought in a derivative relationship with Europe, reinforcing an epistemic rupture between ‘East’ and ‘West’. By framing Arab intellectual discourse as influenced by European thought, it limits our comprehension of the unique and diverse intellectual currents within Arab societies.

Hourani’s binary framework perpetuates a controversial view of Arab intellectual history because it creates a false dichotomy between imitation and failure, impact and reaction, and authenticity and borrowing (Sleiman, Reference Sleiman2021), whereby ‘failed’ modernisation is reduced to borrowing, and Islamism is construed as a reaction to it. This situates Arab thought in a derivative position that overlooks the agency and originality of its thinkers and obscures the vivid intellectual traditions that existed prior to European influence. The binaries and the derivative view they are premised upon have generated much tension, both social and epistemological, between the intellectual field and political Islam.

In the epistemological arena, more recent scholarship (e.g., Zachs, Reference Zachs2005; Pfeifer, Reference Pfeifer2022) has questioned positioning towering figures in Arab intellectual history as products of Protestant missions (e.g., Hourani) and instead focuses on examining more local formulations. While Hourani (Reference Hourani1983) influenced an entire discourse based on his premise that Protestant missionaries played a significant role in shaping the intellectual landscape of the Arab world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, later scholars such as Zachs (Reference Zachs2005) emphasise internal influences over external ones in the formation of a distinctively Syrian identity. They acknowledge that American missionaries had an impact on the literary elite but reject the American-centric understanding of the nahda (Arab Renaissance) as a product of interaction with the West. Instead, Zachs argues, attention should turn to indigenous developments such as the founding of the ‘Ayn Waraqa school in 1789 and the reform of Ottoman provincial administration in the 1860s, which were more important in developing a modern Syrian-Arab consciousness than the establishment of the Syrian Protestant College (today’s American University of Beirut), as the dominant discourse contends (see also Makdisi, Reference Makdisi2011).

Another notable intervention in the direction of internal focus is Keith Watenpaugh’s (Reference Watenpaugh2006) historiography that documents the emergence of a new middle class in the Middle East during and after the First World War. According to Watenpaugh, this class distinguished itself from the ruling oligarchy and the urban and rural poor through a ‘performance of modernity’ that aimed to challenge their exclusion from political power structures by embracing a universal value system rooted in modern ideals. This was expressed through distinct mannerisms, customs, and tastes, as well as a substantive body of ideas relating to authority, gender, citizenship, rights, science, and education. Watenpaugh argues that this declaration of interest in knowledge production, political engagement, and societal influence marked a critical historical moment following centuries of Ottoman rule. He explores the internal dynamics, such as the liberation from Ottoman rule and the subsequent economic growth, revolutionary movements, and nationalism that interacted with colonial influences in forming the Arab middle class and its politico-intellectual pursuits. It is to this new middle class that one might trace the origins of Arab intellectualism as a modern phenomenon that, like its predecessor (Watenpaugh, Reference Watenpaugh2006), is significantly under-represented in Middle East studies – arguably on account of an Orientalist streak that deemed features of Arab societies that did not contribute to their othering as inauthentic.

The under-representation of progressive intellectuals in recent Arab intellectual history is noted by Elizabeth Kassab (Reference Kassab2009), who challenges the assumption, generated by existing literature, that Arab intellectual discourse became dominated by Islamists after 1967, emphasising that secular, leftist, and Marxist voices continued to be present and engaged in intellectual debates. She also highlights the integration of Arab feminism into broader intellectual discussions during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In this way, Kassab challenges the simplistic linearity typically applied to the periodisation of Arab thought: that Arab thought ‘rises’ during the nahda period, ‘matures’ in the interwar years, and then ‘dies’ after the shock of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Instead, she offers a more nuanced understanding of the intellectual landscape, examining the intellectual contributions of thinkers who emerged after the 1967 war and illustrating how a new generation of thinkers both engaged with and challenged the writings of the nahda intellectuals. By suggesting continuity and dialogue with the nahda that unsettles narratives of a ‘break’ or ‘decline’, she demonstrates how the ideas of earlier intellectuals, such as Taha Husayn, Qasim Amin, and Malak Hifni Nasif, remained relevant to and influenced subsequent generations of intellectuals.

Also, in the vein of interest in local influence, Bishara (Reference Bishara2016) traces the historical predecessor to modern public intellectualism in the region’s history and culture. Bishara maintains that the pre-modern predecessor of the Arab ‘intellectual’ – defined as the public role legitimised by working in the fields of signs, meanings, and symbols, such as knowledge and culture – is a critical type of scholar who founded a tradition based on the meeting of knowledge and moral authority, encapsulated in the ancient maxim, ‘the best jihad is a word of truth to an unjust sultan’. He contrasts this figure with that of the sultan’s poet or advisor, who obeys the ruler, legitimises his injustice, and adheres to the status quo, as reflected in the maxim: ‘a foolish Sultan is better than enduring strife’.

Bishara argues that the modern ‘intellectual’ sets themselves apart from this historical predecessor by combining scientific knowledge and methods with a moral authority that was historically the domain of communal norms and religious institutions. As these norms and institutions weakened with modernisation, the role of reasoned thinking became intertwined with the role of moral authority. While reminding us of a long tradition of Arab thinkers who used their symbolic power and scientific or literary status to influence the public sphere, Bishara emphasises the significance of the modernist tradition in the emergence of public intellectualism. This tradition inspired some of the most vocal critiques of tyranny and corruption in the contemporary Middle East. He traces this legacy from Rifa’a al-Tahtawi and Francis al-Marash, through the reformists Muhammad Abdo, Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, Rashid Rida, and the intellectuals of the liberal period between the two wars, all the way to the dissident intellectuals of the twenty-first-century Arab revolutions.

This modern intellectual prevails the cultural scene of Arab societies as a public role that has become an integral part of the self-identity of not only writers, academics, and politically engaged artists, but also many educated professionals like doctors, engineers, teachers, and lawyers (Hamzah, Reference Hamzah2012). But while in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public intellectual is present in both secular and religious circles, this changes in the mid-twentieth century as secularism and religiosity become party ideologies (Bishara, Reference Bishara2013). Indeed, as Christoph Schumann (Reference Schumann and Hamzah2012) describes, intellectualism becomes central to the political and social self-perception of the radical nationalists of Syria and Lebanon in the mid-twentieth century. Created in a liminal public sphere between Empire and Colony where nascent political subjectivities negotiated rights and obligations, the modern Arab intellectual imagined a society that was never actualised by postcolonial states – with its coordinates perpetually rooted in the colonial past (Schumann, Reference Schumann and Hamzah2012). Thus, a resulting sense of impotence ʽajz came to characterise the contemporary Arab intellectual (Kassab, Reference Kassab2019) and contributed to a pattern of thinking whereby aspirations were projected into the distant future. Schumann (Reference Schumann and Hamzah2012) describes this as a disjunct between these intellectuals’ highly positive self-assessment and the realities of social and political power structures in Syria and Lebanon at that time. Hamzah (Reference Hamzah2012) describes how young intellectuals, asserting themselves as a new elite with cultural capital, political determination, organisational forms, and comprehensive ideologies, faced resistance from the traditional leadership that clung to economic power and social prestige, leading the young intellectuals to anticipate their future ascent through the unification and modernisation of the nation. She writes,

While I will argue that this sense of impotence and its related ‘cultural insult’ have at least partly and temporarily been overcome through the painful but empowering experience of the Arab revolutions, their endurance for decades informs our current understanding of field dynamics, and it is important to recognise that the aftereffects of this long ethos of ‘ajz (Kassab, Reference Kassab2019) remain deeply felt.

In addressing these debates, Dyala Hamzah (Reference Hamzah2012) suggests the public sphere as an alternative operative paradigm for understanding the modern Middle East beyond the worn-out and unimaginative ‘impact’ paradigm and its Eurocentric focus on the genealogies of the region’s cultural developments at the expense of understanding the relevant local social contexts. Her project is significant to this book’s focus on the study of meaning because a key question in the region’s intellectual history and cultural and political self-understanding has been that of political agency. And as Hamzah points out,

Indeed, when we take into account the almost infinite range of factors that contribute to shaping an episteme, the influence of location or ‘origin’ is moderated. Instead, the focus is redirected towards the complex and networked contemporary mechanisms, human and otherwise (see Latour, Reference Latour2007) to produce meaning. The simplistic categorisation of factors into internal and external ‘origins’ also ignores the inherent interconnectedness of meaning-making practices across epistemes and the continuities, echoes, and traces of previous epistemes within modern European knowledge itself. Furthermore, it perpetuates colonial discourses that oversimplify complex cultural dynamics, ignore historical context, and reinforce global power imbalances. The issue at hand then is not merely whether the use of external canons or arguments to explain the intellectual history of the region is problematic. Instead, it is the reductionist and exclusionary nature of the very attempt to organise and categorise cultural meaning based on some imagined location for its epistemic ‘origin’.

In parallel to Hamzah’s call for a departure from derivative positions towards a public sphere paradigm, Dakhli (Reference Dakhli and Weiss2016) emphasises the need for epistemological shifts in Arab intellectual history. She advocates an approach of ‘writing Arab intellectual history without the West’, challenging Hourani’s depiction of the West as a dominant influence and urging a withdrawal from cultural self-understandings that overemphasise Western perspectives.

Illustrating the complexities entailed in the engendering of meaning, the interconnectedness of epistemes, and the inevitable transposition of theories as they travel across cultures, Di-Capua (Reference Di-Capua2012) examines how existentialism, as an example of such a theory, was adapted into new forms in the Arab world, offering a versatile framework for addressing the question of authenticity and the decolonisation of the self. He shows how existentialism resonated with Arab intellectuals and allowed them to question and challenge the social and cultural norms imposed by colonial powers and to redefine their identities on their own terms. Moreover, in its political form as iltizam, existentialism functioned as a powerful tool for political engagement. It marginalised the complacency of colonial-era intellectuals and mobilised a younger generation to participate actively in political struggles for liberation. With its emphasis on individual responsibility and commitment, existentialism offered a means for individuals to engage authentically with the decolonisation movement and contribute to collective efforts.

Calls to focus on the complex mechanisms of meaning construction instead of reducing them to questions of ‘origin’ and influence align with the interviews conducted for this research, which revealed a discursive tendency we might describe as a type of relationality fatigue. This fatigue emerges from excessive engagement with, comparisons against, or reliance on Western perspectives and discourses. Many exiled Syrian writers and artists expressed feeling overwhelmed and drained by the demands and complexities of this tradition. As detailed in Chapter 2, as well as in the Conclusion, this exhaustion has led to a paradigm shift in meaning production, from a politics of being perceived to a politics of perceiving. Sleiman (Reference Sleiman2021) challenges prevailing notions in critical nahda studies by rejecting etiological approaches to Arab intellectual history. She offers an alternative perspective that transcends the simplistic dichotomy of either mimicking Western patterns of thought or engaging in acts of resistance against Western hegemony, emphasising that while Westernisation is certainly a present and valid theme, the focus on ‘origins’ should not overshadow more compelling paradigms through which Arab intellectual history can be examined.

As Kassab (Reference Kassab2009) points out, the aftershocks of the 1967 defeat by Israel led to the emergence of two major trends in Arab thought: the search for comprehensive doctrines, particularly religious ones, as alternatives to the waning influence of secular nationalism and leftist ideologies, and an intensified radicalisation of critical thought. The former trend stemmed from a deep longing for a unifying worldview that could provide an authentic, non-alienating perspective and mobilise efforts to overcome humiliation and oppression. The latter trend arose from a painful reckoning with the limitations and risks associated with all-encompassing ideologies, as well as a growing recognition of the vital importance of critique in the face of diverse forms of oppression. While extensive studies have focused on the rise of ideological doctrines, particularly Islamist ideologies, limited attention has been given to the quieter yet significant growth of critical thought. This book contributes to her attempt to rectify this imbalance by providing due attention to a lesser-explored realm of critique that holds equal importance in the Arab social and intellectual landscape.

Zeina Halabi (Reference Halabi2017) juxtaposes this generation of mid-twentieth century Arab intellectuals with the political imaginaries of a subsequent generation, showing how the changing political landscape from the 1950s to the 1990s brought the twilight of the prophetic intellectual as a dominant figure. Analysing the work and positionalities of a group of literary writers in the 1990s, Halabi observes a redefinition of roles and figurations of the ‘intellectual’ in the aftermath of key events like the Lebanese Civil War, the Gulf War, and the Oslo Accords in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. She suggests that these historical shifts significantly influenced intellectual discourse and attitudes, resulting in a sense of disillusionment or disenchantment (see also Bardawil, Reference Bardawil2020) that prompted paradigm shifts from ideologies of nationalism, socialism, and pan-Arabism towards disengagement, disconnection, and, at times, cynicism.

Moving to the diasporic intellectual milieus, it is important to note that while the Berlin milieu essentially emerged after 2011 and the refugee wave, there is some evidence of an older intellectual milieu in Paris. Though no historical details are available on a specifically Syrian intellectual milieu in Paris, the presence of Arab intellectuals in Paris, whether exiles or otherwise itinerant, can be traced back at least to the early nineteenth century. Indeed, as early as the 1820s, Ian Coller (Reference Coller2011) discerns the presence of an Arab intellectual milieu in Paris. In presenting the concept of ‘Arab France’, he contends that this vibrant diasporic field was to a large extent shaped by these intellectuals, who had assimilated into French society while preserving their roles as interpreters of Arabic language and culture. Challenging prevailing discourses in Paris that often contrasted the perceived static nature of the Arabic language and the supposed decadence of the ‘Orient’ with the dynamism and progress of French civilisation, they stressed the importance of a reciprocal bond of respect between French and Arab intellectuals – a radical position by the standards of those times, according to Coller, and a battle that, as the following pages will tell, continues to be fought. Paired with a precarious political situation after Napoleon’s defeat and the return to a constitutional monarchy, ‘Arab France’ unexpectedly found its place during the Restoration period, Coller argues, where a return to universalist ideals allowed Orientalist societies to thrive, with Parisian Arab intellectuals’ active participation. In this liberal cosmopolitan milieu, the skills and contributions of Arab intellectuals in Paris were warmly welcomed, though they were largely centred on the notion of ‘cultural Arabism’, with a focus on expressions and interpretations of literature, culture, and language, and much less so on politics as such. Coller attributes these limitations not to the intellectuals themselves but to Napoleonic France’s unstable, authoritarian, and often racist tendencies. He writes,

Thomas Brisson (Reference Brisson2008) speaks of a turning point in the mid-1950s when Arab intellectuals were no longer absent from Parisian orientalist institutions, although they were initially confined to subordinate teaching positions. In the 1960s and 1970s, Brisson notes, they began to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the French field of Arabic studies, which they significantly contributed to renewing.

Before proceeding, it is important to acknowledge from the outset the narrow spectrum of any study of intellectuals in revolutionary movements. There is a strong sense that the Arab uprisings were spontaneous popular movements. Thus, attempts to attribute causality, overambitious as they may inherently be, usually point to explosions of accumulated grievances, rage, and indeed hope, accompanied by popular mass mobilisation. It is hardly disputed that the Arab uprisings were not the outcome of intellectual movements or the activism of intellectuals, though both undeniably had a part to play. Indeed, the cumulative role of intellectuals in fostering some of the ideals, values, and aspirations in the decades leading up to the revolutionary moment of 2011 cannot be entirely overlooked (al-Haj Saleh, Reference al-Haj Saleh2012; Kassab, Reference Kassab2019; Haugbølle, Reference Haugbølle2015).

For decades, Arab intellectuals used the power of language to call for liberation from oppressive powers, both local and colonial (Halabi, Reference Halabi2017, p. 16). Their debates throughout the second half of the twentieth century warned against the consequences of the failures of the post-independence states and offered a discourse of ‘political humanism’, which sought to reconstruct the human being in Arab societies and assert the ‘right to hope’ that underlies and drives political participation and civil mobilisation (Kassab, Reference Kassab2019). In her book on the Egyptian and Syrian debates leading up to the revolutions, Kassab suggests that it was the demands that Arab intellectuals had voiced during the 1990s and 2000s that ‘were to be heard a decade or two later in the streets of Cairo and Damascus’ (Reference Kassab2019, p. viii). Haugbølle (Reference Haugbølle2015) recognises how central intellectuals were to the constitution of the social, proposing that by 2011, interventions by revolutionary intellectuals like Yassin al-Haj Saleh were directly fuelling dissident pockets within the popular movement in Syria, not least through personal histories and ethical stances and practices that ‘transform the social imaginary and prepare the social conditions conducive of revolution’ (Haugbølle, Reference Haugbølle2015, p. 18).

That said, and despite the importance of their work in transmitting knowledge, constructing meaning, and creating new symbolic references, Syrian intellectuals have not performed a concrete leadership role within the movement. Most even rejected any such role. This position on the margin of political praxis meant that the construction of meaning did not translate into a performance of meaning, to paraphrase Jeffrey Alexander (Reference Alexander2003). Even when intellectual interventions offered affectively powerful and intellectually persuasive ideas, there were no platforms large or powerful enough through which they could influence the movement’s direction on a large scale (e.g., TV appearances). Such platforms, wherever they existed, initially had limited capacity and a restricted distributive power, most of it limited to urban youths with easy access to the internet and adequate levels of political literacy. This discontinuity between intellectuals’ work and mass mobilisation is further intensified by what Haugbølle has argued is their ‘shared desire … to counter the politics inherent in unreflective adoration and following’ (Haugbølle, Reference Haugbølle2015, p. 28). But admirable as its motivations may be, this anti-leadership project eventually resulted, as I will later show, in a political vacuum that came to be filled by anti-democratic forces offering their followers culture-systems of meaning, to use Clifford Geertz’s term, through which they could understand their lived experience of violence and act upon it.

Without the translation of ideas and analyses into systems of meaning and political programmes that are well-aligned with the historical moment and with people’s experience of it, intellectual labour becomes inconsequential to the political process. This makes the question of political agency primordial to any reading of intellectuals in social movements, particularly in a context where sustaining a sense of agency was against all odds but where an ‘optimism of the will’ was more crucial than ever (Khoury, 2012 cited in Kassab, Reference Kassab2014, p. 16). But impact is as difficult to measure as the relationship between thought and action. Thus, while many established intellectuals recalled the critical work they conducted over decades at a very high price (or risk) with a conviction that it has had some bearing on the events of 2011, they admitted that they would not know how to substantiate its political efficacy (Kassab, Reference Kassab2014).

Even with broad acknowledgement that pre-revolution intellectual interventions, murmured and subdued as they may have been, played some role in influencing public will, intellectuals were often censorious towards their own perceived inadequacy. Questions on the role of intellectuals in politics, their relevance, and their relation to power and to ‘the people’ acquired new scope after the revolutions, including criticism of their failure to predict and lead the movements (Kassab, Reference Kassab2014, p. 9). On the eve of the Egyptian revolution, Hazem Kandil (Reference Kandil and Korany2010) describes an apolitical Arab intellectual having either accommodated the prevailing policies of the state or turned away from politics altogether, focusing instead on the cultural. Kandil attributes this apoliticisation of intellectuals to an absence of political vision in the struggle against authoritarianism. Engaging with Kandil’s analysis, Kassab (Reference Kassab2019, p. 73) contends that since the 1960s, a number of uncompromising Arab intellectuals adopted a critical political stance against Arab dictatorships, condemning them as ‘illegitimate, corrupt, and violent’ and insisting ‘that the root cause of the Arab malaise was political and not cultural’. Kassab holds that the turn to thaqafawiya (culturalism), here referring to the tendency to explain socio-political realities exclusively or primarily through culture, as described by Kandil and others, was an outcome of both the persecution of critical intellectuals and introspections incited by the ‘defeat of 1967’ in the Six-Day War with Israel. She describes an ethos of ‘impotence’ (‘ajz), a ‘deep feeling of being unable to implement change in the face of repression, corruption, and neoliberalism’ (p. 2). But she nevertheless suggests attunement between intellectuals’ yearnings for freedom and dignity in the decades preceding 2010 and the popular movements following that year. Drawing on these debates, I agree that the cumulative impact of intellectuals in nurturing a revolutionary consciousness cannot be ignored. But serious limitations restrict any attempt to draw direct causality between the life of the mind and revolutionary movements.

Furthermore, it is often material, not ideational, factors that determine the success of a revolution, particularly once it has turned into an armed conflict. That said, the material is impacted by the discursive (e.g., military power can be affected by discursively generated funding and support). It is precisely for this reason that I insist on a bidirectional approach in this book. That is, I take interest in both how the revolution has influenced intellectual practice as well as the influence of intellectuals’ positions, practices, and relationships upon the revolutionary movement. When examining the latter, I am conscious of the risk of attributing too much weight to intellectuals as social actors. Indeed, one might ask, what could dissident intellectuals have done differently to tip the scales in favour of the movement? Was it not military power and leadership that was lacking rather than ideational leadership? No doubt, it is an assemblage of complex factors that determines the success of a movement: internal and external, ideational and material, spatial and temporal (see, e.g., Skocpol, Reference Skocpol1979). By qualitatively examining the progressive democratic movement championed by intellectuals as a key discursive field within the revolution, and one that was most aligned with the emancipatory aspirations of its early years, this book hopes to shed light on an important factor in the complex machinations of power struggle and how it figures in the success or failure of revolutionary movements.

Theoretical Lens

I adopt a multi-theoretical approach that brings together cultural sociology, social movement theory, and postcolonial theory. Within cultural sociology, two theories take centre stage: cultural trauma and intellectual positioning. According to cultural trauma theory (Alexander, Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman and Giesen2004), trauma, to be experienced collectively and vicariously, must undergo a process of symbolic construction. Through this process, the horrific event that the collectivity has experienced is narrated and reconceptualised in ways that fundamentally and irrevocably mark collective consciousness, memory, and identity. In other words, the theory provides a social constructivist understanding of collective trauma whereby any shared experience is contingent upon an interactive discursive process, sometimes referred to as ‘trauma work’. Intellectual positioning theory (Baert, Reference Baert2012, Reference Baert2015), by contrast, offers a complementary framework that emphasises the contextuality, relationality, and performativity inherent in intellectual interventions and discursive processes and movements more generally. It views intellectual interventions as speech acts that attribute certain characteristics to their authors, positioning them intellectually and politically (Baert & Morgan, Reference Baert and Morgan2017, p. 2). Both theories are strongly rooted in performativity theory, examining the relationship between language, identity, and social change. When extended to cultural sociology (Alexander, Reference Alexander2006, Reference Alexander2011; Baert, Reference Baert2012; Baert & Morgan, Reference Baert and Morgan2017), performativity offers a mode of analysis and a set of conceptual tools that show how cultural identity is not a pre-existing entity that drives certain social practices but the outcome of practices and discourses embedded within grids of power relations. The performative lens, then, shifts focus from language as a mirror of collective identity to language as a generator of social categories and practices (Mar-Molinero & Stevenson, Reference Mar-Molinero and Stevenson2009, p. 105).

Informed by this scholarship, I proceed with the understanding that the vicarious experience of trauma and the creation of an intellectual positioning are both discursively constructed and socially performed. Such performativity is easier to discern where the collective trauma is central to an intellectual’s work. But it is equally important in cases where intellectuals evade trauma in their work, particularly where they do so self-consciously and openly. For example, among Syrian artists and writers, one can observe a tendency to view art as an act of resistance in and of itself, even when it appears apolitical in its topic. This stance revalidates apolitical art or writing at a time when they are simultaneously extremely risky if created within the country and broadly rejected as irresponsible or apathetic. It allows writers and artists to resist confinement to the melancholic or traumatic, not through the now-contested rhetoric of ‘art for art’s sake’ but through the formulation of a hermeneutics of art as a life-affirming act in the face of oppression, war, and death. For example, in explaining his widely criticised decision to exhibit his latest work – a collection of nudes – in Damascus in 2017 while Aleppo was under bombardment, Syrian artist Yousef Abdelki (Reference Abdelki2017) wrote in an article published in Al Quds Al Arabi:

It is a position that reconciles ‘the responsibility of the intellectuals’ with the need to endure a protracted war. In other words, it preserves an artist’s self-positioning as ‘intellectuel engagé’ while allowing them to escape prolonged entrapment in a traumatic field by transforming seemingly apolitical work into politically performative speech acts.

Situating this work at the intersection of performativity, intellectual positioning, cultural trauma, and postcolonial theory, I draw on these theories contrapuntally, highlighting novel and existing connections among them, and between them and postcolonial theory. For instance, regarding the idea of art as an act of resistance in its own right, a performative reading understands this position as an affirmation of the agentic nature of discursive practice, supporting an artist’s political positioning as pro-revolution while freeing them from confinement to ‘trauma work’. A positionist reading, however, explains the phenomenon relationally and contextually: whom is the intellectual responding to, what historical specificities are they addressing, and how does this discourse position them as an engaged intellectual? It is then pertinent to explore, as I do in Chapter 2, the extent to which apolitical work is compatible with exilic intellectuals’ gravitation towards a universalising role that might appeal to a broader, more international audience after exile.

Cultural trauma provides an equally apt framework for understanding the rise of the idea of art as an act of resistance because it highlights how political/apolitical representations impact collective identity. Apolitical work, by normalising collective identity, presents it in its universal human essence rather than its fundamental difference marked by tragedy. Equally, the choice to deviate from ‘trauma work’ resonates with themes of agency and empowerment as modes of theorising trauma’s aftermath in postcolonial trauma theory. It reflects, as postcolonial author Chinua Achebe points out, the need to assert one’s ‘ability to face adversity down by refusing to be defined by it, refusing to be no more than its agent or its victim’ (cited in Visser, Reference Visser2011, p. 279). The example also engages with the sociology of intellectuals, particularly the complexities involved in any minority position (such as that of ‘Third World’ intellectuals or women intellectuals). In this case, seemingly apolitical art or writing focused on the abstract or the universal is a double-edged approach: it avoids the marginalisation risk inherent in asserting a specific kind of experience while potentially abandoning what is distinct in an intellectual’s cultural identity and personal experience.

Calling this multi-theoretical approach ‘contrapuntal’ expands on Edward Said’s notion of ‘contrapuntal analysis’ (Reference Said2014), which calls for a multi-perspective understanding of a colonial text that situates it within its biographical and historical contexts, considering the standpoints of both coloniser and colonised. My use of the term is then somewhat loose. It refers to a multi-theoretical framework where diverse theories are not merely equally useful for explaining various phenomena (i.e., different but separate perspectives). Rather, it is precisely in their polyphonic simultaneity and interplay that they produce explanations better suited to approximate the complex and multi-layered nature of human motivations and address the need for similarly complex, multi-layered apparatuses of analytical tools. For instance, when discussing the shift towards a more cosmopolitan approach in Chapter 2, a positionist reading that highlights the role of new funding sources and expanding audiences after migration does not contradict a decolonial reading, which might interpret this shift as a form of resistance to the marginalisation that confinement to a localised position of victimhood imposes (Visser, Reference Visser2015). Nor does the latter contradict the performative nature of self-empowering universalist speech acts and their role in constructing a compelling cultural trauma narrative that redefines collective identity in instrumental ways that serve group interests. By considering such diversity of explanations, indeed by keeping them simultaneously in our peripheral vision, we might understand social actions as ‘multiplicities’ (to invoke Deleuze): complex structures containing countless factors and forces. The diversity of explanations contained within such multiplicities avoids the evaluative undertones of mono-theoretical approaches. In other words, professional expediency, resistance to marginalisation, solidarity, hierarchy, and commitment to a collective good concurrently underpin the aforementioned phenomenon. They are not mutually exclusive but unfold together contrapuntally.

Another essential question in theoretical approaches is: what can cultural sociology and the sociology of intellectuals bring to our understanding of the Syrian revolution and its dilemmas?

Cultural sociology is interested in the relationship between meaning and social reality, suggesting that social reality can only exist through historically specific meaning-structures (Reed, Reference Reed, Alexander, Jacobs and Smith2012, p. 37). This can help us understand an important and neglected aspect of Syria’s current struggle: the fields of meaning influencing the revolutionary movement and the cognitive praxis emerging from them.

For Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison (Reference Eyerman and Jamison1991, pp. 95–96), a social movement’s cognitive praxis is the combination of knowledge practices emerging from a social movement through which movement intellectuals and other actors attempt to rework the understandings of their social reality. They highlight the central role that sociologists and historians attribute to intellectuals in creating meaning, identity, and ideological direction at the core of social movements. For Gouldner (Reference Gouldner2019), as for many other ‘new class’ theorists who present intellectuals’ defence and representation of the working class as self-interested, social movements are seen as vehicles for intellectuals to pursue their own interests. Alexander (Reference Alexander2017, pp. 8–9) emphasises the position of intellectuals at the intersection between the symbolic and the material, arguing that if their discourses can instigate mass mobilisation and impact social life, it is precisely because of their ability to offer answers for the most pressing questions of meaning and motivation.

While not the instigators of the revolutionary movement, Syrian intellectuals played an essential cumulative role, insofar as their ideas initially provided discursive frames, or what Alexander describes as ‘poetically potent scripts’ (Reference Alexander2017, p. 107), that influenced various actors’ motivations to participate in the uprising. This is in addition to the more direct organisational role that few intellectuals played in founding or contributing to organisations like the Local Coordination Committees, the Syrian National Council, Committees for Reviving the Civil Society, the National Centre for Defence of the Press and Journalists’ Freedom, and other organisations largely the outcome of efforts by intellectuals including Abdelaziz Al Kheyir, Aref Dalila, Michel Kilo, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Louay Safi, Burhan Ghalioun, and a few others.

Creating symbolic frameworks that restore unity and reassemble fragmented meanings, actions, and institutions is a key role for intellectuals in revolutionary movements (Alexander, Reference Alexander2017, p. 107). By doing so, they open up new conceptual horizons for social actors, commanding ideational power by coding and narrating emerging social realities in a manner that offers salvation (Alexander, Reference Alexander2017). This role was compromised when Syrian intellectuals’ influence and relevance were eroded after the movement’s violent turn.

Importantly, a traditional understanding that examines intellectuals and social movements as ready-made static entities is limiting. As Eyerman and Jamison emphasise, one must instead conceive of intellectual activity as a process rather than a product (Reference Eyerman and Jamison1991, p. 98). Thus, by construing social movements as processes that form the intellectuals they need, these authors reverse the causal direction given in Leninist models for understanding intellectuals and social movements. For them, ‘it is movements, as cognitive praxis, that lead and direct intellectuals rather than intellectuals that lead and direct movements’ (Reference Eyerman and Jamison1991, p. 99). I am informed by this model for examining intellectuals in social movements based on the view of both as non-static and evolving entities emerging organically in dialogue and through interaction with the unfolding historic events that shape them. In other words, my aim is to understand the significance of the movement in the social formation of intellectual activity as much as I try to examine and explain the influence that intellectuals may have had on the movement. So, in addition to the ways in which the fields of meaning generated by intellectuals affected the movement, of interest to this work is understanding the ways in which the movement shaped its intellectuals and contributed to the formation of a cognitive praxis. As it takes shape, this cognitive praxis is likely to have an important impact upon Syrian culture and collective identity transnationally and domestically, and to carry social and political potentialities whose reverberations will continue to resound for a long time into the future.

Outline of Chapters

The book is organised into five chapters, following this introduction. Chapter 1 examines internal social dynamics within the field. It argues that intellectual self-positioning was influenced by both material and symbolic factors; notably, competition over symbolic status built around field-specific power structures such as an individual’s sacrifices for the movement or what I call ‘persecution capital’ (Al Azmeh, forthcoming). But it also suggests that intellectual self-positioning was equally influenced by politically rooted psychological traumas – something that Western intellectual positioning theory (e.g., Baert, Reference Baert2015) had previously neglected. The chapter observes how the multiplicity of drivers (material, symbolic, and psychological) for intellectual positioning contributed to the formation of a fragmented field constituting a number of mutually antagonistic intellectual collectives organised around two lines of tension: structuralist-materialist and ‘culturalist’-idealist. Further divisions were also found around stances vis-à-vis armament, transitional justice, and political Islam. This contributed to the fragmentation of the opposition and weakened the movement’s credibility within the international political sphere.

Chapter 2 explores the ways in which exiled Syrian intellectuals relate to their host countries. It shows that while Syria remained at the centre of exiled intellectuals’ interventions, it was now viewed through a more universalist-cum-Eurocentric lens focused on establishing a relatable ‘Syrian cause’ in the international arena by positioning the movement within an international history of emancipatory movements. This cosmopolitan outlook is linked to a resistance to state-led integration policies among exiled intellectuals, particularly in Germany, who viewed their exaggerated suppositions about cultural difference as ‘Orientalist’, ‘inflammatory’, and ‘ethnonationalist’. But while they presented a universalising trauma narrative that connected the Syrian tragedy with other world events and emancipatory discourses, they often reflected a sense of exceptionalism vis-à-vis the tragic nature of their trauma, particularly in relation to its political outcome. This sense of exceptionalism and a perceived responsibility of the international community in the Syrian tragedy nurtured conflicted attitudes toward host societies where inner tensions between appreciation and condemnation were loosely negotiated. The chapter observes a potential paradigm shift in the work of diasporic intellectuals. Heretofore characterised by a focus on how the global periphery, and its intellectuals, are inhabited by a postcolonial hermeneutic that focuses on the Western ‘Other’, it is now characterised by a change in the direction of focus from a politics of being perceived (how the centre sees the margin or influences its self-perception) to a politics of perceiving (how the margin and its intellectuals see and make ethical judgements about the centre).

Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which Syrian intellectuals in exile related to their home society. It suggests that after the 2011 revolution, particularly after its violent turn and first wave of exile, the ‘enlightening role’ of the Syrian intellectual was seriously questioned, and an idea/fantasy of radical embeddedness within society began to emerge within the exilic intellectual milieu. Intellectuals’ stance towards their home publics became increasingly marked by a combined sense of inferiority, indebtedness, and dependency. Additionally, the increasingly important and urgent role of trauma narration called for identification with the suffering masses. As a result, there was a tendency to give up any enlightening role and identify with ‘the people’ or align with what they perceived to be their general inclinations. Such alignment/identification sometimes included anti-intellectual sentiments, resulting in a self-contempt that may be understood as an extreme form of epistemic egalitarianism.

Chapter 4 argues that the discursive trajectory of the movement is marked by a shift towards a victimised and racialised national identity, primarily triggered by a perception of international indifference towards egregious human rights abuses within the country. It contends that a perceived international complicity in protecting the regime in Damascus was understood as a sign that Syrians are among peoples excluded from a now delegitimated human rights discourse and relegated to an existence of ‘bare life’. The chapter describes shifts in the movement’s cognitive praxis. It argues that initially, the movement’s discourse was marked by hope, agency, and unquestioned belonging to the realm of possibilities and potentialities. It is a world where they imagined political change to be possible and human rights to be protected, particularly by the availability of technologies enabling instant documentation and global sharing of atrocities. By the time of their exile, this outlook had shifted to one of helplessness and exclusion. The chapter undertakes a meta-analysis of the construct of ‘meaning’ as an anchor in tracing this discursive shift.

The Conclusion links together the book’s observations and propositions to tell a story about how Syrian dissident intellectuals circled back to ‘Sisyphean labour’ now weighed down by the phantoms of millions more victims: the dead, the disappeared, the tortured, the displaced, and indeed (as promised by the Assadist militias shabbiha) by a ‘burning country’.Footnote ² That they continue to work is testament to an embracement of their own marginality, their resignation to the role of bearing witness, to being a ‘voice in the wilderness’ that ‘without any illusions’ insists on continuing. With hope already largely depleted, they shifted their ethos to one of hopeless perseverance.

Issues and Complications

Before concluding this introduction, I want to put forward some issues and complications that have emerged from critical self-reflection and discussions during the process of writing. The first issue is related to the relationship between my own positionality and the theoretical approach of my research. While I am a social outsider – in that, now settled in the United Kingdom, I am not part of Syrian diasporic communities in France or Germany – my positionality vis-à-vis the group of participants can be described as that of a cultural insider. I am Syrian by birth, nationality, culture, and emotional and mnemonic attachment. I have occupied what might be described as a peripheral position within or perhaps just at the outer boundary of the Damascene intelligentsia. Growing up, my parents held close friendships with artists, writers, and poets from that milieu. In my early youth, I was a student at Damascus University’s Philosophy and English Literature departments. I also attended the Higher Institute of Music and Dramatic Arts for the first two years of my music education between 1992 and 1994, and later as a music theory lecturer between 1997 and 2000. The institute, particularly the section for dramatic arts, and for reasons that will be later explained, was an ‘oasis’ for critical thought in a country where higher education purged its critical thinkers and non-Baathist scholars (see Dillabough et al., Reference Dillabough, Fimyar, McLaughlin, Al Azmeh and Jebril2019; Adwan, Reference Adwan2020). Thus, I came to this study having already made the acquaintance, sometimes friendship, of several of the study’s participants, through old family relations, through the institute, or otherwise. In addition to a cultural background and a now-dispersed social milieu, the study participants and I share a formative traumatic experience. While I was not living in Syria at the onset of the revolution, I have, during the course of this research and largely because of it, become a refugee, and have, like many of us, experienced the emotional trials and practical difficulties that losing a homeland entails.

It is difficult for an ‘insider researcher’ to approach this kind of research question using a performative framework that, since Goffman, has required taking a ‘cynical distance’ from social action. Reconciling such distance towards the field with my feelings apropos of the Syrian struggle and my critical solidarity with its intellectuals has been uneasy. I take comfort in Alexander’s proposition that illuminating the cultural structures and social processes underlying the challenges confronting the cultural trauma process ‘might allow victims, audiences, and even perpetrators to gain enough critical distance to prevent some of its most horrific results’ (Alexander, Reference Alexander2012, p. 5). Nonetheless, I am conscious that my use of performativity-based tools of analysis can be misconstrued as an indictment of exiled Syrian intellectuals or a questioning of their sincerity or authenticity. I wish to stress here that even the most ‘cynically distanced’ tools in the analytical apparatus of my theoretical framework, (e.g., the idea of intellectual self-positioning) do not automatically imply a cynical or self-interested outlook on the part of social actors. Performativity does not undermine sincerity. Indeed, the involvement and sacrifices of many intellectuals in the Syrian revolution must be recognised. Many intellectuals, including in this sample, were imprisoned and subjected to torture for those same intellectual interventions that may have positioned them favourably in the field. Most contributed to resistance activities knowing full well the degree of risk involved. It is impossible to include a comprehensive list, but names like the forcibly disappeared Razan Zaytoune, Samira Khalil, Abdelaziz Al Khayer; the late Fadwa Sleiman and May Skaf; and the persecuted yet tirelessly dedicated Najati Tayara, Samar Yazbek, and Yassin al-Haj Saleh speak to an understanding of the Syrian intellectual milieu as generally committed to the revolutionary consciousness that drove the movement. While I do suggest that the intellectuals I am studying position themselves, whether intentionally or not, in ways that are contextual, relational, and performative, this is not in any way synonymous with some Machiavellian outlook. I am simply interpreting intellectual interventions as speech acts and analysing social actions that are attuned to their context and circumstances.

Relatedly, it is important to emphasise that this work makes no pretence to render justice to the wealth of arguments, experiences, positions, and propensities presented by the complex and diverse field of Syrian intellectuals in exile, nor of those in Paris and Berlin. Rather, it aims to capture a historical moment in an expansionist rather than reductionist manner, recognising that this field, like any other, is constantly shifting. I understand my task as one of ‘interpreting the internal structure and patterning of cultural meaning’ and of ‘understanding the relations between symbolic parts and ideational wholes’ (Alexander, Jacobs, & Smith, Reference Alexander, Jacobs, Smith, Alexander, Jacobs and Smith2012, p. 21).

This concern about the elusiveness of the Syrian exilic intellectual milieu is deepened when the repression, fragmentation, and disconnection experienced by intellectuals inside Syria are considered. Several participants noted during interviews that, as ‘rationality subsides’ with violent political struggle, people become susceptible to identitarian, affective, and other subjective factors that impact their views and contribute to further fragmentation within the field. In other words, and as cultural sociologists have emphasised (e.g., Reed, Reference Reed, Alexander, Jacobs and Smith2012, pp. 38–39), it is important to acknowledge the subjective origins of social action in understanding and explaining not only intellectual positioning or cultural trauma narration but indeed all social phenomena. My undertaking, then, has been to discern the ‘symbolic inputs to subjectively guided social action’ (Reed, Reference Reed, Alexander, Jacobs and Smith2012, p. 39) and to marshal empirical evidence and a theoretical understanding of the link between the subjective and cultural origins of social action to build sociological explanations.

Another limitation relates to the temporality of cultural trauma construction. Both cultural trauma and migrant integration are usually examined further into the (migratory or traumatic) event. In migration studies, it is argued that questions related to belonging are best addressed towards the second or even third generation of migrants. However, addressing the question of belonging sooner enables one to capture affect before extended adaptation has allowed it to evolve and transform. Similarly, in cultural trauma theory, the passage of time is important in as much as it allows the ‘trauma drama’ to unfold, take shape, and seep into the collective consciousness, making its mark on identity. Only then is a thorough analysis possible. Cultural traumas such as slavery and its relation to the formation of African American identity or the Holocaust and its impact on both German and Jewish identities have been examined in this way. Contrastingly, the Syrian event was only six years old at the beginning of this study and continues to unfold at the time of writing. It is possible, nevertheless, to examine a trauma drama in real time or within a short period (Alexander, Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman and Giesen2004, p. 8). Such early investigations can be a valuable resource for future ones, which remain necessary for capturing the full extent of the cultural trauma.

In addition to these concerns, a central challenge throughout this study has been paying careful attention to maintaining critical distance in relation to two epistemes: that of Syrian intellectuals as an object of study, and that of ‘mainstream social theory’ from which many tools of analysis are borrowed in examining them.

On critical distance vis-à-vis participants, intellectual positioning theory, a key tenet of my theoretical framework, is premised on the sociologist’s ability to establish and protect their critical distance from intellectuals’ performative self-presentation and to demystify their claims of authenticity, purity, and transcendentality. In other words, the sociologist is called upon to ‘resist the temptation to idealise intellectuals, by glorifying their works, romanticising their public and/or private lives, and hypostatising their capacity to develop – and to project – a sense of truthfulness, uniqueness, and genius-like matchlessness’ (Baert & Morgan, Reference Baert and Morgan2017, p. 21). As an insider, I have had to be vigilant about unconscious gravitation towards a position of identification with the studied group. I had to move between two thought positions: on the one side, the perspective of an insider who sees the group, its frames of reference, its identifications, and its practices in an intimate normative way that may be subject to the partiality of view characteristic of the insider perspective. And on the other side, I had to examine the group, its frames of reference, its identifications, and its practices from the perspective of an outsider, or ‘role incumbent’, who does not share the partiality of the insider view but who also does not have the benefit of insider knowledge (for more on this dual positionality, see Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixon, Reference Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon2014). Without denying the challenges entailed in navigating this dual positionality, I claim that alternating between two perspectives has enabled me to maintain the benefits of the insider view (e.g., common understandings, tacit knowledge, shared language, kinship, and trust) while protecting enough distance for a positionist approach and for the ability to deconstruct and critically analyse this all-too-familiar social world.

If my research is entangled with a certain political position (against various tyrannical forces operating in Syria), I allege that I have been rigorous in ensuring my research does not ‘bend to political expediency’ (Swartz, Reference Swartz2013, p. 145). In other words, while I subscribe to the Bourdieusian view that ‘doing sociology is doing politics in a different way’, this sociological research is a political act only in as much as it is politically relevant not politically motivated (Bourdieu cited in Swartz, Reference Swartz2013, p. 145). Finding a synthesis, as Mannheim (Reference Mannheim, Wirth and Shils2015 [1936]) demands of any sociology of knowledge, between ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ conceptions of the cognitive praxis that is emerging from the Syrian movement in exile is central to my inquiry. To this end, and despite a delicate positionality, I have striven to rise above the passions of my own beliefs towards a rational understanding of the field. However, I reject the journalistic position of ‘balanced objectivity’ on the issue of identifying perpetrators and victims. ‘Balanced objectivity’, Bishara (Reference Bishara2012) argues, is a problematic practice for three reasons: firstly, because it overlooks the diversity of positions in different camps; secondly, because it misrepresents the communicative space between them; and most importantly, because it obscures the difference in scale and type of the experienced violence. (See Bardawil, Reference Bardawil2016a, for a critique of the hypocritical application of ‘balanced objectivity’ in the context of Syria.)

As for critical distance vis-à-vis mainstream social theory, this is an even more complex undertaking. The importance of critical distance towards the object of study has been amply emphasised in methodology literatures and frequently brought up in discussions with English-speaking academics about my work. However, the question of critical distance towards the canon, specifically its implicit or explicit claims to universality, seemed to attract much less attention outside the somewhat insular fields of postcolonial theory and ‘decolonising the academy’. Notable in this vein is the critique of Arab sociologists’ ‘almost slavish adherence to Western concepts and models, even when these were often irrelevant to the Arab context’ (Weiss, Reference Weiss, Hanssen and Weiss2018, p. 183). Indeed, balancing all these demands placed on the insider researcher has been necessary not only for enabling me to assess the degree to which I overidentify with my objects of study but also the degree to which I take for granted the applicability of the theoretical and methodological tools I borrow from the sociological canon to a unique context. Furthermore, a failure to seriously engage notions that emerge from the work of ‘indigenous’ intellectuals risks ‘reproducing a (post)colonial division of intellectual labour’ whereby thinkers in the global periphery are relegated to the status of objects of study while those in the metropole are ‘colleagues to be engaged or theorists whose work would not be historicized but used as a paradigmatic conceptual arsenal’ (Bardawil, Reference Bardawil, Weiss and Hanssen2018, p. 180). I have tried to be attentive to these matters and to the attribution of different weights to discourses.

It is in response to these issues that I have been intent on including the writings of Syrian intellectuals on their professional calling not only as data but also, where pertinent, as part of the theoretical discussions. As a result, my reader may experience an uncomfortable back-and-forth between the use of an author’s ideas once as empirical evidence and in another instance as literature, blurring the boundaries between data and references. This mixing becomes particularly tricky when I use participants’ self-diagnostic writings both as literature analysing Syrian intellectuals in exile, and as data when discussing questions related to intellectuals’ relationships with, and views of, each other. My reasoning is that these conversations are indeed happening in dialogue with the broader literature on the research questions and as such do constitute an important source of knowledge, in addition to being a data source. That some of these conversations are drawn from publications outside the standard scope of academic literature, for example, online periodicals or media interviews, further complicates matters. But if this is a methodological deviation, it is one based on an understanding of the specificities of social thought in Syria and a recognition that due to heightened political control over universities in the country (Dillabough et al., Reference Dillabough, Fimyar, McLaughlin, Al Azmeh and Jebril2019), the modern intellectual history of Syria must be broadened in order to take into consideration not only academic activity within universities but also other sites of intellectual production throughout Syrian society and public culture (Weiss, Reference Weiss, Hanssen and Weiss2018, pp. 183–184). This dual use of participants’ self-reflections on their collective role, their contextually specific realities, and their ethical responsibilities is an under-theorised methodological aspect of the study of intellectuals, one that is perhaps unique to this subfield in which the object of knowledge is also, primarily, a producer or subject of knowledge.

Contributions

Empirically, this book advances our understanding of the Syrian revolutionary movement, its transnational cultural sphere, and its discursive formations. Contrary to ‘declinist’ arguments, the revolutionary movement spurred a burst of intellectual and cultural activity, renewing the influence of intellectuals, particularly among youth who engaged in the uprisings. Though the intellectual field has largely been driven outside the country, it remains deeply rooted in Syria’s social and political realities. This study addresses a wider gap in empirical sociological research on Syria’s social and cultural transformations, which remain critical for both understanding the country’s ongoing shifts and for informing the transformation process itself. Effective social movements, after all, rest on socio-historical knowledge specific to their contexts. This book highlights a key challenge to this aim: the primacy of subjective factors over empirical knowledge in shaping intellectuals’ political positions and levels of support for, and belief in, the movement’s progressive potential.

Historically, the book examines how the role of public intellectuals shifts amid social and political discontinuities within an environment of diminished hope for historic progress. It presents a real-time investigation of intellectuals’ roles in constructing cultural trauma within the unique non-Western context of a failed revolution – a scenario underexamined in existing literature. By exploring the relationships between intellectual positioning, cultural trauma, and forced migration, the book sheds light on the complex effects of migration, shifting audiences, networks, and labour structures on intellectuals’ social and political roles in revolutionary contexts.

If, as Antonio Gramsci (Reference Gramsci1971) argued, intellectual labour and its role in transforming consciousness are still essential to social and political change, then understanding this role is all the more urgent during periods of political unrest. Complicating the binary of a declining public intellectualism versus a transforming one, this book illustrates an intellectual field that has been contributing to emergent discursive and cultural formations in ways that have influenced social and political reality, even if not always immediately or directly.

While the book documents a decline in political and discursive influence for Syrian intellectuals, it does not echo declinist arguments in the sociology of intellectuals. Instead, it complicates the binary of influence versus decline by highlighting a shift in intellectual roles, particularly in cultural trauma narration and construction (see also Eyerman, Reference Eyerman2011; Ushiyama & Baert, Reference Ushiyama and Baert2016), and examines the political implications of this role in subaltern contexts.

Normatively, the book explores the potential for intellectuals to play a constructive role in revolutionary movements in a post-ideological, globalised world. It argues that the intellectual work of narrating, reconstructing, and representing shared pains, disappointments, and aspirations in ways that counter hegemonic trauma narratives contributes to shaping a collective identity amidst evolving cultural traumas. This role, however, is not without cost. Intellectual work, alongside the efforts of citizen journalists and other activists, has transformed the way Syria’s story is written, creating a ‘Syrian Cause’ that advocates justice for victims and seeks to prevent further victimisation. Yet, this focus on trauma may detract from political impact, as the solidarity it fosters can distance intellectuals from critical and political action, impacting the direction of change itself.

Conceptually and theoretically, the book contributes in the following ways. Beginning with an insistence that critical distance from sociological canons is as crucial as distance from the empirical field, I depart from hegemonic cultural trauma theory by unsettling what its literature describes as the ‘central paradox’ of cultural trauma theory: the notion that while atrocities are most prevalent in the ‘non-Western world’, successful cultural traumas have primarily emerged in Western societies. As I argue in Chapter 4, it is not a failure in the ‘cultural trauma process’ itself that prevents horrific events in non-Western contexts from becoming recognised as cultural traumas, as Alexander (Reference Alexander2015) argues. Instead, it is the failure to translate narratives of wrongdoing into formal acknowledgements and material or symbolic reparations. Syrian intellectuals describe this failure as a ‘denial of meaning’. For many, the emancipatory demands of the Syrian uprising represent a ‘right to meaning’ – a demand to reclaim language and existential purpose through public engagement and the revival of politics and speech. Equally, they saw as ‘denial of meaning’ the reality that their trauma work did not prevent the endurance and gradual rehabilitation of the regime but was met instead with the relegation of the movement to the agenda of the War on Terror. Thus, building on the discourses of exiled Syrian intellectuals, the chapter presents the idea of the right to meaning as a framework for understanding global inequality through a dichotomy between those entitled to ‘meaning’ and those whose lives are accepted and treated as devoid or denied of it.

Further, this book departs from cultural trauma theory by suggesting that while ‘trauma work’ is often valorised as a collective process of ‘working through’ and ‘acting out’ collective trauma, this can come at a high political cost. In the context of Syria, I argue that it became a hindrance to political praxis by shifting intellectual focus from political organisation and theorising to the emotional labour of seeking solidarity. This emphasis on solidarity risks creating an illusion of political engagement in contexts where international compassion alone cannot deliver justice. Here, on-the-ground organising and political mobilisation must remain paramount, as argued in Chapter 4.

Additionally, drawing on Bourdieu, the book introduces the concept of ‘persecution capital’, which highlights the contextual contingency of field theory to suggest that victimhood, rather than privilege, can also become a nexus for competition over status, that is, a form of symbolic capital.

The book also contributes to postcolonial theory by suggesting a potential paradigm shift in the work of postcolonial intellectuals from a politics of being perceived to a politics of perceiving. This shift raises important questions for decolonisation efforts, particularly where postcolonial intellectuals are inadvertently confined to epistemic fields defined by cultural or national identity, which implicitly safeguards the minority world’s claim to universality.