【Seminar】Syrian Authoritarianism in Lebanon Through the Prism of Cross-border Abductions (1976-2005)

How does a military occupation convey shared values, belonging, and kinship to local populations without extensive official discourse? How do citizens and resistance movements contest these aspirations for intimacy beyond the battlefield? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted in Lebanon between 2011 and 2015, this talk argues that the Syrian army’s abduction of Lebanese citizens between 1976 and 2005, and their incarceration in Syria, often under the 1963 Emergency Law, served as a mechanism through which the regime advanced aspirations for territorial unity with Lebanon under modified forms of Syrian authoritarianism. Expanding the study of Syrian authoritarianism to include Lebanon—and viewing the occupation as one of its modulations—reveals Assad’s coercive rule as a set of interconnected projects rather than fragmented or decentralized state practices confined to Syria and affecting only Syrians. The talk introduces two such modulations in Lebanon.

Registration

• Registration
  Please register via the link below by Monday, July 20.
  For registration, please see here.

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Programs

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Organized by

Core Project “Field Archiving of Memory”, ILCAA, TUFS; Heiwa Nakajima Foundation Asia Research Grant “Network Formations in the Borderlands: The Case of the Iran-Iraq Borderlands”

Contact

• meis[at]aa.tufs.ac.jp