"The Ambiguities of Syria’s Reconstruction"

A video recording of this paper is available here.

Abstract: Aleppo is the story of Syria’s reconstruction so far: Token rebuilding efforts are underway in the city, but they are shrouded in propaganda and only the authorities in Damascus and their allies are involved. In Aleppo, as in other Syrian cities hardest hit by the war, Bashar al-Assad’s regime is already prioritizing what to rebuild, and what not to, and in doing so changing the meaning of reconstruction itself. It will restore symbolic sites that are considered useful for propaganda purposes but neglect the devastated stretches of the city, overwhelmingly Sunni-majority, that supported the opposition. Assad already hinted at this strategy when he told a conference in Damascus two years ago what he thought Syria had “won” in the war: “a healthier and more homogeneous society in the true sense.” Although Western governments are currently withholding reconstruction assistance in order to pressure Assad to make some of the same concessions that he has resisted over the past eight years, they may not have much leverage. The promise of Western money for reconstruction may not appeal to the regime if rebuilding all of Syria isn’t really its goal.

Biography: Frederick Deknatel is the managing editor of World Politics Review, an online source of news and analysis on global affairs, based in New York. His writing on urbanism, culture, and heritage in the Middle East has appeared in The Nation, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Even Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He was previously a staff editor at Foreign Affairs. In 2008 and 2009, he was a Fulbright fellow in Syria, where he conducted research on architectural and urban preservation in Damascus and also worked for the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR. He has an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony’s College at Oxford, where he wrote a master’s thesis on the politics of urban planning and historic preservation in Cairo, and a B.A. in history and Arabic from Vassar.