Everyday experiences of the law, in Syria and beyond

[RT] I was completely brainwashed by the Baath rhetoric. When Hazef al-Assad died, I cried.

Anything to do with how satisfied you are with life, on a political level, with the laws, with governance, any sense of inequality, was very much self-censored. There was an inner voice inside you saying what was forbidden territory. Do not think about that.

When my dad told me about الاحداث, the events in Hama, he wanted me to know the difference between right and wrong. That this is a corrupt system. It is not how it should be.

[MS] During COVID-19, I was stopped at a police and army run checkpoint just outside of Melbourne in Australia. As my car was forced into a lane with no escape route, awaiting the verification of my legal identity documents by a police or army officer, I thought, this is something that happens “over there” to “others” in places where I travel to do fieldwork, like the Middle East, that I then have the privilege to leave. Checkpoints like this do not, I had felt quite sure up until then, happen “here”.

Legal consciousness is an academic term used to describe how our everyday ideas and feelings about the law, what it is and how it operates, are constantly evolving based on our lived experiences.[2] Legal consciousness therefore encompasses modes of governance, formal laws as well as the unspoken rules and values that influence and control our lives in subtle and unconscious ways. This internalised and “everyday” understanding of the law is also always evolving based on new experiences and input.[3] This could include being made aware of “the events” i.e. the massacre of between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians in Hama in 1982 directed by Hafez al-Assad and his brother Rifaat or the unnerving experience of realising how the law can be used by security services at checkpoints in Australia, or Syria.

[RT] I was one of those people that was very apprehensive when the protests across the Arab world started. The reason being that it would be much, much worse in Syria. A lot of the other protests, in Tunisia, in Egypt, were met violently and we knew that in Syria it would be worse straight away. It would be met with a deadly response from Day 1.

I tried to talk to a friend about what was going on. He looked at me like, are you trying to get me in trouble, or are you trying to get yourself in trouble and you’re too stupid to notice? Either way you’re not winning.

Despite joining the protests in the earlier months, I began to worry that I might be stopped and arrested at one of the checkpoints on the way to university in Homs. It was too dangerous to openly join the opposition movement. I remember this as a time of confusion, uncertainty and lots of questions. How long can I wait before I become more active in the revolution? What do I do if I become more active? Do I post online? And if I post online, do I use my real name or a pseudonym? Should I start covering my face when attending a protest? Or not? Why am I continuing to be so careful?

[MS] A group of five of us are supporting a Syrian family to be resettled in Australia. A fundraising event we organised raised a lot of money and there was a great outpouring of generosity from our little, overwhelmingly white, Anglo, low-to-middle-class community. After the event, I cried, and not just a few tears, either. Not to take anything away from the Syrian family we resettled, but I was thinking about all the other Syrians I had seen, met and been welcomed by across the Middle East who are no less deserving than this one family of safety, security and a home. All this generosity mediated by the law and decisions made by the Australian state.

Scholars such as Salwa Ismail and Yassin al-Haj Saleh have argued that in Syria violence is used as ‘a modality of government, ordering and structuring regime-citizen relations’.[4] In such an environment, the ‘specification of rules in the form of law is intended to promote an image of procedural fairness and to endow rules with a veneer of rightness’.[5] However, the political needs of the regime are always prioritised. This means that when applied to people’s lives, written law can be completely gutted of specificity and meaning. Violence is used legally to make sure people considered disloyal to the regime are detained at checkpoints, arrested at a protest or for posting online under the pretence that they are “terrorists” or a “security risk”.

In so-called Western democracies like Australia, if you are not Indigenous or another minority, the violent nature of the law, more often than not, sits just beyond your conscious understanding. This does not mean, however, that it is any less present and necessary. As legal theorist Robert Cover has suggested, ‘[all] legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death … A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life.’[6] Put another way, the legalised violence of the law is on display when a state’s immigration regime gets to decide which humans are worthy of refugee status and humanitarian resettlement and which are not.

It has now been well-established that violence and the law are inherently linked in all nation states.[7] This is because, ‘law rationalises (or even humanises) violence offering legitimacy, and violence establishes law, it gives it meaning and social relevance.’[8] We do not tend to think about the law’s deceitful nature very often. Perhaps this is because we have all internalised that the way the law works is necessarily legal and therefore “right”.

[RT] Alhumdulillah, Alhumdulillah! We see justice in our lifetime, and not after. I can’t even… It’s crazy. We are dancing around the kitchen. Oh my gosh. In addition to juggling two young babies, it’s a workday and I have been doing back-to-back interviews, radio and tv. Yalla, it’s crazy but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I want to watch what other Syrians are saying just to make sure we are sending a consistent message of hope but also caution. But I haven’t had time! Every time I start watching, something else happens, and obviously juggling the kids and the sleep too…

Right now, there’s so many emotions it’s hard to get started. And then when you read something or hear something, more stuff comes up.

[MS] Each week at our team meeting, we do a tour de table where everyone in our Centre shares what they have been working on. This week, when it comes to my turn, I begin to talk about what happened on 8 December and promptly burst into tears. I mean, it’s overwhelming really. I cannot really fathom it. I cry a lot these days (laughs).

While it may seem self-evident that established states are the sole entities with the ability to create and enforce the law, the reality in Syria was that during the civil war, there were numerous entities which existed physically but were not yet, or not fully, recognised as states, which also created and enforced their own version of the law. These included the Syrian Interim Government, ISIS, the Kurdish Autonomous Administration and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.[9]

We tend to assume that states like Syria or Australia rest on robust and permanent legal foundations that are legal and “right”. This deceptive suggestion of permanence disguises the contested origin of states. It also does not reckon with the fact that a state’s legal foundations have historically been, and will continue to be, challenged and uprooted.[10] This is the essence of revolution. ‘Revolution comes about because martyrs insist in the face of overwhelming force that if there is to be continuing life, it will not be on the terms of the tyrant’s law … A legal world is built only to the extent that there are commitments that place bodies on the line.’[11]

[RT] When I tried to talk to you last week, and I’m sorry, I completely forgot about the funeral of your friend, I was really struggling to process what was happening in Suweida. I think I have a bit more clarity now, but to be honest I think I just wanted someone to talk to.

I have been thinking about how our feelings shape our analysis and how that, in turn, affects which sources you look at and how you interpret events.

On the one hand, atrocities against civilians should never be normalised or be seen as collateral damage that occurred as a result of the state seeking to restore law and order. Protecting civilian lives should always be at the heart of any political or military decision. I have struggled with some Syrians’ denial that atrocities against civilians occurred in Suweida as well as the lack of empathy towards civilian casualties who happen to be from a different sect.

The other thing is that when I tell you things they are real feelings, but my thinking is constantly evolving and, I think, has become a bit more nuanced since we last spoke about this. I am conscious that when I attribute blame to a particular party I might not be being fair to other parties. And because these are such recent events lots of things are constantly coming to the surface, so I am thinking to myself: there are atrocities committed by pro-regime but there are also crimes committed by al-Hijri against civilians.

This is complicated by the fact that I haven’t had time to look into the Suweida events in detail. It’s hard to keep up with the nuance, reading long reports and detailed accounts. Some writing is biased and it takes time to go over these reports and balance it, to get to the root. For example, in the siege of Suweida, I have heard a lot of people saying there is a siege, it is just not a “siege” in the traditional sense, but others are like, no, there’s no siege, so getting a clear idea about what’s happening is very hard. This means a seemingly “simple” question like ‘is there a siege in Suweida right now or not?’, is not actually straight-forward.

And then how should we assign blame? To the current regime? I mean to the government. I can’t believe I am saying regime (laughs). I don’t think it’s a regime… yet. Hopefully it won’t be. Hopefully I won’t be speaking in such terms… but who knows, who knows.

[MS] I take your point about the private nature of your thoughts. On one side it’s a methodological question but we also have to be comfortable with what we write. For me, when I do research about what is happening in Syria at the moment, I don’t come to any conclusions. I just have more questions and more ambiguity.

Of course, as researchers, what we write today is a reflection of what we think, see and analyse, but in a week or in five years, hopefully that analysis may well be very different… and I think it should be different.

The state – whether it be the regime of Assad, the transitional government of Sharaa or the liberal democracy of Australia – uses the law to justify its own actions and even its own existence. Law cannot be detached from political systems or people’s lived experience.

But law is just one of the many competing forces that affect, construct and shape our lifeworlds. Further, law is not always or only about state law and people’s worst experiences of it. Nevertheless, our vernacular, embodied ideas about what the law is and how it operates (known in the scholarly literature as “legal consciousness”) exist even when law is seemingly absent from conscious articulations or understandings.[12]

[RT] The law in Australia is more straight-forward but it is very comprehensive and thorough. When I applied for asylum in Australia, the application, the character check, all the previous addresses you’ve been in, what you’ve done, the claims you make. It’s very extensive. It’s stressful. The quantity of work is exhausting and, in some ways, retraumatising.

There was a lot of nitpicking like why did you show your face here, but not here? Why did you use an alias here and not here? You say you wanted to protect your family but here you are showing your face? The problem is that you can’t remember why you made those decisions at the time. A lot depended on the dynamics on the ground.

Trying to substantiate some of the things you say in the statements to the government, the topic of dates itself, the exact details, what you did and how it happened, is impossible to recall. There were periods where I was moving from house to house and staying with friends, and all I knew was the name of the city. When we left Qusair, we lost my uncle first, then my dad, then my brother in the space of weeks. Witnessing all this happening before and during that time of flight makes it very blurry to me now. We were leaving through what they called the “Opening of Death”.

What helped in my case, and it was a real blessing, was that I had written articles which were extremely useful in verifying dates and times. These articles clearly show that I was an activist. But I would imagine that if I was someone that had just participated in protests, who hadn’t published these articles, it would be much harder to prove my asylum claim.

To be honest, the things I did when I went fully into the revolution are some of the proudest moments in my life. My only regret is that I did not do it from day one.

[MS] I have a deep desire to go to Syria, but I am also conscious that I don’t want to be a war-tourist. I want to go for a reason. And for some reason it doesn’t feel “enough” to go for personal reasons so instead I need to go for an academic reason. And that then brings up lots of feelings about my legitimacy to speak in this space and do work on Syria and with Syrians. It’s funny you know, when I think about going to Syria, I think about going through the checkpoint at the Nasib-Jaber or al-Ramtha crossing from Jordan and what would happen there, what kind of conversations would take place with these police who were until recently terrorists? And also, how just a few months earlier, if I had tried to go through this crossing while the regime was still in power, I would most likely be arrested.

We are not inert recipients of law’s contradictions. Who makes and what the law is one day, can change the next – as it did in Syria on 8 December 2024. And yet we have become so intoxicated by law’s images and meanings, its doctrines and priorities, that law’s ways of ordering our world seem like our own ways of ordering the world. As a consequence, law’s demands seem natural and necessary, hardly like demands at all. It is in this way that Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns have suggested that law has “colonised our souls”.[13] And, if law has indeed colonised our souls, gaining enough space between you and it, to see how it functions, its proper form, how it can potentially be undermined, is no easy feat. It is, to use a legal term, prima facie revolutionary.