Salwa Ismail, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
With the fall of the Asad regime in December 2024, the centrality of violence to its modes of governing came into full view once again. The breaking open of Sednaya prison and other places of political internment, along with the large-scale public search for the disappeared, brought to focus practices of imprisonment, torture and extra-judicial killings conducted on a wide scale during the 2011-2024 war between the regime and its opposition (both armed and unarmed). Key questions, here, concern the excess of violence in the Syrian regime’s practices of killing and punishment: What accounts for this scale and level of violence? What are the rationalities, objectives and effects of this violence? What work is performed by this violence?
In this paper, I revisit aspects of my work on the politics of governing through violence to reflect further on the logics, mechanics and constitutive effects of governmental violence in Syria (Ismail 2018). This revisiting is concerned with dimensions of the ontological function of specific practices of violence, namely horror forms of violence. These forms of violence target the singularity and uniqueness of the human being. It is in this sense that violence can be said to have an ontological function. In considering violence in these terms, I draw on Adriana Cavarero’s (2011) theorisation of horror and on its exploration by François Debrix and Alexander Barder (2012). My aim in this discussion is twofold. First, I seek to broaden the outlook on horror violence beyond a body-centred conceptualisation with a view to integrating violence that assaults the individual’s sense of self. Violence in the horror mode, as conceptualised by Cavarero, indexes assaults on the body that undermine its figural unity. In tandem with body-centred horror violence, practices of violence that target the human sense of self are also an assault on the subject’s ontological dignity. Second, I seek to advance a socially grounded understanding of the ontology of human dignity as opposed to an understanding of human dignity as existing prior to the social.
This paper is presented as a set of reflections on modalities of violence and their ontological effects. In the first section, consideration is given to the ways in which horror forms of violence assault human dignity. The two subsequent sections discuss modalities of Syrian regime violence that disabled life and produced domains of abjection. In the last two sections, attention is directed to the ethical challenges and responsibilities presented by the visibilisation of violence first during the Uprising, and then in the aftermath of the fall of the regime.
Violence and the Ontology of Humanness
Cavarero premises her conceptualisation of horror forms of violence on the idea that core to the ontological human condition is the upholding of the dignity of the body. Cavarero posits that a distinguishing feature of horror forms of violence is that they target the figural unity of the body and have as an effect the negation of bodily integrity and of human dignity. As such, body-undoing violence constitutes an assault on the ontological dignity of the body in its very being as a singular body (Cavarero 2011, 8). Cavarero argues that death or the termination of life, in itself, does not offend the dignity of the body, as its figural unity is preserved until burial. However, what offends the dignity of the body and incites horror “[…] is the spectacle of disfigurement which the singular body cannot bear” (Ibid.). Through the assault on the body, horror violence produces the non-human, rendering the human body into unrecognisable matter, indistinguishable from the non-human. “Horrorism”, in Cavarero’s usage, indexes violence that dismantles human existence by breaking up the body into pieces, crushing it, and thereby effacing the uniqueness that makes it recognisable.
Cavarero’s body-centred account of horror violence is, however, circumscribed in its analytical purchase by virtue of leaving out other forms of horror violence. Analytics of horror violence should extend beyond acts of violence that target bodily integrity to include acts of violence that target the human subject’s sense of self and thus undermine their human dignity. The subject’s ability to maintain their sense of self is a necessary condition of preserving ontological dignity. Forms of violence that render the subject abject by fracturing their sense of self have as primary aim the negation of the subject’s humanness. As a frame to examine practices and mechanisms that target the sense of being human, the ontology of humanness must take account of violence that makes the subject abject. Further, this ontology of humanness should be approached as social in the terms elaborated by Judith Butler. Butler’s social ontology of life and the body is premised on an understanding of ontology not as referencing a fundamental structure that pre-exists reality, but as the product of social processes and relations that are constitutive of beings and entities (Butler, 2016, 2). As put by Butler (2016, 3): “It is not possible to first define the ontology of the body and then to refer to the social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology”.
Butler’s social ontology of the body underscores that one’s life is not exclusively one’s own but dependent on others. As human beings, we are always constituted through the relations of dependence we have with others. Ontological dignity is attached to the socially constituted body and to the self as a living being—a being who is formed in and through a lived life. The ontology of human dignity is social to the extent that the sense of self develops in relations with others and that its preservation and protection from injury depends on others. In a similar manner to the horror that results from the assault on the singularity of the body, a manifestation of horror violence is instanced in the assault on the human being’s sense of self through acts that unmake it by, for example, breaking the respect and consideration attached to it as a self.
Violence in Excess: Killing that Overshoots its Target
In its crushing response to the 2011 Uprising and in its mounting of a generalised war that extended beyond the opposition to encompass the broader society, the Syrian regime’s violence corresponded, to some extent, to what Debrix and Barder (2012), drawing on Hannah Arendt, termed “agonal sovereignty”. In Debrix and Barder’s (2012, 23) elaboration of the term, “agonal sovereignty” refers to “a form of confrontation, an antagonism that, for good or bad, pits bodies against one another or bodies against structures (or apparatuses, or indeed machines—including war machines), often in a violent and brutal fashion, but, in apparent contrast with Arendt’s intended meaning of agony, without any hope of reconstruction or consolidation of a political community”. Debrix and Barder’s explorations of agonal violence move beyond biopolitical accounts of violence so as to enable a reading of forms of violence that are devoid of the logics of life.
Taking up Debrix and Barder’s (2012) suggestion to extend examinations of violence beyond biopolitical rationalities, I explore below the excess in violence and destruction witnessed in the Syrian war. It is important to note that the point here is not to discount biopolitical rationalities, but rather to take note of forms of violence that do not have as an objective the preservation of some life at the expense of some other, even when the agents of violence (whether rulers or rebels), in their discourse, make declarations asserting that their acts of violence are necessary for the protection of certain lives or of a way of life.
Excess in violence and destruction was a defining feature of the Syrian regime’s response to the 2011 Uprising. In its drive to uproot the opposition, the regime conducted sieges of city neighbourhoods, towns and villages, which escalated to food blockades and the cutting of water and electricity supply in places where armed rebels were present. Military campaigns featured shelling of inhabited areas across the Syrian territory and resulted in the razing to the ground of entire residential neighbourhoods, towns and villages. The scope of devastation to the built environment and the mass scale of killing totalling hundreds of thousands are indicative of destruction as method.
Using the term “massacre” in its broad sense to mean all instances of large-scale killing, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) documented thousands of massacres committed by the regime and security agents, the pro-regime paramilitary groups, the armed opposition and the Islamist Jihadist militias, and, at a later stage, by international actors, primarily the Russian military, and the International Alliance led by the United States. The SNHR collated information on 516 massacres in 2015 alone, and, for the period between March 2011 and December 2015, it reported that over 250,000 Syrians were murdered in massacre-type operations and incidents (SNHR 2015a & b). The SNHR attributed the majority of the massacres to the regime and its armed supporters.
Excess in killing is not just a question of numbers. Rather, it also manifests in “a killing that overshoots the elementary goal of taking a life and dedicates itself instead to destroying the living being as a singular body” (Cavarero 2011, 12). In the Syrian war, this “killing that overshoots its goal” can be discerned from the accounts of massacres perpetrated by pro-regime militias and by some factions of the armed opposition (as seen in well-documented and high-profile massacres such as the 2013 al-Bayda massacre, the 2012 Houla massacre, and the 2012 Latakiyya Countryside massacres). Exceeding the objective of taking life, recurrent patterns in acts of killing in these massacres reveal assaults that aimed to disfigure and undermine bodily integrity. A 2013 Human Rights Watch report on the al-Bayda massacre reported a repeated pattern of killing by shooting the victim in the eye(s).[1] In other acts of killing, the attackers made use of knives and cleavers to manipulate the victims’ bodies and cause severe bodily mutilation. One survivor of the massacre, Um Mohammad, recounted stepping outside her home and witnessing men and children being led to the square. She saw the son of her neighbour, a fourteen-year-old boy, named Loqman al-Hirs, being slaughtered. In her account, the boy was held-down by militiamen, while one of them cut off his head (Channel 4 News (2013), cited in Ismail 2018, 177).
The state of the bodies, as depicted in survivors’ accounts in the aftermath of the massacre, attests to the fact that methods of killing involved dismemberment and disfigurement. Um Mohammad observed: “many had their body parts fall. We picked up afterwards. So many parts, we did not know which part belonged to whom (ma bin’araf had limin wa hada limin)” (Ibid). It was only by noticing a distinctive scar on a finger that she was able to recognise her son among the killed. Another survivor described the disfigurement of her murdered husband: “there was nothing left on my husband’s face apart from his mouth and nose. It was hideous” (see BBC 2013).
The scenes of horror depicted for the al-Bayda massacre were not an aberration in the conduct of the war. Instead, they capture a systematic pattern of body-undoing violence that occurred in many other massacres. Cavarero’s analytics of horror brings attention to aspects of the performative dimension of these forms of violence, specifically the ontological work they perform on human dignity. There is a need, however, to extend the performative analysis of horror to account for how enactments of violence establish conditions of rule, and shape understandings of relations between rulers and ruled (see Ismail 2018). Further, integral to the performances of violence are the substantialisation of vulnerabilities, which are differentially allocated (see Butler 2016). To apprehend this aspect of the performativity of violence, consideration must be given to the broader constellations of discourses and practices that enable the production of some bodies as violable.
Domains of Abjection: Unmaking the Human
Building on Achille Mbembe’s (2003) articulation of necropolitics to denote “forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” as a frame for understanding forms of modern sovereignty, Banu Bargu (2019, 5) draws attention to forms of political violence that “take life in its fold, not only by inflicting death but also by actively undermining, disabling, displacing forms of life that create living deaths that are unprecedented”.
Modalities of violence that disable and undermine life are readily captured in the apparatus of the camp or political prison. The political prison was a primary site for the localisation of practices of violence that have as target the subject’s sense of self. However, these practices extended beyond the prison and can be characterised as virtual— that is, as having the potential to happen anywhere and effectively materialising across many different sites (on the street, on public transport, in schools, places of work, and more). Scenes of assault on ordinary citizens’ human dignity manifested in the everyday and incited feelings of abjection.
In the production of a domain of abjection, the detention centre presents a paradigmatic site of processes and practices that rendered subjects abject. Tadmur and Sednaya prisons were the exemplars under Hafez al-Asad and Bashar al-Asad respectively. The diaries of political prisoners from the Hafez al-Asad period present us with a vast catalogue of practices of violence centred on humiliation and abjection of the political prisoner.[2] Considered in terms of their objectives, effects, and the thinking orienting them, these practices bear out a particular rationality: they approach the subject as both thinking and feeling and aim to generate feelings of humiliation and abjection, and, thus, undermine their sense of self.
In fictionalised narratives and personal testimonies of the prison experience, we encounter scenes of horror wherein prisoners are subjected to acts that shatter the self beyond the possibility of reconstitution, nullifying humanity with no prospect of recovery. Illustrative of the assault on the human self are practices that break the prisoners’ bodily borders and force self-pollution and contamination. In a number of memoirs and fictionalised accounts, a recurrent motif is that of prisoners being forced to eat food contaminated with spit, urine, vermin and the like. Of the many repulsive acts that prisoners were forced to undergo is that of swallowing another’s spit (what could be called “the assault of spit”). In his fictionalised account of the detention experience, former political prisoner and novelist Mustafa Khalifa (2008) narrates a troubling incident of the assault of spit. In Khalifa’s account, the assault shattered the person beyond a possibility of ever being able to recover their personhood. In a memoir of his political imprisonment, Aram Karabit (2010) describes his harrowing experience of being forced to participate in the assault of spit. The iteration of these acts and the shared affective conditions they establish should be understood in terms of the ontological work they operate on the subject, specifically their effecting a fracture in the subject’s sense of self.
The narrative of the assault of bodily fluids conveys the kind of battering directed at the human spirit. The assault incites feelings of humiliation and estrangement from one’s body as it becomes indelibly soiled. In his prison diaries, Ratib Sha’bo (2014, 244) reflects on the lines and borders distinguishing the human from the animal, expressing his anguish that, in Tadmur, these lines and borders were absent. In his reflections, he expresses a fear of acts that force a human’s reversion to a state of animality: “I could not protect myself from the fear that the designers of these tortures and the innovators of counter-humanity would deprive the human of his sense of physiological humanity”. In his apprehensions he conjures a scenario of further debasement, wherein a prisoner is made immobile and forced to meet his physiological needs of expelling bodily waste at the spot of his enchainment. Contemplating this potential circumstance, he asks: “when confronted with the unrestrained imagination of liquidation and not just debasement and humiliation, which is more extreme: liquidation or reversion to animality?”. Sha’bo’s reflections convey the menace of being forced into acts of self-debasement and the attendant threat of nullifying the human self.[3]
Figures for the numbers of arrests made following the outbreak of the Uprising confirm that detention continued to be a regime practice of dealing with opposition. In the very early days of the Uprising, security personnel rounded up activists, protestors, and dissident figures and put them in various detention facilities. To accommodate the scope of arrests, makeshift detention centres in schools and public buildings were created. What is more, the punishment and torture practices applied to detainees remained the same as those documented in the Hafez al-Asad period, albeit with variation in the intensity of their relative use, and the notable introduction of new instruments of torture. A report published in November 2019 by the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) details practices of torture, humiliation and degradation. Former detainees in Sednaya spoke of “the reception party” (in reference to a ritualised mode of mistreatment and humiliation of new detainees), the use of “the German Chair”, being forced into stress positions and the like. According to the ADMSP Report, methods of corporal punishment and torture included beating with sticks and batons, whipping (with cables), “the wheel” (car tire into which the detainee’s body is looped, with the legs and feet hanging upward to receive beating). All of these instruments of torture were used in Tadmur Prison. Additionally, large-scale killing and massacres were committed in Sednaya. By some accounts 13,000 persons were murdered in that prison alone.
Violence and the Staging of the People in the 2011 Uprising
In response to the 2011 Uprising, the Syrian regime unleashed its war machine against the population. The immediate use of violence to crush the protests in Dar’a and, subsequently, to lay siege to cities, towns and villages brought war onto the surface. The relationship of war at the foundation of the state/regime, exemplified by the 1982 Hama events, became visible once again.[4] In a context marked by governmental violence, the Uprising unfolded as a staging of the people made possible by the visibilisation of their vulnerability to one another.[5] This visibility enjoined ordinary Syrians to rise. It placed individuals as witnesses to another’s suffering and conferred a responsibility as a human to relieve the suffering. Activists and participants in the Uprising, whom I interviewed, identified, as one driver of their action, the objective of relieving Dar’a and other areas under attack from regime forces. Lama, one of my interviewees, who was displaced to Lebanon from Qusayr, described her rising as a demand and a requirement of being human. In her account of why she and her family joined the Uprising, she explained that had they not risen, they would not count as human beings (Interview Shtura 2015, cited in Ismail 2018, 202).
The visibilisation of violence targeting both the integrity of the body and the sense of self occurred in the very early days of the Uprising. Particular public acts of body-centred violation, committed by the security forces and other regime agents, incited ordinary people to protest as a way of declaring their refusal of this violence. Emblems of this visibilisation were images of the body of fourteen-year-old Hamzeh al-Khatib. The images showed his face and body swollen, severely bruised and scarred. Alongside the images, there were reports that certain of the young boy’s body organs had been excised. Also emblematic of this visibilisation was the footage of men from al-Bayda who were made to lie face down on the ground in the public square, while regime soldiers stepped on their bodies, stomped and bounced on their backs, and kicked them with their boots.
The images and footage of violence targeting the body’s integrity and the sense of self marked turning points for vast segments of Syrians who were positioned as bystanders and distant witnesses. In my interviews with activists and ordinary citizens who participated in the Uprising, they identified seeing these images as decisive moments in the turn they took to join the protests. The visibility of violence suffered demands a response. The assault on human dignity, once recognised as such, enjoins action. The humanity of the human being plays out in response to the suffering, harm, and damage done to vulnerable others. One activist from Salamiyya city, in the Hama Governorate, relayed to me deliberations among members of his family and among neighbours about what to do if children in Dar’a were being shelled, and their interrogation of what reason there could be for them not to act, that is, not to join the protest and oppose the regime (Interview Amman 2022).
In its response to the Uprising, the Asad regime mounted a war on society. In its conduct of this war, Ratib Sha’bo (2021) notes that the regime crossed a threshold of no return. As a consequence, it was no longer possible for it to reconcile with those it sought to govern. What marks this threshold, I suggest, is the visibilisation of horror: the assault on human dignity was made manifest. In some of its facets, the Uprising represented an insurrection in defence of humanness. Syrians participated in collective action in the recognition that the vulnerability of others placed on them a responsibility to act, but also that this vulnerability is ultimately a shared condition.
The Challenge of Human Vulnerability After the Fall of the Regime
With the fall of the regime, the lives of its supporters, loyalists, and all those placed as being on its side, in one way or another, have become exposed to threats of destruction, which find justification in claims of justice, retribution, and revenge. The historical conflation of the regime and the Alawi community has placed the community’s members in a position of vulnerability. In the post-Asad juncture, there is a risk that the conflict with “the remnants of the regime” will be transformed into a war against the Alawi community. Incidents of communal violence in the coastal region, beginning in early 2025, confront Syrians, following Butler’s (2016) account of human vulnerability and precariousness, with the ethical challenge of how to stage humanness—how to intervene at a given moment to recognise the vulnerability of others.
Contests over humanness are being waged in Syrians’ responses to the assault on Alawis in the coastal region and the sectarian killings and massacres that began on 6 March of 2025.[6] With the Alawi community being mapped on to the Asad regime in the discourse of some, the violence aimed at members of the community is given justification by reference to a presumed allegiance to the regime and implication in its war. In some narratives and constructions of the conflict with the regime, the Alawi community is charged with complicity with the regime and with responsibility for regime atrocities. These narratives and constructions are mobilised as ground for exclusion of the Alawis, individually and collectively, from the body politic and for their elimination, making Alawi bodies violable and thus legitimate targets of violence. The violence in the coastal region connects with regime violence and could potentially extend the civil war regime as a frame of rule established under the Asads’ rule. The challenge that the fall of the regime and the ensuing rearrangement in relations of power and violence poses to Syrians is how to make intelligible the vulnerability of other Syrians who are cast as their adversaries. This challenge, by necessity, requires that Syrians envision forms of humanness that transcend the political fault lines that divide them into “us and them”, whether they be mapped out along sectarian, political or ideological lines.
References:
Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP). 2019. Detention in Sednaya: Report on the Procedures and Consequences of Political Imprisonment. November. https://www.admsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/sydnaia-en-final-November-s-11-07-2019.pdf
Bargu, Banu. 2019. “Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Notes Towards an Investigation,” In Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence and Resistance, ed. Banu Bargu. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1-22.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). 2013. “Syrian Activists Document al-Bayda and Baniyas ‘Massacre’”. 28 May. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-22684359
Butler, Judith. 2016. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Cavarero, Adriana. 2011. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Translated by William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press.
Channel 4 News. 2013. Al-Bayda: Anatomy of a War Crime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=29&v=sp22U837O5g
Debrix, François, and Barder, Alexander D. 2012. Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics. Routledge.
Human Rights Watch. 2013. “No One’s Left”: Summary Executions by Syrian Security Forces in al-Bayda and Baniyas. Human Rights Watch. September.
Ismail, Salwa. 2018. The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Karabit, Aram. 2010. Rihlat ila al-Majhul: Yawmiyati fi al-Sujun al-Suriyya (A Journey to the Unknown: My Diaries in Syrian Prisons), Dar Mada lil-Nashr.
Khalifa, Mustafa. 2008. Al-Qawqa’ah (The Shell), Beirut: Dar al-Adab.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics,” translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, 1: 11-40.
Rancière, Jacques. 2011. Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso.
Sha’bo, Ratib. 2021. “Nizam Harb ‘ala al-Mujtama’” (A Regime of War on Society). Harmoon Centre for Contemporary Studies. 3 February. https://www.harmoon.org/?p=18496
——–. 2015. Madha Wara’ hadhi al-Judran? (What lies behind these walls?), Beirut: Dar al-Adab.
Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR). 2015a. Ma la Yaqil ‘an 516 Majzara fi ‘am 2015 wa 55 Majzara fi Kanun al-Awal (Not Less than 516 Massacres in 2015 and 55 Massacres in December). Available at: www.sn4hr.org.
——–. 2015b. Hasad Arba’ Sanawat l-Abraz al-Majazir fi Suriyya (Four-Year Census of the Most Notable Massacres in Syria). Available at: www.sn4hr.org.
[1] The account of the al-Bayda massacre is drawn from Ismail 2018, 176-177. The killings began when security forces and allied militia raided one of the homes hiding three defectors from the Syrian military. Then, according to a Human Rights Watch report (2013, 1), the forces and militias “entered homes, separated men from women, rounded up the men of each neighbourhood in one spot, and executed them by shooting them at close range”. Besides the men, 23 women and 14 children were reportedly killed. In one case, at least 25 bodies were piled into in a mobile-phone store and set on fire. Shooting in the eyes appears to be a figural message of breaking the body and the spirit (as in the figurative idiomatic description of “kasr al-ayn” used to denote taming).
[2] The following discussion of the prison diaries is drawn from Ismail 2018, 49-50.
[3] This paragraph is drawn from Ismail 2018, 50-51.
[4] The events of Hama unfolded with the regime’s bid to uproot the Islamist insurgency active in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Toward this objective, as seen during the 2011 Uprising, a war was mounted not only against the militants, but also against populations thought of as supportive or sympathetic to them. Thus between 1980 and 1982, military security campaigns were mounted against the cities of Aleppo, Idlib and Hama, culminating in a four-week assault on Hama wherein between 10 and 30 thousand civilians were killed and entire city neighbourhoods were obliterated. In this assault, Hama was put under siege, bombarded from the air, and subjected to a ground military deployment in its streets and markets. It is estimated that the number of Hama-based insurgents was somewhere between 200 and 1000.
[5] My use of “staging the people” is drawn from Jacques Rancière’s (2011) work and gestures towards his analysis of political and public staging as constitutive of political actors.
[6] The sectarian killings in the coastal region were sparked by an ambush attack on a public security patrol. Leading this attack were a military general and armed men with affiliation to the Asad regime. In a retaliatory response, armed factions and civilians, who are at least nominally within the orbit of the “transition regime”, carried out murderous raids on Alawi villages, killing unarmed residents. Alongside this sectarian killing, fighting between various armed groups with conflicting political alignments broke out.