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Over much of its rule, the regime of Hafez al-Asad and his successor Bashar al-Asad deployed violence on a massive scale to maintain its grip on political power. In this book, Salwa Ismail examines the rationalities and mechanisms of governing through violence. In a detailed and compelling account, Ismail shows how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities, defining their understanding of the terms of rule and structuring their relations and interactions with the regime and with one another. Examining ordinary citizens' everyday life experiences and memories of violence across diverse sites, from the internment camp and the massacre to the family and school, The Rule of Violence demonstrates how practices of violence, both in their routine and spectacular forms, fashioned Syrians' affective life, inciting in them feelings of humiliation and abjection, and infusing their lived environment with dread and horror. This form of rule is revealed to be constraining of citizens' political engagement, while also demanding of their action.
List of contents
Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the government of violence; 1. Violence as a modality of government in Syria; 2. Authoritarian government, the shadow state and political subjectivities; 3. Memories of life under dictatorship: the everyday of Ba'thist Syria; 4. Memories of violence: Hama 1982; 5. The performativity of violence and 'emotionalities of rule' in the Syrian Uprising; Conclusion: the rule of violence - formations of civil war; Postscript; References; Index.
About the author
Salwa Ismail is Professor of Politics with reference to the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on everyday forms of government, urban governance and the politics of space. She is the author of both Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism (2003) and Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (2006).
Report
'In this highly original, but also deeply disturbing book Salwa Ismail has captured superbly the daily and the spectacular acts of violence that have marked Ba`thist rule in Syria. The cumulative effects of dread, fear and horror on the Syrian subject, conformist as well as resistant, are at the centre of this account, giving a unique insight into the conditions that have torn the country apart.' Charles Tripp, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
