Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State

Scholars have published widely on the geostrategic aspect of the First World War, how the French and the British divided the Arab lands after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. In this context, such studies have identified a process of colonial appropriation, in which borders became the natural outcome of imperial diplomacy. This chapter investigates other temporalities (political, technical and social) through which borders were made. First, when politicians decided in 1920 to separate Cilicia and Syria, they had to agree on the new political lines which would divide the territory. A series of negotiations were launched, and finally, in 1929, an agreement was reached between French and Turkey which clearly established the boundaries. Then, several technologies were used to control this land. In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire started to shape this area of land by deploying several villages, castles, and battalions. The French followed the same strategy by developing cities. Finally, people appropriated the new divisions. The case of the Armenians is particularly interesting as they mainly settled on the borders and constituted the nucleus around which each new border city grew. These new towns interacted with the surrounding rural areas and affected transport and the economic circuit.

This chapter, by exploring the local, national and imperial debates over the delimitation of the Turkish-Syrian border, will analyze the interrelated processes of organization of geographical space and politics of difference in Turkey and Syria under the French mandate (1921–1939). Borders are dynamic markers reproducing external distinction and internal homogeneity. For the French having the mandatory power to rule Syria (1921–1946), the border between Turkey and Syria implied potential economic, commercial and strategic interests. For the Turkish state, however, the border issue evoked anxiety of security and order, and was embedded in the Armenian and Kurdish issues. As far as the borderlanders in Syria and Turkey are concerned, the border functioned as a powerful symbol of an oppressive state power to be resisted against, negotiated with or absolutely avoided. It is through the violent or otherwise struggle between these multiple state and non-state actors that the space is organized, the national/colonial state power is established and cultural difference is (re)produced. By looking at a variety of colonial and national archives this chapter aims to present the multi-sited story of the interrelated processes of state, space and nation making along the Turkish-Syrian border in the early two decades of the twentieth century.

Born in 1916, modern Syria’s territorial and administrative configuration has undergone significant transformations resulting from competing cultural claims and governmental aspirations. An examination of the external border provides a crucial interrogation of the aspirations and constrictions of French and post-independence Syrian territoriality. Yet internal divisions are often overlooked; divisions that could turn into permanent divorces (i.e., Lebanon’s formalization as an independent territory in 1926) or fluctuating changes in governmental organization. This paper will focus on French attempts at dividing modern Syria into manageable blocs in the first decade of their mandatary administration (1920–1930). It will draw on a wealth of governmental archives and local newspaper comment to show how this project immediately encountered contestations from the centrifugal and diverse interests. This examination draws on Michael Van Dusen’s (Middle East Journal 26:123–136, 1972) helpful suggestion regarding Levantine political geography seen as a set of competing agro-cities with regional hub towns (Aleppo with Homs and Idlib, Damascus with Deraa and Hama). This can give us an insight into the failure of French attempts at reorganizing the country according to their “overly-simplifying and geometrical”, as early mandate administrative supremo Robert De Caix put it.

Most of the political analysis of Hizbullah’s involvement in the conflict in Syria dealt with its relationship with Iran’s regional goals and more directly with the interest to secure the alliance with the Baathist regime in Damascus. While the latter is of some interest for our purpose, this paper would like to reflect upon a larger historical trajectory of the Shiite movement in Lebanon while taking into account its previous experience in the southern borderlands to analyse its current political strategy along the eastern borderlands (Qalamoun region). It aims at identifying the main patterns of power when it comes to the territorialisation of power in border regions. Therefore, the paper will rely on the b/ordering—othering theoretical framework which tends to highlight the interactions between legitimisation process and the use of violence at the edge of the State. Moreover, the paradoxical goals of Hizbullah as a non-state actor will appear as the movement clearly contribute to shape the territorial delineation of Lebanon’s nation-state boundaries alongside its own political identity as a nationalist party.

The Syrian civil war has become an important arena of regional struggle with its human tragedies and geopolitical implications for neighboring countries. The sectarian dimensions of the war added another complication to the current political framework and violence not only in Syria but also in the Turkish-Syrian borderlands, particularly in Antakya (Hatay). At the southernmost border with Syria, the city was annexed by Turkey in 1939 as a result of colonial treachery and contains the largest proportion of Arab citizens of Turkey. The Turkish state’s open support for opposition forces in Syria including jihadist groups, the influx of the Syrian refugees and a significant Sunni Turkish population in favor of the Turkish regime amplified sectarian tensions and the political opposition, after March 2011. Drawing on micro-historical approaches and ethnographic analysis of societal responses at the Turkish-Syrian border region to the interstate conflict of the Syrian civil war, this paper attempts to answer two questions: How has the political and cultural landscape shifted and what are the spatial consequences of it? What are the ways in which ethnic and religious identifications in the city have been re-negotiated with regard to sectarian polarizations and the Syrian civil war?

This chapter examines local-level dynamics in Syria’s Dayr al-Zur governorate from the beginning of the 2011 uprising through the ascendance of ISIS in late 2014. The governorate was the site of both intense armed conflict and a range of experiments in governance. The violent struggle between al-Qaʿida-affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and its offshoot, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/al-Sham (ISIS), unfolded primarily in Dayr al-Zur, creating new enmities between local communities and providing a forum for pursuing old rivalries. At the same time, the absence of a central political authority created space for new local arrangements to deliver services, provide local security, and render legal judgments. The chapter argues that tribal linkages and symbols played an important role in patterns of contestation, alliance, and violence, but not through formal tribal hierarchies, nor at the level of entire tribes. Local networks contained within sub-tribal groupings formed the core of many military formations, while broader tribal affiliations were used only in transactional, often ephemeral ways. Men occupying the historical positions of status and prestige in their tribes were all but irrelevant to these dynamics. Understanding patterns of alliance, service delivery, and violence in wartime provides needed context for theorizing post-conflict governance.

Territoriality plays an important role in understanding Syria’s heterogeneous opposition movement, as it has in understanding the Syrian conflict more generally. Much like other parties to the conflict, the Syrian opposition has engaged in military contests for control of territory in a very tangible sense. But territory is also at the center of important symbolic contests for legitimacy within the wider field of Syrian politics. This paper examines the territorial imaginaries in circulation within the Syrian opposition, focusing on three such classifications in particular: the liberated territories, laboratories, and safe zones. It argues that these help constitute distinctive—if anomalous—forms of political order (Jeffrey et al. Geoforum 66: 177–183, 2015), and that their dynamics shed light on how the opposition labors to justify its political project and navigate its relationships to external actors. Consequently, they offer insights into the broader geographical imagination of the opposition and its changing international entanglements as the conflict enters its seventh year. Exploring the Syrian opposition’s three territories thus reveals the evolving forces shaping the political geography of Syria in the twenty-first century.

The establishment of the ‘Islamic Caliphate’ in 2014 over a territory that comprised portions of the Iraqi and Syrian state as well as the self-declared Kurdish ‘federal’ scheme in Northern Syria nourished the perception that the so-called Sykes-Picot system had collapsed. However, scholars should be cautious. For one, non-state actors can reshape international borders just as well as states can—i.e., with similar functions, albeit with different political agendas. These agendas include acquiring a means to gain material and symbolic resources; as a process of (b)ordering local societies; as a political asset within the international system; and, finally, as ‘shielding borders’ in the face of external threats. In so doing, non-state actors might replace state authorities as institutions that hold the legitimate use of force in a territory while contributing to the permanence of state borders. The chapter thus argues that since the establishment of the Syrian state, Kurdish populations and local political actors have developed a complex and dynamic relationship with the post-World War I borders. Crucially, the analysis of PYD discourse (pamphlets, online outlets and school textbooks) and practice points out the continuities and changes with regard to the relationship of the main Kurdish political party with state borders as well as with the concept of Greater Kurdistan.

Since the advent of the Islamic State (Dā’ish) in 2014, very few works have sought to question the territorial ideology and spatial representations which underlie its political imagination. Even if the movement has engaged—with considerable celerity—in a massive enterprise of conquest, neither its leaders nor the ideology itself has adequately communicated how it represents and categorizes this territory and, more broadly, the territory. Thus, how does ISIS project its conception of the world around it in terms of spatial reality? What do the notions of space, territory, and boundary(ies) mean for a transnational movement whose transcendent ideology calls for the unity of an Umma based on the denial of belonging to any traditional ethnic, racial, or national group? Based on the analysis of hundreds of propaganda documents produced by Dā’ish between 2015 and 2016, this paper will explore ISIS’s territorial ideology, as well as its strategy to symbolically represent its imaginary borders and disseminate it via its “Ministry of Education” (diwān at-ta’līm). By studying the fascicles and “official” school textbooks, including dozens of volumes on geography, this chapter will also provide a historical reflection on the interaction between space(s), border(s), and territory(ies) in the contemporary Arab world.