Product details
- ISBN 9781649035226
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Aug 2026
- Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Gripping accounts of how ordinary Syrians strove to survive the hardships that preceded the Assad regime’s collapse
Activists striving in the shadow of Syria’s police state; widows launching small businesses to feed their families; farmers tending fields battered by destruction, pollution, and drought: their voices are as central to Syria’s conflict as they are absent from most discussions of it. Drawing on more than three thousand interviews between 2017 and 2024, Syrians in the Shadow of War explores how ordinary people began picking up the pieces as battle lines froze and global interest in Syria waned. It documents the social and economic decay that preceded the Syrian regime’s spectacular collapse: the hollowing out of public services and productive industries, the disintegration of social ties, the trauma of a war seemingly without end. Equally important, it captures the resourcefulness through which Syrians helped one another survive, and which will prove vital in the uncertain stage ahead.
This book is itself a testament to such tenacity: born of on-the-ground fieldwork by Syrian analysts in one of the world’s most forbidding research environments, thesefindings concern anyone with a stake in Syria’s future or that of other post-conflict societies—from grassroots organizers to international policymakers.
Contributors:
Lina Ghoutouk, researcher and human rights practitioner, Damascus, Syria
Lina Omran, graduate student, Danube University Krems, Austria
Malak al-Shanawani, researcher, filmmaker, and feminist activist, Damascus, Syria
Manar al-Tizini, psychologist and social researcher, Marseille, France
Alex Simon (Edited by) is a researcher, writer, and co-founder of Synaps, a Beirut-based research and training center that conducts intensive fieldwork on socioeconomic trends in the Middle East and broader Mediterranean. From 2017 to 2024, he coordinated Synaps’s team of Syrian researchers working across Syria and neighboring countries. His current research focuses on human mobility, environmental stress, and transnational economic interdependence. He holds a Bachelor’s from Princeton University and an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Matthieu Rey (Afterword by) is a CNRS researcher specializing in contemporary Middle Eastern history, with a special focus on Syria’s and Iraq’s political systems and formerly director of contemporary studies at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO), Beirut. He is also an associate researcher at the Collège de France and the Wits History Workshop. He is the author of When Parliaments Ruled the Middle East: Iraq and Syria, 1946–63 (AUC Press, 2022).
Peter Harling (Afterword by) is the founder and director of Synaps. He has lived and worked in the Arab world since 1998. He first visited Syria that year, and was based in Damascus between 2006 and 2014. He advised Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi in their attempts to launch a peace process in Syria.
