In 2018, the trajectory of the Syrian war seemed to have irreversibly tilted in favor of Bashar al-Assad. The regime moved quickly to consolidate its battlefield gains by declaring the end of the conflict and the opening of a postconflict era—a declaration rejected by opposition forces and Western governments alike. Central to that political contestation was the instrumentalization of reconstruction as both discourse and material practice. Reconstruction As Violence in Assad’s Syria intervenes in this moment, arguing that reconstruction functioned less as recovery than as an extension of violence—in the form of urbicide, dispossession, and spatial engineering. With Assad’s fall in December 2024, the volume now reads as a historical record whose conceptual stakes remain salient in the post-Assad period.

The strength of the book lies in its clear articulation of reconstruction as a continuation of wartime violence rather than a pathway out of it. By challenging linear models of postconflict transition, the editors and contributors show that the authority to announce the advent of reconstruction is itself a political instrument, used to reinterpret destruction, reshape social geographies, and entrench political control. This conceptual scaffolding emerges gradually through the sequence of chapters. Hashim Sarkis’s foreword traces Syria’s urban ontology through cycles of violence and building, and the editors’ introductory chapter calls for revisiting normative understandings of reconstruction and provides the ethical framing of the book as a stance against normalizing reconstruction while war is still raging.

The first part offers the historical and political foundations of this argument. Nasser Rabbat traces identities, ideologies, and planning strategies that collided across Syria’s modern urban history, creating the institutional and political conditions that shaped the war’s destructive outcomes. Wendy Pullan, drawing on several international precedents, describes how modern urban warfare simultaneously destroys and constructs space, challenging assumptions that rebuilding occurs after violence rather than as part of it. Valérie Clerc reframes informal settlements—where the war had its most horrific impacts—as longstanding sites of negotiated governance, cautioning against reading them solely through the lens of postwar clearance or redevelopment. Emma DiNapoli demonstrates how regulatory instruments became “weapons” of urbicide, advancing spatial erasure under the guise of legality. Deen Sharp extends the analysis by examining reconstruction as a mode of internal colonization deployed by the Assad regime against his people and external colonization by Russia to secure geostrategic gains and long-term access to Syrian resources. Sawsan Abou Zainedin concludes the section by unpacking the regime’s narrative of a culturally homogeneous Syria—a myth employed to legitimize demographic engineering and selective redevelopment.

The following chapters turn to Aleppo, the city that became both symbol and laboratory of reconstruction politics. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh offers a sweeping history of Aleppo’s cultural heritage as a contested political terrain long before 2011, explaining that the struggle over what to preserve or efface continued during the conflict. Rim Lababidi examines interventions in Old Aleppo after the fighting subsided, tracing how political interests, bureaucratic fragmentation, and community actors shaped patterns of return and exclusion. Omar Ferwati introduces the concept of “civilian crisis architecture,” foregrounding the deliberate, adaptive architectural gestures civilians undertook to survive—an essential counterpoint to conventional narratives that focus exclusively on destruction. Ammar Azzouz advances the notion of “domicide” to shift attention from monumental ruins to the intimate violence of home loss and fractured identity in his native city of Homs.

Together, these chapters offer a coherent account of how reconstruction discourse operated during the latter years of Assad’s rule, spanning legal transformation, the use of building regulations to consolidate political control, demographic reordering through displacement, and the distribution of victory dividends to loyalists. Yet the book’s analytical precision is hampered by its long production timeline, having originated in a conference that took place in 2019. Chapters were written from outside Syria during rapidly evolving events, limiting the authors’ ability to verify information or situate their interpretations within a broader institutional landscape. What began as a timely intervention now requires reconsideration, in light of post-2024 developments and expanding empirical evidence.

A central limitation lies in the analytical simplification of the ways reconstruction was conceived and implemented on the ground. Several contributors treat Syrian governance as a unified “regime” directed by a single hegemon, collapsing the divergent roles of ministries, municipalities, security agencies, and competing elite networks into one form of political agency. An example of this flattening is Wendy Pullan’s claim that barrel bombs were deployed by the regime as antiaesthetic tools to invert the urban order and transform interiors into public scenes of devastation. The analysis risks reproducing the illusion of omnipotence that totalitarian systems themselves project, as Hannah Arendt warned long ago.Footnote ¹ The reality was more fragmented: reconstruction policies emerged from overlapping mandates, administrative rivalries, and uneven local capacities. Because of this flattening, the book often underplays the institutional complexity and political and economic constraints that shaped outcomes on the ground.

The legal analysis suffers from similar reductions. Some chapters conflate executive presidential decrees with parliamentary laws or ascribe mandates not found in the legal texts but adopted selectively in practice (DiNapoli), a common challenge of analyzing individual legal texts from afar. Others mis-sequence legislation or understate the significance of key frameworks, such as Law 33/2008 on informal settlements (Clerc) and Law 33/2018 on debris removal (Sharp). These inconsistencies do not undermine the value of the authors’ arguments, but they highlight the difficulty of verifying and interpreting legal practice from afar and the need to distinguish clearly between the letter of the law and its administrative implementation.

The volume also pays limited attention to the reasons many flagship reconstruction schemes were never completed. The Marota City project appears prominently in the book, yet its analysis gives little weight to the political and economic constraints and institutional rivalries that stalled progress. Ambitious municipal projects under Law 23/2015 and Law 10/2018 faced resistance, competition among elite economic actors, and contradictions within the planning bureaucracy; these dynamics are largely absent in the book. The Qaboun master plan, treated in the chapters of Abou Zainedin and DiNapoli as a fait accompli, was in fact suspended several times through collective lobbying by local manufacturers, although it has recently resurfaced, following the fall of the Assad regime. Only the microrestoration efforts in heritage neighborhoods documented by Lababidi achieved meaningful, if partial, progress—underscoring the importance of questions regarding overlapping mandates and the support of external actors. Such questions were often relegated to secondary attention in the book.

The book’s emphasis on regime violence, although well-founded, narrows its analytical range. The destruction inflicted by ISIS, Turkish-backed armed factions, the US-led coalition, and Kurdish-led forces receives limited discussion, despite shaping key urban geographies. In Aleppo, opposition forces engaged in their own forms of urbicide, with varying degrees of firepower. The defacing of buildings in Raqqa was the work of the anti-ISIS coalition, not the regime. Similarly, the reliance on a narrow set of case studies—Damascus, Aleppo, Homs—limits the book’s capacity to address the diverse urban and rural trajectories that emerged across the country. Core urban–rural dynamics remain underdeveloped in the book despite the occasional reference to rural–urban migration (Clerc). Finally, the heavy use of visual material occasionally slides into fetishization, treating Internet images and drawings as authoritative evidence rather than interpretive artifacts requiring contextual grounding, as in Ferwati’s chapter commemorating civilian resilience during the war.

Despite these limitations, the book offers a powerful reminder that reconstruction is not a neutral technical exercise but a political project capable of extending and reframing violence. This insight remains pertinent as the new authorities in Damascus seek to declare the war over and promote investment-driven redevelopment that echoes many policy undertones of the previous regime. Yet ethnosectarian tensions persist, territorial divisions endure, and millions remain displaced. In this context, the book stands as a cautionary text: declaring a postconflict moment does not resolve the fractures left behind by wars.