СʪÃÃÊÓƵ

‘Sulayman Khalaf, Syria and the anthropology of the Middle East’
Funder: Institute of Communities and Society, СʪÃÃÊÓƵ
Duration: January 2024 - June 2024

Raqqa, the infamous capital of the so-called caliphate, still bears the brunt of terror. Syria still bears the brunt of war, displacement and economic strangulation. But Raqqa had a different history and heritage before the destruction unleashed. Syria didn’t used to be synonymous with war. The purpose of this pilot project is to collect, document and reveal these alternative histories through the life and works of the late Professor Sulayman Khalaf, who was born to a nomadic heritage in Raqqa, became the first Syrian anthropologist, and whose work have contributed immensely in the anthropology of Syria and the broader Middle East. Exploring his life and his works, this project aims to develop a digital archive and to pilot a documentary film about Sulayman Khalaf’s life, and through this, an alternative story of heritage, culture and hope in Syria.

The politics of (im)mortality: Death, time, and statelessness in the Middle East // Marlene Schäfers and Maria Kastrinou
Funder: British Academy Newton follow-up grant
Duration: May 2023 - May 2024

War keeps gnawing away at the textures of social life in the Middle East. As victims of political violence are mourned, as martyrs are celebrated, and as others leave to seek better lives abroad, death, loss, and disappearance remain at the forefront of everyday life. And yet, people in Syria, Kurdistan, and beyond keep dreaming of revolutionary change and imagine novel forms of political belonging. Building on our respective expertise working with Kurdish and Druze communities, this collaborative research project aims to shed light on the temporalities that death engenders in the context of statelessness and stalled sovereignty. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship conceptualizing death as productive of social life and political community.

The Price of Water: An immersive ethnographic collaboration
Funder: Institute of Communities and Society
Duration: -

The Price of Water is a performative portrayal of the experiences of refugees having fled their war torn country to seek what they imagine to be the ‘grace of safety’ in Europe, transitioning through a processing centre in Greece. This vivid dramatisation reflects on the roles of host and guest, good and bad refugees, the entanglements of migration and smuggling business, experienced in the two female performers’ quietly haunting recital of memories and hopes. The research and guiding concepts for this work relies on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece and in Syria, but they have wider resonances today during the current crisis of the war in Ukraine. The performance will inform a grant application on the consequences of war, exploitation and displacement through investigations of different modalities of capitalist invasion: the sudden and irreparable change of social relations and the policing/government of life..

Free from the state? Resistance and the possibilities for freedom in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights
Funder: ATHENA SWAN AWARD, СʪÃÃÊÓƵ London
Duration: January 2022 - December 2022

Can sectarianism exist without the nation-state? Can statelessness open up or inhibit the possibilities of political resistance and freedom? Critical scholarship on sectarianism in the Middle East, including my own book on sectarianism within the pre-war Syrian state, locate sectarian belonging within the contingencies and struggles of modern Middle Eastern state formation. But, contemporary crises, such as the devastating war in Syria, the socio-economic crisis in Lebanon, and the right-wing expansionism in Israel, seem to shake the foundational assumptions of states and belonging in the region. By exploring the political resistance among the stateless Syrians, who belong to the Druze sect, in the Israeli-Occupied Golan Heights, this project turns the question of sectarianism on its head. Stateless since the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights during the Six-Days War in 1967, the Syrian Druze have persevered dispossession and occupation and they continue to fight for their liberation and return to Syria. Indeed, they appear to be an example of defying sectarian stereotyping, and the contemporary widespread sectarianisation of political belonging in the region and the rise of populism among rural communities world-wide.

Lives across divides: Ethnographic stories from the Golan Heights
Funder: Druze Heritage Foundation, London
Duration: May 2021 - July 2024

The Syrian population of the Golan Heights is considered one of the world’s most vulnerable peoples as they are internationally recognized to be ‘stateless’ since the Israeli occupation of their lands in 1967, and its illegal unilateral annexation in 1981. This project aims to collect the life stories and narratives of those currently living in the occupied Golan Heights as well as refugees from the Golan Heights who now live in Europe. What is belonging to them? How do they reflect on the movement of borders, and on their own movements between different countries and different states? Do they still resist occupation, and how?

Autochthony as politics: Resistance, land and landscape in the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights
Funder: Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (www.iss.nl/erpi), ·International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS),
Duration: August 2017 - January 2018

Whereas authoritarian discourses, Israeli propaganda and imperialist interventions in the Middle East have mobilised sectarian identity rhetorics to explain conflict and divide populations, the stateless Syrian Druze population in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights have eschewed the use of any sectarian identity politics in their 50-year struggle. Could the struggle against Israeli occupation within this rural vantage on the Middle East offer new insights into the emancipatory potential of agrarian and land-based political movements?

Following the wires: sensing socio-material practices of everyday electricity supply in post-conflict Greater Beirut.
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC/ESRC Conflict call)
Duration: September 2016 - June 2018

The research explores the consequences of conflicts on electricity infrastructures in Beirut.

Sect and Statelessness: The Politics of Energy in the Druze Golan Heights
Funder: СʪÃÃÊÓƵ London
Duration: September 2015 -

How do struggles over energy resources affect religious minorities and their allegiance to contemporary States in the Middle East? This question lies at the heart of ‘Sect and statelessness’ project, which will shed new light on the intersection of energy conflict, religious minorities’ formation, and State belonging by conducting research amongst Druze minorities in the Levant, with a special focus on the Druze community of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.