Through her research on Syria, SOAS, University of London Professor Salwa Ismail argues that violence needs to be understood as a deliberate method of rule.  Author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, Ismail cautions us not to reduce regimes that perpetrate heinous human rights violations to despotic, backward, cultures of aggression.  Extreme forms of violence, such as  torture or massacres, or ordinary forms of policing and surveillance, need to be understood as methods of rule aimed at dehumanizing, debilitating, and crushing the will to resist and dissent. The rule of violence has an enduring effect by using fear and terror to sear itself into the memory of its victims.  

The Ba’ath Party has ruled Syria ever since it first seized power in 1963.  Among its earliest actions, justified in terms of the need to safeguard the revolutionary goals of the party and because of the state of war with Israel, was to declare a state of emergency.  This state of emergency, which would remain in place for the next fifty years, suspended normal rights while granting government authorities extraordinary powers.  If suspected of very broadly and often vaguely defined seditious activities, citizens could be summarily arrested without charges and detained for indefinite periods of time.  Complementary laws made political forms of association illegal.  Gatherings of more than three people could be construed as a crime. It was within the context that the constitution established the Ba’ath Party’s monopoly over political power.  

Armed with a wide range of extra-legal powers the primary enemies of the Syrian state were internal more than external.  Beginning in the mid-1970s, after Hafez al-Asad seized power, communist and Marxists activists were kidnapped and disappeared.  Syrian security forces experienced a dramatic expansion with the creation of a wide range of departments to oversee political, military, and civilian life.  A network of prisons ballooned as Syrian authorities pursued a policy of mass interment.  Special paramilitary units carried out massacres in cities and villages where critics of the regime resided.  By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood and their armed offshoot, the Combatant Vanguard, topped the list of official enemies of the state.  In 1980, membership in the Muslim Brotherhood became a crime punishable by death. 

As the state ramped up its institutions of repression it is more accurate to regard Syria under Hafez al-Asad as existing in a state of perpetual civil war.  While Syrians were technically not at war with other Syrians, the government discursively divided the population into patriots and traitors, loyalists and enemies within.  The Muslim Brotherhood, which was regarded as the greatest threat to the regime, was cast as a cancer on the nation which had to be cut out and removed.  It was this sharp division of the population into the healthy and the diseased that drove the kinds of extreme forms of violence witnessed in other contexts such as Francoist Spain. 

The spectacular violence of Hama stoked fears and horrified. Meanwhile, the imposed silence meant that Hama’s horrors loomed large and the menace of more violence inhabited the landscape and its people. Thus, the people lived in anticipation of the massacre, pondering what would make one ready for it, or what could be done to avoid it or forestall it. The ghost of Hama lived on in embodied memories of humiliation – memories that were both constraining and demanding of action.  Salwa Ismail, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria. 

Perhaps the most notable example of extreme violence under the regime of Hafez al-Asad occured in the city of Hama.  The assault by government forces on the city of Hama in February 1982 was officially a response to an Islamic insurgency.  Hama was a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, membership in which had become a capital offense in 1980.  But Hama had an even older history as a site of leftist opposition to the regime.  The military assault on Hama, and the massacres that took place across the city, can be understood as a brutal lesson to the rest of the nation of the fate in store for those who opposed the regime.  

What made Hama loom even larger as a source of fear in the memory of Syrians was the ambiguity and silence that surrounded it.  There was never any official death toll, although the numbers could have been as high as 30,000.  Hama was never commemorated or incorporated into official historical accounts of the nation. The massacres at Hama were not even referred to directly by name but rather as “the events of Hama.”  It was the unspeakable horror that took place at Hama that seared it into the memory of Syrians.  The fear that the government might “do Hama again” served as a powerful and enduring means of constraining resistance and opposition to the regime.  

The Syrian prison system also functioned as a tool for reeducating dissidents and opponents of the regime.  But rather than operating along the lines of a modern correctional institution, Syrian prisons sought to break the spirit of detainees as a means of eradicating deviant thinking.  Torture, malnutrition, exposure to the elements, and array of pychological forms of humiliation and abuse were meant to strip prisoners of their humanity so dissent would become impossible.  Tadmur prison,  the most infamous of the prisons under Hafez al-Asad, processed at least 20,000 of the 100,000 prisoners incarcerated during this period.  The memoirs of former detainees are replete with recollections of bodily and psychological forms of violence inflicted on inmates—some of whom languished at Tadmur for a decade or more. 

But in this struggle over the minds and souls of the interned, prisoners devised methods of resistance that allowed them to preserve their humanity.  In some cases prisoners fashioned ordinary implements denied by the prison out of whatever was available to them.  In others, younger prisoners might volunteer for duties that exposed them to physical violence as a way of shielding older, more vulnerable detainees.  Memory functioned as an important means of retaining one’s humanity, even under the most dire circumstances.  Prisoners memorized the layout of their cells or the details of an ordinary day.  Prisoners condemned to execution left wills and donated what little they had while other prisons remembered them through funerary rites.  

Civilian life under the Asads bore many resemblances to the universe of the incarcerated.  Constant shortages of basic goods made precarity a pronounced feature of everyday life.  Syrians who recalled living through the 1980s and 1990s often explained their struggle to make ends meet and the exhaustion it entailed as the reasons why resistance to the regime was impossible.  With watchers everywhere, from baby sitters to bakery owners, it was necessary to be constantly vigilant about not saying or revealing anything compromising about oneself or others.  Developing a finely tuned interpersonal radar to detect who might be in service of the myriad state security departments became a question of survival.  

The 2011 uprising was sometimes cast as a revolution against their parents’ generation.  This was because of the powerful memories of how parents tried to discourage their children from doing anything that might ensnare them in the tentacles of the security state.  Better to blend it, or to “walk along the wall,” as the colloquial expression went, than stand out and be singled out by the authorities.  Families, and fathers in particular, were remembered as a constraining factor and an impediment to their children taking a stand against the regime.  Authoritarian fathers were blamed for reinforcing a “culture of obedience.”  

It was the resentment of the culture of fear and silence that played a major role in sparking the 2011 uprising.   But despite years of civil war and the exodus of millions of Syrians, little has changed.  The regime of Bachir al-Asad ended the state of emergency but only as a superficial concession.  The security state remains firmly in place and an even greater number of Syrians are subjected to the expansive system of prisons and detention centers.  Saydnaya Military Prison has replaced Tadmur as the state’s most infamous site of detention and violence.  The Ba’th Party continues to dominate political life.  The rule of violence remains the primary modality of the government of Syria.