Trajectories of Fear in Syria

How have Syrians experienced revolution? While perspectives are as numerous and contested as are the parties to the conflict, a shared understanding is coalescing among the subset of the population that has become refugees. My oral histories of Syrians in Jordan and Turkey show how individuals’ narratives coalesce into a collective narrative whose arc emphasizes change in the source, functions, and consequences of political fear. In this telling, four phases of fear mark the chronology of contemporary Syrian history. Before the uprising, fear was a pillar of the coercive authority of the state. Surveillance and repression generated obedience by instilling in citizens a dread of punishment and sense of the futility of resistance. In spring 2011, popular demonstrations generated a new experience of fear as personal barrier. In mustering a capacity to act despite or through fear, many protestors discovered a sense of self and purpose that had been subjected. As the rebellion militarized and the regime responded with indiscriminate violence, fear emerged as a way of life. Relentless danger of physical death was alternatively terrorizing and normalized as the encompassing context of the everyday, yet not with the subjugating effects of the pre-revolutionary system. Finally, flight from the homeland and protraction of devastating war gave rise to new fears of an uncertain future. Personal instability, as well as threats to the very existence of state and nation, produced anxiety and a struggle to counter it with hope and faith. This trajectory – from an imposed, silencing fear to a self-referential, transformational fear, to a (partly) normalized fear and then an existential, exilic fear – reveals how some Syrians make meaning of traumatic tumult. Moreover, it shows how, after decades of authoritarian rule, ordinary people’s narration of their own history is an act of voice and agency paralleling revolution itself.