Tyranny Necropolitics- The Suppression of the Syrian Revolution


Shahed Ishak, University of Toronto

My presentation aims to analyze state violence and the politics of death in the context of the Arab Spring. It does so by looking at the Syrian Revolution through the lens of necropolitics, a concept that examines how life is subjugated to the power of death. In March 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, peaceful protests erupted throughout Syria in demand for political reform and democracy. The Syrian regime perceived these protests as an existential threat to its authority. In response, the Syrian regime declared war on the opponents/revolutionaries, whom the regime publicly portrayed as an internal enemy . An enemy that needed to be exterminated in order to protect Syrian sovereignty and maintain its form of existence. The Syrian authorities used violence to suppress demonstrations, resorting to police, military, and paramilitary forces, thus, creating death-worlds and relegating the majority of Syrians to the status of the living-dead. This study employs a theoretical framework rooted in necropolitics. Necropolitics is a concept developed by Achille Mbembe (2003) to analyze the centrality of death in politics, extending Foucault’s theory of biopolitics. Mbembe highlights that Foucault’s biopolitics may not fully capture scenarios where death, rather than life, is the focal point of political power. Necropolitics has gained prominence across various disciplines, offering an analytical tool to understand the dynamics of power in relation to death outside the literature on genocide and the United Nations legal conventions on genocide, which were developed in the specific historical context of the Holocaust. However, it is essential to acknowledge that the framework of necropolitics has its limitations when it comes to addressing different political and social realities related to different historical experiences and geographical locations beyond Western liberal democracies. Besides the fact that the concept was initially theorized to capture the centrality of death in relation to colonies, race, and war and terror, the concept remains overapplied and undertheorized in the literature. On this basis, my presentation offers: first, to contextualize the concept of necropolitics within the Syrian conflict. By applying the concept to different historical experiences and geographical locations, I aim to conceptualize the suppression of the Syrian Revolution as a necropolitical formation. Second, to contribute to the development of the concept, broadening its theoretical scope and contributing to the conversation from the periphery. This will ultimately bridge the gap in the existing literature on the concept of necropolitics regarding the Middle East and North Africa region in relation to the Arab Spring event. In my presentation, I claim that by looking at the contemporary history of Syria, it is apparent that we are witnessing the unfolding of a particular and historically contingent form of necropolitics that emerged in the context of the suppression of the 2011 Revolution. I call this type of necropower that operates under authoritarian regimes, like Syria, the tyranny necropolitics . It refers to a type of necropower that operates under authoritarian forms of rule when the state authority is threatened. In times of stability, ruthless violence functions as the organizing element in the political practices of the regime, as manifested in its governmentality logic through a set of administrative and coercive practices. Extreme violence becomes the primary, if not the only, mode of governance in times of political contestation. Amid contention when a sovereign power is called into question, the regulation of life as a means of articulating sovereign power becomes insufficient. The state then acts and exercises its power beyond, above, and through the rule of law, to ensure the survival of the regime. By marking its opponents with a loyalty/disloyalty marker, the state decides who may be included in political life and who must be excluded from it. Disloyalty becomes the mark of the internal enemy perceived as a threat to the political and social way of life. In this sense, with rampant extreme violence, tyranny takes the form of a war machine that operates by the ceaseless identification of disloyalty, marking it by death. Inevitably, the production and distribution of death become an essential instrument used to retain power and ensure the continuity of sovereignty. This paper aligns with PSM3 session’s theme as it operates within the realm of political sociology, focusing on state violence, social revolutions, and counterrevolutions.

This paper will be presented at the following session: