Description
In 2012, US President Barack Obama had warned that any attempt by the Syrian regime to move or use its chemical weapons would constitute a ‘red line’ that would change his ‘calculus’ in the region, triggering a ‘range of contingency plans’. However, after the Syrian regime’s chemical attack on the suburb of Damascus on 21 August 2013, the US and its British and French allies ultimately decided against a full-fledged humanitarian intervention in Syria to support the opposition. While many scholars have examined the political and normative implications of Western states’ failure to intervene, and Western citizens’ protests against the possibility of an intervention, very little scholarship has investigated the position of the Syrian opposition itself on the question of humanitarianism.
In this paper, I analyse the discourse on humanitarianism of Syrian opposition intellectuals, as part of an attempt to re-introduce the silenced voices of the people whom Western states aim at liberating with humanitarian interventions. Building on Rahul Rao’s observation that resistance in the Global South is entrapped into a ‘protest dilemma’ between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism (2010), I suggest searching within Syrian opposition intellectuals’ writings and practices for the predicated condition of revolutionary protest in the Global South by engaging with what Rao describes as sensibilities, emotions and feelings underlying political thought. Specifically, I make two arguments. First, I challenge the overarching interpretation that Syrian opposition intellectuals were divided into two clear camps, the interventionists and the anti-imperialists, by suggesting an alternative reading of their writings. Although Syrian writers did decide to call for or against a Western intervention against the regime of Bashar al-’Asad, they nevertheless stood out for their potential to challenge their own positioning. Second, feelings of frustration and helplessness suggested the desire for new conceptual resources to imagine resistance, revolution and humanitarian intervention in the postcolony beyond the task of recognition of imperial encounters. In doing so, they proposed to redefine the practice of humanitarian intervention by shifting our theoretical gaze from the metropole to the periphery.
In analysing the discourse of Syrian opposition intellectuals on the 2013 aborted intervention in semi-structured interviews collected during fieldwork in Beirut and Istanbul in 2016-2017, and in their articles published in the Syrian revolutionary magazines Al-Jumhuriya, Souriatna and Tl’a’na ‘al-hurayya, I show how local actors interacted with the Western discourses and policies of humanitarian intervention by proposing new ways to think humanitarian ideology.
