The symbolic construction of national identity and belonging in Syrian nationalist songs (from 1970 to 2007)

Aldoughli, Rahaf

doi:10.1080/20581831.2018.1554233

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Aldoughli (2019) argues that the state in Syria sponsored a national identity that worked to bring together the different components of Syrian society into a cohesive whole. Hafez al‐Assad constructed Syrian national identity gradually, employing Arab nationalist rhetoric.…”

Section: Is There a National Identity In Syria?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The end of the dialectical symbiosis of national and tribal identities in Syria

Dukhan¹

2021

Nations and Nationalism

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Since the 1970s, the Syrian regime has been attempting to build a ‘Syrian national identity’ to promote identification with the Syrian state (al hawiyya al‐wataniyya) while concurrently following policies of survival and legitimisation, to preclude suppressing tribal identity (al hawiyya al‐asha'rya). The regime instead fostered tribal identity and relied on it when confronting internal and external challenges. The Syrian regime's policies aimed to empower tribal identity, while seeking to manipulate this perception for its own ends. As a result, tribal and national identities have been integrated in a relatively harmonious way for three decades. The economic liberalisation project that Bashar al‐Assad pursued, however, disturbed the delicate balance that Hafez al‐Assad had constructed between the national and tribal identities. In the wake of the Syrian uprising, it has become clear that tribal identity was a significant element in the conflict that engulfed the country, shaping local politics and influencing social dynamics in north eastern Syria and parts of the south. Over the past few years, tribal identity has become a powerful form of expression in Syria, which is increasingly evolving to replace its national counterpart. This paper will use a constructivist approach, which argues that tribal identity has its roots in the origins of the tribes but has been subject to external manipulation by political actors in their struggles for power. In Syria, as in other states, such actions carry the risk of civil war, precipitating degrees of state failure (Hashemi, 2015) in which the tribal and national identities clash.

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Section: Is There a National Identity In Syria?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The end of the dialectical symbiosis of national and tribal identities in Syria

Dukhan¹

2021

Nations and Nationalism

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“…However, Pan-Arabism as a political ideology, while it certainly follows an ethnic rationale by grounding its idea of belonging in a 'united Arab family', also contained 'civic' elements such as secularism and its political association with the Ba'ath Party's programme. The self-identification 'Syrian-Arab' may therefore go beyond the ethnic rationale based on belonging to the 'Arab tribe' and instead follow the state-sponsored idea of Syria, perhaps including adherence to the Ba'ath Party, the Syrian state and its leaders (Aldoughli, 2019;Hinnebusch, 2020).…”

Section: Syrians' Ties Of Belongingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…7 Along more differentiated lines, yet still predominantly from a top-down perspective, academic work, on the other hand, paints a 'semi-sectarian' (Phillips, 2015: 359-360) picture of the Syrian conflict. Most scholars, with that, emphasise the presence of a firm, yet artificial and elite-manipulated, national identity cultivated through the Ba'ath Party's pan-Arab ideology that stands alongside a multitude of ethno-sectarian players (Aldoughli, 2019;Farouk-Alli, 2014;Phillips, 2015;Schaebler, 2013). What, however, unites all of these works is the underlying assumption that collective identities (be they national or ethnic/sectarian) are predominantly steered by elite manipulation.…”

Section: Gauging the Legacy Of War In Syria: Correlations Between Gro...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Legacies of war: Syrian narratives of conflict and visions of peace

Bachleitner¹

2021

Cooperation and Conflict

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This article is interested in the formation of war legacies and how they interact with social identities. It suggests a bottom-up approach towards examining the societal processes in which individuals create a legacy of war. It posits that through their narratives of conflict, by remembering what happened to them as a group, they mould the meaning and boundaries of how the group will be membered post-conflict. The validity of the theorised link between war memory and group membership is then tested in the case of Syria. In 200 interviews, Syrians provided their narratives of the conflict and their vision of a future Syrian state and society. The findings show that most respondents’ narratives follow a civic rationale, forming a society around civil rights and political ideas rather than around ethnic/sectarian divides. With this, the article contributes a new route for international relations scholars to understand the formation of war legacies through individuals’ narratives of conflict and explains their effects on ties of group belonging while also offering a glimpse into the Syrian ‘we’ amid the ongoing war in Syria.

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“…In response to that perceived emasculation, the Syrian state reinforced an existing masculinist nationalism through militarism. Al-Doughli's work draws attention to the everydayness of this masculinist militarism, where nationalist songs glorifying war and resistance to Israel form the daily routine for Syrian school children (Al-Doughli, 2019a: 144, 2019b. This pervasiveness of militarism is thus not only anticolonial but also a chauvinist reaction to defeat and subsequent Israeli triumphalism.…”

Section: In Shortmentioning

confidence: 99%

Racial militarism and civilizational anxiety at the imperial encounter: From metropole to the postcolonial state

Gani

2021

Security Dialogue

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In this article, I ask three key questions: First, what is the relationship between militarism and race? Second, how does colonialism shape that relationship to produce racial militarism on both sides of the imperial encounter? And, third, what is the function of racial militarism? I build on Fanon’s psychoanalytic work on the production of racial hierarchies and internalization of stigma to argue that militarism became a means through which the European imperial nation-state sought to mitigate its civilizational anxiety and assert itself at the top of a constructed hierarchy. In particular, I argue that European militarism is constituted by its colonization and historical constructions of the so-called Muslim Orient, stigmatized as a rival, a threat and an inferior neighbour. However, this racial militarism and civilizational anxiety is not only a feature of the colonial metropole, but also transferred onto colonized and postcolonial states. Drawing on examples of racial militarism practised by the Syrian regime, I argue Europe’s racial-militarist stigmas are also internalized and instrumentalized by postcolonial states via fleeing and transferral. Throughout the article, I demonstrate that racial militarism has three main functions in both metropole and postcolony: the performance of racial chauvinism and superiority; demarcation of boundaries of exclusion; and dehumanization of racialized dissent in order to legitimate violence.

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The symbolic construction of national identity and belonging in Syrian nationalist songs (from 1970 to 2007)

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

The end of the dialectical symbiosis of national and tribal identities in Syria

The end of the dialectical symbiosis of national and tribal identities in Syria

Legacies of war: Syrian narratives of conflict and visions of peace

Racial militarism and civilizational anxiety at the imperial encounter: From metropole to the postcolonial state

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