“Syria Differently” – The third Syrian narrative. 12 February 2015 18:00 at Litteraturhuset With the picture of the Syrian struggle being blurred and the focus being shifted to Islamic extremism only, it is important to bring back to the scene the increasingly neglected aspects of the Syrian ‘conflict’. “Syria Differently” provides an alternative image of…
While Media and western observers have mainly focused on the Sunni Jihadists moving to Syria to fight Assad or to join the “Islamic State” and fight Syrian opposition factions, other Jihadists - Shi’a ones - have been deploying in larger numbers in the country to defend Assad and “protect” his regime. Whether from Iraq, from…
The situation for the refugees has become increasingly present in the Norwegian and European media over the last weeks and months. However, the debate about the refugees is still being repeatedly depoliticized and reduced into a question of numbers only. In this debate we will take as a point of departure the assertion that the…
The picture in Syria today looks increasingly gloomy, especially for those watching from afar. What was widely recognized as an uprising for shared humanitarian values, is no longer seen as such. As the situation became intractably complicated, faulty generalizations and simplifications emerged, and the gloomy picture was, consequently, obscured. Nonetheless, many Syrians still believe in…
One of the most important formative experiences for the Syrian youth in the past four years is the emergence of an active civil society. The concept of civil society in Syria was virtually nonexistent before 2011 under the Assad's dictatorship. But as the Syrian uprising started, the explosion of self-expression mediums turned with time into…
“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” Jacques Derrida Since March 2011, Syria has witnessed deep cultural mutation; forms of expressions have evolved trying…
Even before the revolution broke out, but certainly after it, artistic practices in Syria often centered around democratizing the access to performative and artistic spaces. In the face of collective political calamity, a “democratization” of images takes place. This democratization, as Susan Sontag argued, turns the Event or calamity into an object that can be…
The Syrian sky is crowded with jet fighters from different corners of the world. While none of these is contributing to solving the Syrian conflict, Russia has been specifically accused by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of targeting civilians, using cluster bombs and committing atrocities that amount to war crimes. In September 2015 Russia…
While the Syrian war seems to embody all that is complex, alien, and thus incomprehensible about the Middle East, the five-year-old brutal conflict can in fact be explained through a set of global historical factors that emanate from the world made by Europe in the wake of World War One. This talk will shed light…
Persistent claims that the Syrian regime is “non-sectarian” result from a failure to distinguish between sectarianism as an explicit ideology, and sectarianism as an often unspoken technique of power. Whereas the Assad family has generally purported to act in the name of “national unity”, and accordingly minimised discursive expressions of sectarianism, its actual practices throughout…