Rebel populism: Revolution and loss among Syrian labourers in Beirut

By Philip Proudfoot

Workers from the Syrian diaspora have maintained a presence in Lebanon for decades, building multimillion-dollar apartment complexes, toiling for backbreaking hours in grocery stores. From the mid-2000s, liberalising reforms saw accelerating levels of poverty among workers, often paid as low as $20 per day. Instead of ‘opportunity’, workers faced the prospect of indefinite economic exile, the unending drudgery of hard labour, and a constant struggle to make ends meet.

But in 2011, revolution came to Syria. Rural towns and villages exploded in revolt, but even those workers who remained in Beirut found means to protest at a distance. Their movement, which this book identifies as ‘rebel populism,’ represents an early instance of an increasingly common global contentious political formation, a form of mass politics that emerges not via a charismatic orator or developed ideological convictions, but through the weaving together of grievances aimed at the ruling class.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526158093

Book preview

Rebel populism

Rebel populism

Revolution and loss among Syrian labourers in Beirut

Philip Proudfoot

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Philip Proudfoot 2022

The right of Philip Proudfoot to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5810 9 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit: Philip Proudfoot

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For

My Mum, Dad, and Granda

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: revolution and loss

1Cynicism, socialism, and labour migration

2Rebel populism and rupture

3Art, uprising, and smartphones

4Rebel-martyrs

5Masculinity in (a) crisis

6Conspiracy, sectarianism, and the failure of the uprising

Conclusions: it’s your turn, doctor

Index

Preface

This book is a study of revolutionary politics among male Syrian migrant workers in Beirut at a time of uprising, war, and refugee crisis. It is based on extended periods of fieldwork carried out from 2012 to 2017. The purpose of this book is to fill a rather startling gap in ethnographic work on the Arab Spring. Namely, the lack of long-term ethnographic studies into the development of oppositional political positions among hitherto non-political people.

In other words, Syrian workers are not professional civil society activists, radical Islamists, or secular-liberal organisers. Instead, they are precarious, marginalised, and low-skilled workers. While the demands of making a living disconnected these men from frontline revolutionary activity, their circumstances nonetheless reflected those who formed the backbone of the Syrian opposition more generally. All those in this book expressed support for what they called the revolution [al-thawra] and its intention of overthrowing the regime [al-niẓām].

Their political ideas were not articulated through any particular ideological project, nor were they supporters of any singular opposition outfit. Instead, their commitment to the revolution was expressed through an anti-elitist language – which I call rebel populism – that spoke of an unbridgeable divide between the people and the regime.

Political scientists and journalists have now done much to elaborate on the general course of the Syrian uprising, its composition, mobilisation tactics, and its descent into a civil and proxy war. However, what remains comparatively unexamined are the perspectives of Syrians themselves.¹ To try to fill that gap, I build all this book’s observations and argumentation from the bottom up, seeking to describe, in the process, how it was that the uprising structured migrant workers’ lives in Lebanon and why the promise of the revolution so enthralled them. This has led me to examine a vast array of related topics, including labour migration, market liberalisation, populist politics, revolutionary art and images, new communication technology, patriarchy, and conspiracy theory.

To concretise what is evidently a great diversity of themes, I will begin the book with the story of just one migrant worker in Lebanon, Abdullah, and chart how the revolution began to shape his political ideas, his day-to-day opportunities, his relationships with others, and his long-term prospects. His life history sets the book’s tone as I begin to weave into his tale the broader ethnographic context, my own entrance into the field, and the theoretical issues at stake.

I came to write this book through a course set by the uprising itself. My interests in Syria began with a different proposition. In 2010, I wanted to document the lives of men who flee from Syria’s lengthy and compulsory military service. Over long summers spent studying Arabic in Damascus, I learned of the dread Syrian men my age – then in my early twenties – held toward service. They feared years of abuse, bad food, and cold showers. And many, naturally, looked for a means of escape. But then, four months into writing a research proposal, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions ignited. Two months later, the first protests broke out across Syria. The more I wrote, the more my plan became fiction. By the end of the year, it was evident the original project was now impossible. With the hope of finding new possibilities, I travelled to Lebanon in September 2011.

Deciding first to contact migrant construction workers, I found that my apparent oddness as an Englishman asking questions about everyday life led to a flood of invitations. I spent long nights playing cards, eating dinners cooked in overcrowded apartments across the city, taking Sunday walks along the seafront, and playing football in weekly worker matches. But I also sat bored for hours, staring at satellite television news or trying to distract men away from their mobile phone screens. I listened as my new friends tried to make sense of scenes unfolding just a few hundred kilometres away in Syria. Through all this – which is really what the anthropologist’s research method of participant-observation entails – I have spent years hanging out with some of Syria’s most marginalised populations. And in all my interactions in the field, it was always the revolution that engulfed all other potential topics of inquiry – it was an ever-present object of conversation, excitement, hope, and, in the end, tragedy.

In spending time with a small group of workers, I learned that as protest mobilisation spread across Syria, these men – who otherwise faced a future of deteriorating livelihoods – found, suddenly imaginable, a different future. Through the ubiquitous internet-enabled smartphone, they received a constant stream of photos and videos shot by friends and kin back home. Inspired, some returned to participate; others later joined the armed resistance. But even those who remained took part in the revolution from a distance. All described to me, in rich detail, the life of dignity [karāma] they hoped the revolution would usher forth. After the victory, they told me, the state would work for us. With that victory coming, they would soon return, get married, work the land, open a shop, build houses, and raise children.

I do not hide that migrant men’s political aspirations were deeply imbricated in a desire to occupy promised roles within Syrian patriarchy as heads of households, breadwinners, businessmen, farmers, and fathers. Women’s aspirations and voices are decidedly absent from this book. This presents serious limitations for any holistic analysis of revolutionary processes, gender dynamics, and resistance. Nonetheless, I try to present masculinity as one of the book’s core topics, and I deliberately avoid offering men’s views of life and politics as natural or self-evident, but instead show how those views always emerge within a gendered mode of being.²

In many ways, the absence of women was also simply unavoidable: the bulk of Syrian migrant workers in Beirut are men. For reasons this book makes clear, mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives generally remained in Syria. However, men’s ideas, stories, and complaints about women do appear throughout. What’s more, women will slowly enter the stage at points, like when the reality of Syria’s worsening situation meant workers began to wed fellow refugees in Lebanon.

Readers may also be curious about why Islam does not occupy a more central place in the book. Indeed, all my informants identified as Muslims and practised to varying degrees. In the years leading up to the Arab Spring, anthropological work on the Middle East afforded Islam an extremely high degree of centrality, with discussions focusing on practices of piety, Islamic dress, and religious ritual as vehicles for resistance that are often incomprehensible to Western or liberal value-systems.³

This focus on Islam drove discoveries of previously hidden power struggles and challenged Western-centric thinking. Yet, when I went into the field, politics was not something implicit or hidden elsewhere, that is, in activities that my informants would not necessarily themselves even classify as political. Instead, politics – as the direct contestation of authority and government – was present everywhere and in every conversation. Indeed, sometimes workers’ ideals of social justice were connected to Islamic principles, but those ideals also appeared bound up with other discourses, like the remnants of Arab Socialism or even the crisis of masculinity. In the rare instance I even discuss Islam, I do so not as some single, all-encompassing framework that can explain social action, but as merely one frame among many through which workers navigated and understood their lives.⁴

In the end, this is a book about rural-to-urban workers in Lebanon talking about Syria. My data was collected in Beirut, and this entailed tracing a network of men through that city. However, while Beirut is present as a character, this is not an ethnography of that city. Instead, it is an ethnography of the views, experiences, and lives of men who found themselves observing and participating in the uprising at a distance.

What I offer the reader, then, is my attempt to capture working men’s political theories, their opinions concerning unfolding events, their strategies of survival, and their means of knowing and not knowing from the margins.

Notes

1A notable exception is: Wendy Pearlman, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017).

2Farha Ghannam, Live and Die like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2013).

3Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press, 2013); Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (University of California Press, 2016); Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton University Press, 2011); Saba Mahmood, Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide? Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 836–62.

4Samuli Schielke, Second Thoughts about the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life, Zentrum Moderner Orient Working Papers, Number 2. Available from: www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/32233/ssoar-2010-schielke-Second_thoughts_about_the_anthropology.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed 10/02/2022).

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible, first of all, if it were not for a wonderful group of migrant Syrian labourers in Beirut so willing to share their aspirations, ideas, and daily lives with me. Their friendships and openness are really what has made every word in this text possible. While it might now appear a forgotten conflict, we are now ten years into the Civil War and the Syrian government appears to have emerged victorious across vast swathes of the country. However, ongoing clashes, alongside a compounding series of crises – from COVID-19 to economic collapse in both Lebanon and Syria – continue to profoundly constrain Syrian workers’ lives. Tragically, it is a sign of that ongoing danger men face that workers’ names remain hidden behind pseudonyms.

Needless to say, any oversights or mistakes in the text are mine alone. However, as a book almost a decade in the making, there are also too many people for me to thank, many of whom have helped shape the text in immeasurable ways.

Important institutions to thank include the Council for British Research in the Levant. I cannot overstate my total gratitude to Carol Palmer in Amman for giving me my first real academic job and the space needed to think through the project and transform it into a book. As an academic from a working-class background, without that first step on the ladder, I would have quickly abandoned this career path. I must also thank the British Academy for awarding me a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. When COVID-19 hit, I had to re-adjust my research plans for that award; with fieldwork rendered impossible, I concentrated instead on expanding and refining this manuscript. I must thank both the University of Bath and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) for giving me the space to write the text. I am incredibly happy in my new intellectual home at IDS and as a member of the Power & Popular Politics cluster. In these final stages, I have enjoyed a great deal of support and encouragement as a new fellow from my cluster conveners Alex Shankland and Rosie McGee.

For intellectual guidance, I could do no better than my principal doctoral supervisor, Professor Martha Mundy. Martha has taught me since I was an undergraduate at the LSE. Fiercely intelligent, she has challenged every single one of my ideas and helped reshape my work in so many ways. I thank my secondary supervisor, Mathijs Pelkmans, for his patience and for providing such thoughtful comments.

I want to also acknowledge David Graeber here, who we tragically lost last year. David was not only a political comrade, but he also acted as my mock reviewer when this book began its life as a doctoral project. That process led to me exploring many of his ideas, which took the chapters that follow in all manner of interesting avenues.

Moving back to 2010, I was still planning on fieldwork in Damascus. For this reason, I cannot overstate my gratitude to the people who eased my introduction to Lebanon. I was collected from the airport by Gustavo Barbosa, and I was his guest for several weeks while I found my feet.

When studying Arabic, my fellow classmate, Miriam Stock, provided invaluable conversations that helped reformulate my research. Without Mohammad Hosso I would have likely not felt myself at home in Beirut, and my research would have taken even longer to begin. I am thankful also for the support offered by the American University of Beirut.

I wrote this text between Lebanon and Britain; elements have been informed by my conversations and support in both cities. In Beirut, I must thank, in no particular order: Olivia Alabaster, Nader Atassi, Rita Issa, Pete Targe, Sophie Rimington-Pounder, Hamed Sinno, Tory Brykalski, Safa Hamza, Michael Jerab, Ali Kadri, Daniel Neep, Ryan John Stultz, Alaa Minawi, Philip Issa, and Alison Meuse. In Britain I must thank, again in no order: Emily Fu, Henry Lodge, Danny McNally, Maev McDaid, Sarah Jaffe, Peter Adams, Olivia Herbert, Duncan Crystal, Charlotte Gerada, Ashok Kumar, Daniel Oldfield, Meadhbh McIvor, Fuad Musallem, Agustin Diz, Andrea Enrico Pia, Natalia Buitron, Susannah Crockford, Katherine Fletcher, Julia Huang, Mark Stanford, Christopher Martin, and Fernande Pool. I also thank all staff and colleagues at the LSE.

Finally, the most important note of gratitude must go to Mahdi Zaidan, who has read countless copies of this manuscript, and exercised the extreme patience such a task demands. I am eternally grateful to have Mahdi in my life.

Introduction: revolution and loss

Well, I’ve still not found a new job, Abdullah says, taking a slow drag from his cigarette. It’s early winter 2015, and we’re eating chicken fajitas at a fast-food restaurant on Beirut’s seafront. Abdullah is a 26-year-old Syrian migrant labourer. He’s about 5ft 10 with a slightly protruding belly. Styling himself casually, he is wearing a hooded pullover, grey jogging bottoms, and sparkling clean trainers. His hair is neat; kept trim, it blends down into a well-maintained stubble beard. Recently, he’s begun to sprout greys. His friends mock him for it, but Abdullah puts it down to stress.

It is little wonder Abdullah is feeling the strain; in the many years I’ve known him, I’ve watched as he endures constant bouts of unemployment and navigates ongoing workplace precarity. These conditions would be challenging at the best of times, but right now his family back across the border are only just surviving, and that is only thanks to the wages he sends home as remittances. In his ancestral village, the situation has gone from bad to worse. Despite an initial tribal-led resistance movement, in summer 2014 the Salafi jihadist militant group Islamic State surged across the Iraqi border and conquered his ancestral lands.¹ His mother and sisters still live there; he worries about them every day. The war has already claimed scores of his comrades and kin.

Yet it was not so long ago that Abdullah believed victory for the Syrian revolution was just around the corner. He spent long nights telling stories that linked the misery of abusive conditions in Lebanon with his dream of a soon-to-be-realised future of freedom, dignity, and democracy. And despite everything – despite the splinters, setbacks, and even the emergence of Islamic State itself – he remains committed to the uprising’s core demand: the fall of the regime.

Also dining with us that evening by the sea is Dala, Abdullah’s new wife. She is short and wears bold make-up that highlights her sharp facial features. Tonight, she sports a bright pink hijab and matching pullover. Dala’s family are shopkeepers from Idlib, and unlike her husband, the bulk of her immediate kin has long since fled to Lebanon. The young couple fell in love a little under a year ago when, in spring 2014, they were both working at a whitegoods wholesaler in Beirut’s Southern Suburbs.

In private, Abdullah has insisted to me that their marriage, due to regional and class differences, was only possible thanks to wartime dislocation. Dala’s parents would never have approved otherwise. But now she wants more than he can offer, and he’s feeling the pressure. His wife’s family are forever compelling them to forge a life free from precarity and poverty.

Dala, for her part, refuses to accept her husband’s enduring faith in the revolution. While she was not strictly against the uprising, she’s adamant Abdullah is an idealist, stubbornly unwilling to accept today’s reality. All she wants is for the fighting to stop and a sense of meaningful life to resume.

You see! says Dala, interrupting her husband’s tale of unemployment. Lebanon can’t give him a future, no future, low wages, high costs.

Well, what should he do then, take a [smuggler’s] boat? I ask.

Yes! My cousin’s in Germany. I want him to go too – there’s nothing for him here!

But it’s illegal, how many people have died crossing? I ask.

But how many people have died in Syria? Abdullah answers. There’s lots of pressure. What can I do? Stay here for nothing, go to the village and maybe Islamic State will kill me, or get on a boat and maybe drown? I just don’t want to leave and be far from Syria; I want to go back to the village!

See, there’s no future here! says Dala, a second time.

Suddenly, a TV in the corner of the room draws our eyes. We see scenes of bloodied people running panicked from smoking buildings. Frantically, I check my phone. A twin bomb blast carried out by Islamic State had, moments earlier, exploded in a popular market area in South Beirut. It killed 43 people instantly and wounded a further 200.² The blast struck just two streets down from the young couple’s apartment, and at that moment Dala’s insistence her husband set sail for Europe seemed much less rash.

At the dawn of the Arab uprisings, Lebanon’s vast population of Syrian migrant labourers faced a lifetime of economic exile, backbreaking labour, and the constant struggle to make ends meet.³ But when news of street demonstrations began to break, many soon felt the pull of the revolution. They saw a potential escape from the grinding misery of poverty wages and the constant struggle to make ends meet. Emboldened, some even returned to join street demonstrations while others aided the armed resistance; however, even those who remained in Beirut found means to partake at a distance.

This book tells the story of those ordinary migrant workers and the extraordinary rise and fall of the Syrian uprising. This is not another text concentrating on the Middle East’s experienced activists, liberal or left-wing intelligentsia, radical Islamists, or even secular civil society organisers, for those populations have already enjoyed the lion’s share of journalistic and scholarly attention.⁴

In the opening years of the uprising, men like Abdullah were convinced mass demonstrations would lead toward a better future. So strong was that faith, even men with limited experience in oppositional politics debated the latest revolutionary developments long into the night. But whatever that effort, whatever that hope, it was not long before the revolution spiralled into a brutal civil conflict and proxy war. Abdullah, and many other men you will meet here, began to look upon a new reality of permanent dislocation and total socio-economic collapse. This book tells that story – a story of revolution and loss.

Syrian labourers in Lebanon

Eastern Syria, Abdullah’s homeland, is known in Arabic as Jazīrah – a word meaning Island, which refers here to a land set between two rivers: the Euphrates and the Tigris (Mesopotamia). These waterbodies nourished humanity’s earliest civilisations, giving rise to what archaeologists call the Neolithic Revolution.⁵ Thousands of years ago, our ancestors in Jazīrah moved from hunting and gathering to planting crops and the beginnings of state-level organisation. On that land – the birthplace of agriculture itself – Abdullah’s family grew wheat, cotton, and kept a small number of chickens. Nothing can compare, he recalls to me one evening, to the taste of a freshly grilled chicken on a warm summer’s evening. We’ll go together someday, he says, we’ll ride motorbikes, shoot rifles, and cook – you’ll love it.

Abdullah has an older brother called Basim who worked in Beirut for several years before his arrival. In early 2010, Basim arranged for his younger brother’s first trip across the border, even managing to wrangle him some work on a construction site.

Abdullah’s memories of that time are unpleasant. After lugging building materials, he slept in a breezeblock shack built below the construction site. He did not want to disappoint his brother, but he found the physical demands of labour crushing.

Beirut itself was a shock to the system. Cramped living, tasteless bread, and dirty air, he tells me, reminiscing about that time. After just two weeks he threw in the towel. I hadn’t gotten used to that type of work yet, he concludes.

Nevertheless, for decades vast numbers of Syrian labourers performed exactly that type of work.⁶ In the 1990s, some estimates suggest as many as 1.4 million migrants were taking part in Lebanon’s post-civil war construction boom.⁷ By the early 2000s, that number scaled back to 400,000.⁸ Even at that point, remittance flows from Lebanon comprised around 8 per cent of Syrian GDP.⁹ Workers held a variety of low-paid jobs; however, their meagre wages stretched further back home thanks to a series of controls over the economy that kept prices in check and a comprehensive welfare system eased the cost of social reproduction.¹⁰

Despite a substantial flow of migrants across the border, no permanent diaspora ever took hold in Lebanon.¹¹ This is noteworthy because neither Beirut nor Damascus sought to erect any legal barrier to settlement. On the contrary, labourers were free to travel around the country and seek jobs wherever they emerged.¹² Migrants crossed the border under a bilateral agreement forged during Syria’s military occupation of Lebanon, stipulating reciprocal freedom of movement, residence, and property ownership.¹³ It was also perfectly legal for men to bring their wives and children, where broad cultural and linguistic overlaps ought to have eased integration. Nevertheless, workers still almost universally returned to their ancestral villages.¹⁴

The most substantial restriction to diaspora formation was Lebanon’s exorbitant prices, where nearly all Lebanese welfare services are privatised, run along sectarian lines, or exceedingly expensive.¹⁵ In response, workers strove to reduce their outgoings and maximise savings. For months at a time, men bunked together in temporary shacks or rented digs in overcrowded apartments – often with five to six per room.¹⁶ Meanwhile, they off-shored social costs to Syria, where healthcare, education, housing, hospitality, and leisure remained either free, subsidised, or substantially cheaper.¹⁷ This crystallised into a structural arrangement where migrant labourers consented to wages otherwise inadequate for a Lebanese worker from the same social class. Or, as the historical sociologist John Chalcraft, puts it:

Male workers who can bear the humiliation of dirty clothes and slum living, who can conveniently return to Syria for medicine and treatment, and who do not have any dependants in Lebanon to educate or otherwise take care of, and whose ties of reciprocity and hospitality are limited, can accept, at least temporarily, living in a kind of social exile in Lebanon.¹⁸

Thanks to this mixture of coercion and consent, Lebanese employers enjoyed a supply of cheap, pliable workers. Even where we might say migrants consented to indignities across the border, they did so with an eye on a better future back home. These ambitions were not necessarily unrealistic.¹⁹ Unlike much of the Arab World, [Syrian] village communities continued to be viable,²⁰ and no mega-slums filled with dispossessed smallholders and agricultural labourers encircled Damascus.²¹ From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, the ruling Syrian Ba’ath party enacted policies that protected rural smallholders’ livelihoods.²² Such measures included guaranteed crop pricing as well as subsidised fertiliser, fuel, and seeds.²³ With an agricultural economy more-or-less viable, male workers abroad provided a flow of remittances that addressed moments of intermittent downturn, helped start small business ventures, and paid for weddings, bridewealth, family homes, and the like.

As I detail in Chapter 5, these economic protections also contributed to the reproduction of a patriarchal social order which saw these male migrants marry, assume positions as heads of household, and look on as their sons followed in their footsteps.²⁴ But then, in the mid-2000s, that pattern began to transform. Under local and global pressure for market openness, President Bashar al-Assad intensified new austerity measures and neoliberal economic reforms.²⁵

Before we start detailing how those transformations impacted the lives and political commitments of migrant labourers, it is vital to narrow down exactly what I mean here by neoliberalism. Like many conceptual words used by academics, neoliberalism is often so stretched in meaning that it can appear somewhat conceptually vague and so broad in meaning that it lacks analytic purchase. Nevertheless, provided we adopt a processual understanding of the term, I think the concept is still worthwhile. Following the geographer David Harvey’s work, I conceptualise neoliberalism not as a necessary set of economic policies but as a project of elite enrichment.²⁶ Indeed, for Harvey, the neoliberal project, wherever it emerges, has but one unifying objective: to curb the power of labour and consolidate ruling-class power.²⁷ While the exact trajectory such a process takes and what forms of resistance it engenders depends on underlying socio-political and economic contexts, the neoliberal project always entails that everything should be done to … allow market principles to permeate all aspects of life.²⁸ It is an attempt, in short, by capital to eradicate any victories won by organised labour or progressive governments.

Harvey’s processual framing overcomes a particular Eurocentric bias that limits neoliberalism to policies developed in the Global North, where its advocates argued for the dismantling of high taxes, a welfare system, and financial regulations.²⁹ By contrast, in the Global South, neoliberals set their sights on third-world socialisms: post-colonial governments that prioritised – though to highly varying degrees of success – state-led economic development, import substitution industrialisation, and nationalisation.³⁰

Neoliberalism’s cheerleaders are unlikely to admit they want to restore ruling class power. Instead, they are more likely to wax lyrically about the hidden hand of the market, or the need to enhance efficiency, while also conjuring a semi-magical image of wealth trickling down. But whatever that rhetoric, it is a simple empirical fact that the neoliberal project has, especially across the Global South, nearly always enhanced income inequality, enriched and empowered the ruling-class, and produced a whole range of anti-poor outcomes.³¹

On this front, Syria is no exception.³² As I will detail in Chapter 1, the current president’s father, Hafiz al-Assad, first set the country on its path towards liberalisation (in Arabic, infitah; opening-up).³³ In the 1980s, the country faced several political and economic challenges at once: this included the fall of the Soviet Union, the drying-up of external revenues from Gulf states, and a failure to provide competitive exports.³⁴ In a bid to jump-start the faltering economy, Hafiz al-Assad relinquished control over specific sectors. By contrast, his son, Bashar al-Assad, for a variety of reasons explored in Chapter 1, pushed economic liberalisation much harder and much faster, even if that meant ripping apart the remaining threads of Syria’s welfare safety nets, thereby breaking the party’s social contract with rural populations and the working class. The regime jettisoned