Legacies of war: Syrian narratives of conflict and visions of peace
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/00108367211032691 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367211032691
Cooperation and Conflict
2022, Vol. 57(1) 43 –64
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367211032691
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Legacies of war: Syrian
narratives of conflict and
visions of peace
Kathrin Bachleitner
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Legacy of war, memory, narratives of conflict, social trauma, societal belonging, Syria
Introduction
To remember a conflict is to re-member the group.1 This insight taken from the interdis-
ciplinary literature on collective memory (Olick, 1999) is central to this article. Through
it, this article seeks to theorise the formation and role of legacies of war in international
relations (IR). While the IR literature so far mainly integrates legacies of war through a
top-down perspective, focusing on state-produced memories or stories by political elites
(Bachleitner, 2021; Berger, 2002, 2012; He, 2009; Khong, 1992; Khoury, 2018; Lind,
2008), this article suggests their social meaning is established from the bottom up, among
the people. With this assumption, the article builds upon the insights offered by the
Corresponding author:
Kathrin Bachleitner, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2JD, UK.
Email: kathrin.bachleitner@lmh.ox.ac.uk
1032691CAC0010.1177/00108367211032691Cooperation and ConflictBachleitner
research-article2021
Article
44 Cooperation and Conflict 57(1)
interdisciplinary ‘collective memory’ (Assmann, 2016; Gillis, 1994; Olick et al., 2011;
Olick and Robbins, 1998) and ‘social trauma’ (Alexander, 2012; Edkins, 2003) concepts,
as well as on a tiny but growing literature within IR that prioritises the individual level
when it comes to the construction of social meanings (Rumelili and Todd, 2018; Stanley
and Jackson, 2016; Todd, 2018a, 2018b).
If remembering a conflict indeed re-members the group, then we must find a link
between the memory of the conflict and the collective affected by war. To operationalise
this link, the article investigates the memory of war through people’s ‘narratives of con-
flict’. It suggests that their stories of what happened to them as a group contain a vision
of the future in-group. In other words, who belongs and who does not belong to the col-
lective forms through looking to the past. In IR, the proposition to remember a conflict is
to re-member the group thus becomes the hypothesis to socially narrate the conflict is to
construct a collective’s identity. As this article aims to show, it is this, the crucial legacy,
that war leaves on societies.
Empirically, the article tests the theorised link between war memory and group mem-
bership in the recent case of Syria. In 2011, public demonstrations against the ruling
regime of Bashar al-Assad spiralled the country into a bloody civil war that continues to
this day. With no peace agreement signed, this war’s legacy is still evolving. Yet, its
consequences are already enormous and devastating: Within the first five years of con-
flict an estimated 470,000 people were killed, 1.9 million were wounded, 5.7 million
Syrians had become refugees and 6.6 million were internally displaced (Phillips, 2017:
1). War and associated displacement cast what Slavoj Žižek (1997) pointedly called an
‘ontological crack’ into the identities of individuals and their ties with the community.
The legacy of war in such ontological terms, that is, in the minds of the affected Syrian
people and their ties of collective belonging to a society that has been torn apart by war,
has so far received little to no research attention within the political sciences and IR
literature.2
To dig into this side of the legacy of the Syrian war, 200 Syrians were interviewed
online through surveys. In applying its theoretical framework, the empirical analysis of
the collected data aimed at gaining insights into how ordinary Syrians view their in-
group and construct their own ties of belonging with it through their narratives of the
ongoing conflict. Via a qualitative content and a follow-up quantitative statistical analy-
sis of the data, the empirical study thus attempts to gauge the meaning of ‘Syrianness’
that emerges from individuals’ narrative of the conflict: Who – based on these stories –
belongs to their envisioned in-group, and who does not? Moreover, do Syrians’ narra-
tives of conflict indeed construct a new Syrian ‘we’?
With this, the article’s contribution is to point the way towards a novel, practically
viable and replicable bottom-up approach towards social identity constructions amid war
for the IR literature and the scholarship on the Syrian conflict. Both have to date mainly
explored ‘group identities and war’ from a top-down perspective, focusing on the moti-
vations of elites and their manipulation of social identities (particularly, ethnic and sec-
tarian ties) (for general IR work, see: Checkel, 2017; Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Kalyvas,
2000; Mueller, 2000; Wimmer, 2013; for work on Syria, see: Abboud, 2016; Hokayem,
2017; Lesch, 2013; Phillips, 2017). Building on these, but going beyond them, this arti-
cle aims to gain new and different insights through a bottom-up perspective. However,
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