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Zeina Al-Azmeh, "Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
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- [02:02]
Matt Dawson
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to a podcast from the New Books Network. My name is Matt Dawson and I'm professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow, and today I'm very pleased to have my guest, Zina Al Azmi. Zina is a research teacher Associate Socio in Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology at University of Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow of Selwyn College, and we are going to be discussing her book, Syrian Intellectuals in the Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving, published by Cambridge University Press. So, Zena, welcome to the show.
- [02:37]
Zina Al Azmi
Thank you, Matt. Thanks for having me.
- [02:39]
Matt Dawson
So, to start, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to write this book?
- [02:43]
Zina Al Azmi
Sure. So I'm a political sociologist. I work specifically on exile intellectual life and the relationship between knowledge and political struggle. And this monograph was very much, well, both a personal and intellectual project shaped by my own proximity to the Syrian revolution and obviously its aftermath. It started from a. A nagging question that is both personal and analytical, I suppose, about how Syrian intellectuals, including, you know, some of the people I grew up amongst in my parents home in Damascus or others from my own generation who became friends or colleagues, etc. So the question that was nagging me was how these intellectuals reconciled their imaginaries of emancipation there. If you want the poetics of revolution, if you will, on the one hand, with the violent horrors of war that were unfolding on the ground every day, particularly, you know, after 2012, but even from the, you know, from the early days of the revolution when it was faced with brutal violence in the regime. So these were people who were calling for revolutions since the early days of the Assad regime, many of them, which, as you pointed, probably know, came to power in the early 1970s through haze, Assad's coup d' etat against a government of his own. Ba'ath party at the time. And then the Syria that I grew up in, the syria of the 1980s, you know, it may have seemed like, you know, often described as, quote, unquote, the kingdom of science, but under the surface, sometimes literally under, like in dungeons, under the ground, it was a dark and heaving political battlefield. And then when Hafez Assad passed, you know, when he died in 2000, just before he died, he had arranged to pass power onto his son in 2000. And in 2000, actually a new wave of resistance emerged, which later became known as the Massacre Spring. And so these, some of them the same figures, some of them are a new generation. Again, revolution were reanimated and organized and again suppressed violently, not as violently as the 80s, which was a particularly, you know, notoriously violent dictatorship, but equally, in more sinister but equally violent way. And so, you know, I, you know, this was a personal question for me. I had grew up within this environment, monitored it. My parents were dissidents from. And they had many friends who were actually one who, several who died in prison under torture, et cetera. So it was, you know, it had these personal repercussions at the same time for myself and my generation. It was, it was more kind of the Bashar Assad period, and how these revolutionary imaginaries and ideals turned into an ugly war and a lot of devastation on the ground.
- [05:52]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, and as your title gives away, you cover the Syrian intellectuals in exile, often people who have exiled after Those events of 2012 you were talking about. And you note, they largely ended up either in Paris or Berlin. So can you tell the listeners a bit about who these intellectuals were and whether there are any differences between those who found themselves in Paris or Berlin?
- [06:12]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah, I mean, they were writers, academics, artists, public commentators, people who were for the most part already engaged in politics and shaking political and cultural discourse in Syria before 2011. So exile for the most part didn't create them as intellectuals, but it kind of transformed the conditions under which they operated and in a few cases gave them a new, maybe broader platform, a broader audience. For Thor and Navy Oswald, for a few days, Paris in Berlin offered quite different environments. Berlin appears as kind of the larger, younger, more institutional, supported site of the two. So Germany offered significantly more funding, residencies, translation opportunities, a cultural infrastructure for several intellectuals that at the same time, along with these, I suppose like the institutional approach to receiving the intellectuals and artists as refugees, for the most part, Berlin was associated with stronger fragmentation and kind of more performative, if you will, forms of radicalism, particularly among kind of the younger artists and writers. So the manuscript described the emergence of kind of a Berlin specific talk of radicalism relates to the Kreuzberg region. You have an alternative theme, how things found their place or kind of they're placed within that theme, where kind of exclusionary group identities were built around lifestyle markers, anti integration rhythm, which is very much associated, like I said earlier, with a kind of heavy handed approach of the the German state and its institutions. Integration is very much institutionalized, unlike power, and also like it will embrace this kind of countercultural performance, anti integrationist and you know, very much group identity focus. Berlin also produced stronger reactions against, you know, the German integration policies in Herzogarth, which many of my Germany based participants experienced as invasive or patronizing or sexist or culturally homogenizing and other ways in which they described it as a friend of good. Paris, by contrast, appears as a smaller and somewhat older milieu because there had been generations of Syrian dissidents in in exile in Paris already. So much less state support and fewer institutional opportunities. But participants in France were much more relaxed about the questions of identity and integration. You know, integration really hardly ever came up in interviews, although some similar performances of revolutionary radicalism existed in Paris, as they did certainly in Berlin. They were less pronounced generally and less identity driven than in Berlin. And then Parisian intellectual like appears somewhat more centered around established intellectual traditions, kind of symbolic debates where Berlin was bringing in a new kind of newer, younger youth identities and more visibly performative subculture type of positioning. And relatedly, Paris tended to reproduce older hierarchies, tight language, cultural capital, you know, established intellectual traditions. You had at least three generations already, like some of the people I interviewed in Paris had been there for over 50 years, or one over 50 years. Others arrived after 2011. All of them certainly were political dissidents though, were in. In Paris as exiles. But you have gen, you know, different generations and as a result, you know, arguments about discussions about old guard and kind of how the boundary of the intellectual media was kind of protected or boundaries were set for who's inside it, who's outside it, on what criteria, particularly by the kind of older generation of Syrian exiles who were perched from Syrian universities or from Syrian cultural life as a result of their dissident political stances. And Berlin, like I said, by contrast, was almost entirely a new field post 2011. All of my participants had a Reich after the revolution during war, which started in 2011. So there was no old guard to speak of. And the boundaries into the field were more through it, but it was a lot more institutionalized, like I said to NGO funding infrastructures that were popping up like mushrooms, you know, in Germany, around just before my interview. So around 2015 and 2016 was the peak. We see no parallel of that in France, not really. But all of these created different opportunities and different pressures, particularly around how the Syrian event would be interpreted or narrated to external audiences, to the host society audiences more broadly. The comparison illustrates one of the book's key arguments, which is that intellectual positioning was shaped not only by ideology or by trauma, but very much by the material and cultural structures of exile itself, such as funding systems integration, policies and regimes, urban cultures, generational composition and so forth.
- [12:11]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, I think already, Zena, what listeners are going to get from this is the ways in which this book is driven by this. As you mentioned earlier, there's a personal drive towards this and brought this topic, but the really rich empirical, intellectual theoretical in such have there. This is a really wonderful book. I really enjoyed reading it. And as our conversation will hopefully show, and as you've already highlighted there, you're engaged in a lot of debates and providing some really valuable tools. I wanted to ask you about something you mentioned in introduction as part of this I found really interesting. So you mentioned in your Introduction that you're in this unusual place as a researcher because as someone is researching intellectuals, your participants are not just your participants, they're also part of your literature because they're intellectuals talking about Syria. So how did you negotiate that, that challenge?
- [12:59]
Zina Al Azmi
Wow. I mean, that was probably my main methodological challenge, which, as you say, the fact that many intellectuals I studied were also producing some of the most important reflections on exile, revolution and intellectual life in Syria about themselves, really. So it would have been a huge blind spot, I thought, if I ignored all of that wonderful literature they produced on these topics and treated them just as, you know, objects of study. At the same time, you know, they were my interviewees and, and the main source of documentary analysis, data. So the documentary analysis that I conducted was based on their writings, their interviews, their, you know, film productions, et cetera. So I found myself in the position of having to see some of their writing simultaneously as literature and as data. But to be honest, rather than seeing this as a flaw, I, I view introduction somewhere that this is actually, first, it is specific to the study of intellectuals because the object of study is itself a producer of kind of theory and interpretation, including about intellectuals, intellectuals itself. But also, at the same time, it was crucial for me to maintain critical distance from participants, self pleasure presentations. And equally important, ironically less discussed, I was much less challenged to, to talk about the critical business I was keeping, maintaining to the Western theoretical canon that I was sometimes using to analyze them. So the project involved constantly moving between insider and outsider perspectives, taking serial intellectual work seriously as theorists of their own condition, while also critically analyzing their self positioning, critically analyzing their performances, their symbolic struggles, etc. It's kind of like wearing two hats, you know, switching between two hats constantly. I also think that my insistence to treat them not only as research objects, but to take their writing seriously as theoretical and, as you know, literature resources. I consider that insistence which I was challenged sometimes about. I consider it as kind of a political and epistemological intervention against what Julian Goh calls theoretical bifurcation. Julian Goh talks about how Western thinkers are treated as universal theorists, while thinkers from the global briefly are reduced to sources of local data or experience. I didn't want to kind of fall into that trap. So drawing on Go, drawing also on Claude's work, I wanted to resist reproducing that division of intellectual labor by engaging intellectuals not only as objects of analysis, but also as interlocutors and producers of sociological and political thought on a site about a topic they are closest to and probably most kind of with art.
- [16:09]
Matt Dawson
Yeah. And I think that rings really true as someone who's read your book, you know, I can feel that I like the way you talked about, you know, the moving between wearing different hats and, you know, the move between insider and outsider. It rings really true in what you're doing. I think you're entirely right with the point about intellectual verification. You know, the book gained something from having these voices. It would lose a lot from not having them there as both participants and intellectuals. They need to be there in both ways. So let's turn to how you are sort of involving yourself in these. These debates and these ideas. So one of the things your work is really influenced by and intervening is the sociology of intellectuals. And you've already used the word position in there, which is often a key part, especially increasing part of the sociology of intellectuals, how intellectuals are positioned. So I thought a good place to ask about this would be with the divisions you talk about amongst intellectuals, positioning, which is the focus of chapter one. So what were the divisions in how these intellectuals positioned themselves? And as part of this, I wondered if you could tell us about how some of them practiced a form of what you called anti. Positioning.
- [17:14]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah. So this chapter that you mentioned argues that divisions in intellectual positioning emerged through processes of group identity formation and through social and professional competition within the exotic intellectual field. And these divisions were. Were sustained through both inclusionary and exclusionary boundary work organized around a number of fault lines. I identify four, and I zoom on which of them generational divides, geographic divides, social divides and ethical dividends. So the generational divide is basically where older intellectuals were often associated with early exhibitions of, you know, ideological politics, party party politics, party structures, authoritative intellectualism, where kind of the intellectual has more this kind of prophet or peeking at their audiences. Whereas younger intellectuals tend to embrace more embedded anti hierarchical and ethically driven forms of engagement shaped directly by their involvement in the uprising. Their, you know, their own revolutionary experience will. And these tensions also reflected broader disagreements about concepts of leadership ideology, political organizing, party follow books, political strategy, and importantly, the role of intellectuals in relation to quote, unquote, the people. So that's the generational divide. The second divide was kind of a geographic divide. And this was very salient, particularly between intellectual faith in different sites of exile, but also between those who remained inside the country and those who remained outside the country. And there was very clear hostility between the latter two. Where the. I mean, I obviously didn't interview any intellectuals who remained inside the country, but the dynamic was based on what I, you know, what I Was observing through my interviews with those who left the country, exiled intellectuals. And my readings of what was being written by intellectuals who stayed in the country was that they were mutual accusations between the two. And the people I interviewed would often undermine, perhaps driven by guilt or to kind of self justify. But were often skeptical about the plausibility of any intellectual. Critical intellectual work. If you stay within Syria described how the role of these insider intellectual was. Was reduced to kind of humanitarian work. And they're clearly presented in interviews with Adam Inferior born of work, at least by some of some of the interviews. So there were kind of mutual accusations, perhaps, you know, a very cool divide. Another the chapter also identifies like ethical political delusions, which were centered on completely interpretations of the revolution and of its favor, while fake. And I suppose the most important fault line included positions on questions of armament, political Islam, transitional justice and responsibility, or the collapse of the occulting or its. You know, its descent into a violent proxy. So intellectuals competed over symbolic legitimacy through what the chapter calls competitive performances of ethicality, where sacrifices, imprisonment, exile experiences and others became sources of kind of symbolic. I would get into that in more detail in a different chapter, but let me stay on the fragmentation of the field. So basically, the field became fragmented into these small antagonistic collective organized around two major intellectual tendencies. One is kind of structuralist materialist approaches, which for grounded political and structural conditions. And then culturalist, what I call culturalist approaches, which attributed the crisis primarily to cultural and social pathologies within certain societies. And these divisions were reinforced by broader kind of ideological polarization globally by trauma. Certainly made it gave it like a sharper tone, more graphic sometimes. Obviously those online with wars that I also monitored, they were also reinforced. These divisions were reinforced by kind of emotional solidarity and struggles for recognition and influence within this highly fragmented public sphere, Particularly the online life of the revolution. You asked about anti positioning. By anti positioning I refer to a strategy identified. Identified by. Within intellectual positioning theory by Fartik Da. But this anti positioning is a strategy through which intellectuals define and establish their own position by positioning themselves against another already visible intellectual or already visible discourse or current. So rather than articulating a position independently, they gain clarity, legitimacy or visibility through such antagonism. In the Syrian case, for example, this often manifested in sometimes younger or emergent writers or artists building revolutionary credibility by publicly attacking established figure. Notably, I talk about this part of it in the chapter. Notably the poet and intellectual Adonis, who sided against the revolution from the onset, but is otherwise a highly respected kind of intellectual figure in the Syrian intellectual field. But then by adopting this strategy of like excessive kind of criticism and almost aggression towards Adonis on social media or in publications, they were turning polemics into a form of symbolic positioning within this fragmented intellectual field.
- [23:37]
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- [24:27]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, it's fascinating to think of the field and all the different divisions and about, as you mentioned there, there's this, all of my symbolic capital people get. And at one point there you come up with a wonderful phrase that you call persecution capital. So can you tell us a bit what this is and why it was so significant to the positioning of these intellectuals? Yeah.
- [24:45]
Zina Al Azmi
So persecution capital is a concept I developed to describe how experiences of political suffering, things like imprisonment, torture, exile, course disappearance, blacklisting, for example, for travel bans, et cetera, became a source of symbolic legitimacy and authority within the revolutionary and in fact post conflict fields. Now I'm continuing to create havoc business developing. So in the Syrian case, what I observed is that suffering often carried more symbolic weight than traditional forms of prestige like academic status or professional success or institutional authority, and other like more traditional forms of, of symbolic weight or capital. So people who had to use the language paid the price of dissent or dissent were often seen as more authentic, morally, more. More morally legitimate, and even more entitled to speak on behalf of the revolution and the revolutionaries. And what interested me sociologically was that this wasn't simply about individuals strategically using their victim murders. Quite. You know, this is discussed a lot in the literature, but it was more about a broader moral economy that emerged in a traumatized and fragmented political field where institutional legitimacy had collapsed almost completely. And in that context, persecution became a kind of political currency that shapes both first and foremost, who can be trusted, who is heard, who is allowed to lead. At the same time, you know, I'm careful, I have to be careful here because the concept is intended to be normatively ambivalent, like of course, persecution capital or the ability to gain respect as a result of a price paid for a revolution, for suffering for a cause is important. It can empower silence people. It can honor genuine sacrifice. But, you know, where. Where I think it's problematic or where I think we can learn from that experience in Syria, is that it can also produce exclusionary hierarchies, what is sometimes referred to as competitive victimhood, and certainly a lot of fragmentation. And one of the arguments I make later about this concept is that when suffering or persecution becomes the main basis of legitimacy, political life can become organized around a sort of moral outbidding rather than collaboration or focus on collective goals or, you know, working together towards. I shared the vision of what reality the collective wants following their organizing mobilization.
- [27:42]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, it's really fascinating. I think it's a really useful, valuable concept. In addition to the sociology of intellectuals, as perhaps already been indicated by your mention of Julian Goh earlier, your work is influenced by postcolonial theory, post colonial sociology. And to me, when I was reading it, I think it does some of the stuff that really good post colonial work does at its best, you know, it makes readers in the west question a variety of different assumptions we hold. And this is especially the case in chapter two, which begins with you noticing that the intellectuals you spoke to universally rejected what we might call an Orientalist framing of themselves and their work. But the problem was the new Western environment. They found themselves often actually encouraged this. You spoke earlier about the NGOs, particularly in Berlin, that had grown up and supplied funding. They often wanted to prioritize work that presented Syria as different and that framed Syria through their view of what the country is defined by, often questions of Islamism and the revolution itself. So how did the intellectuals you spoke to negotiate this?
- [28:48]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I argue in chapter two, as we said, is that Syrian intellectuals in Anzal were constantly navigating a difficult kind of double pressure. On the one hand, they were trying to make themselves comprehensible to Western audiences and institutions, as you said. So universities were important for them, NGOs, cultural organizations, media platforms, funding bodies, et cetera. All of these institutions were important for them. And they needed to be kind of legible to them, because these often became necessary spaces for survival and for visibility, for jobs, for, you know, for. For visibility in exile. On the other hand, many, if not most, were deeply uncomfortable with the kinds of expectations that came with that visibility. So, for example, one of the recurring concerns among participants was the feeling that Western audiences often expected to them to perform certain recognizable roles. The traumatized refugee, the oppressed Muslim woman, the secular dissident, the victim of isis, or other kind of configurations that match, you know, previous Orientalist expectations and imaginaries. The heroic survivor, for example, the. The common one. But my participants were very aware that some narratives traveled more easily than others and that there were implicit pressures to simplify Syria into morally and culturally digestible stories that sound familiar or resonate with a specific audience. Some participants resisted very explicitly. They criticized what they saw as Orientalist framings that reduced experience to violence, sectarianism to cultural, quote, unquote backwardness. Others worried about becoming trapped in what I call a politics of testimonialism, where their value in the cultural field or artistic field or intellectual field became tied primarily to narrating the trauma that they went through or that their people are going through, rather than producing art for art's sake, you know, or theory or political thought more broadly. They navigated these expectations inconsistently, some of them strategically so Some adopted the kinds of expectations, they adapted their language or self presentation depending on the audience. Others tried to subvert these brains from within by insisting on complexity, contradiction, heterogeneity and pluriversality, if you want to use that term, rather than kind of cultural exceptionalism. And a few, or more than a few actually refused to respond to invitations where they were explicitly invited as Syrian or like as a Syrian writer or a refugee arson. And that occurred at least in two interviews where my interlocutor would explicitly recount an anecdote where they rejected because of the wording, because the way the invitation was received. So there was a constant negotiation, I guess, between the need for visibility and support in exile, job and not, and the desire to resist being academically or culturally reduced to cliches or contained within expectations that have kind of dubious genealogies for them, you know, Orientalist females.
- [32:35]
Matt Dawson
Indeed. And can you tell us a bit about another concept you developed? The dual gaze. So how did the intellectual perspective adopt that dual gaze as a result of negotiating this environment?
- [32:45]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah, so I guess the argument I make is that exile produced a shift from what I call a politics of being perceived to a politics of perceiving. By that I mean that many Syrian intellectuals, historically, like other post colonial intellectuals, really were preoccupied with analyzing the collective self. So this navel gazing very much reflective navel gazing very much orbited around how they were being seen by the colonial other. And for example of Edward Said's work on Orientalism or culture imperialism, or another strand of this kind of politics of being perceived is being preoccupied with how the Western Gaze influenced self perception. So here I'm thinking, for example, of Web Boyce's notion of double consciousness. In either case, there was this kind of strong awareness of being looked at, interpreted, catalyzed, and often misunderstood. That is a politics of being perceived. But first, the Arab revolution and maybe the disenchanting experience of exile coximity produces mis enchantment. Often many participants began to redirect the gaze from inwards to outwards, right? So they felt empowered, paradoxically, even by the force of their trauma itself, they felt empowered to make moral and political judgments about the world. They increasingly became observers and interpreters of a global world order in what they describe as its hypocrisies, its contradictions, racial hierarchy, integration, regimes. Kind of this liberal self image. That shift from being perceived to perceiving is related to what I call the dual gaze. Because what becomes clear was that many participants were no longer especially invested in explaining themselves to the west or in correcting stereotypes in the older post colonial banks. Instead, they increasingly approached Western societies themselves as objects of critique. And they spoke about kind of the selective application of human rights discourse, the hypocrisy of the so called war on terror, Europe's racialized group borders, and what they saw as kind of the abandonment of Syrians by the international community. So the gays were not. The gaze was no longer only inward toward the wounded post colonial self, but outward and morally evaluative at the same time. It wasn't simply a rejection of the west or indeed a move towards kind of crude anti West Westernism. What made this dual gaze dual was precisely the coexistence of admiration and dissolution. Right. So many participants continue to deeply value aspects of European intellectual and political traditions. Things that were cited were often democracy, political thought, literature, philosophy, poetry, certain Enlightenment values, et cetera, but while simultaneously condemning Western states and geopolitical structures for their, what they perceive to be their complicity in the survival of Assad and in the atrocities that were happening in Syria. So they could admire European culture while feeling profoundly betrayed by Europe politically. And the result was a more complex position in the end, no longer seeking recognition from the west so much as situating themselves as political and epistemic actors capable of judging it in return.
- [36:32]
Matt Dawson
And I think that brings it over really well in terms of explaining the ways in which they had the dual element of that gaze, as you say. And it becomes, I think, a really useful concept because of that. So one thing we've touched on already is sort of the intellectual's relation to the revolution and to the revolutionary movement. So let's get into that a bit more depth. And you speak about the intellectuals you spoke to could be defined on a continuum between two poles of their relation to the revolutionary movement, between what you call critical liminality or radical embeddedness, with the latter radical embeddedness perhaps being the one that more of the participants were close to. So what were the differences between these two positions?
- [37:14]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah, so critical luminality is a term that I borrowed from Moroccan philosopher Abdelkadi Khadzidi, and I use it to describe the position many Syrian intellectuals occupied between two forms of reductionism, if you will, that they rejected. They rejected both. On the one hand, they rejected kind of Orientalists, Eurocentric narratives that portray Arab society of entirely backward or cultural depressions and whatnot. But on the other hand, they also rejected localist or Islamist forms of anti Westernism that dismissed, for example, democracy or feminism or human rights as merely colonial importance. So rather than fully identifying with either a secular Eurocentric modernity discourse or on the other hand, a nativist anti modern discourse, they occupied a kind of in between liminal critical position that is critical of Western hegemony, but also critical of authority, authoritarianism, of political Islam, of patriarchy, sectarianism and other internal forms of domination. And that's why, you know, that's what I, that's how I use the, the Khatidi's term preliminari in the context of Syria inhabiting a critical position at the threshold between several, well, two main hegemonies without fully surrendering to either of them or anything. And this relates to then radical embeddedness on the other end, as you described, which you know, in one of the arguments I make is that unlike older Enlightenment models of the intellectuals who positioned themselves above so society as kind of reformers or enlightened intellectual or, you know, as supposedly leaders of a back otherwise backwards people. After 2011, Syrian revolutionary intellectuals became much more embedded within society and within the lived experiences of ordinary people. Many of them were subjected to, you know, the kinds of hordes that ordinary Syrians were being subjected to. Prison and torture, lost loved ones, course disappearance, several other ways in which they felt either by experience or by ideology, they needed to become part of this people. And they're legitimate. They're legitimately increasingly pain. Not from kind of this previous distance or you know, being above the people or lit elitism or even, you know, leadership claims to superior knowledge, but from solidarity, empathy, participation, shared vulnerability during the revolution and in exile also. So radical embeddedness is kind of this shift away from the detached enlightener, intellectual. A previous figuration that was popular in Syrian and other intellectual viewers toward a more socially immersed intellectual figure, socially embedded, radically embedded, someone who remains critical but who no longer imagines themselves as standing outside or above the people they speak with and for.
- [40:36]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, and I think this radical embeddedness is a really interesting and valuable concept again that you're bringing out here and you highlight the ways it leads to what you call a logic of deferral, which, correct me if I'm wrong, seems to be a sort of, let's park all critique of the revolution until after the government's overthrown. And also a form of quietism where for reasons you've already highlighted, these intellectuals become not leaders speaking through a mass or, you know, particularly enlightened figures, but simply almost followers of the masses. But a key claim of your book is that this harmed the intellectual's position in the long run. So why was that?
- [41:13]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah, because, you know, radical embeddedness had actually really problematic consequences in reality, by rejecting elitism and over identifying with the people. I argue that some intellectuals became reluctant to exercise critical distance or intellectual leadership or even political leadership or unpopular judgment. So there was sometimes a tendency towards even anti intellectualism and what I described as a extreme form of epistemic egalitarianism where making distinctions between kind of expertise, analysis and between popular sentiment itself becomes suspect. Right. So in Syrian case, there was this kind of, this radical embeddedness resulted in a sort of fetishization of, quote, unquote, the people, which is already a very ambiguous construct, as I argue in the book. And it's sort of almost the demonization of the intellectual. And this contributed to weakened kind of discursive role, critical role, dispersive authority resulted in fragmentation and in an avoidance of, most importantly, actually in an avoidance of institutional politics, organizational politics, you know, precisely at the moment when strategic political leadership was most needed in the country. So only one of my interlocutors was deeply involved in organized politics, who was the head of, for a while was the president of the Hearing National Council. And he, in my interviews with him also in a book that he published later, he talks about how he was left alone because no, none of the other intellectuals were willing to participate in this because they wanted to maintain kind of this separation between, you know, your role as an intellectual versus as a politician. And as a result, it created kind of a vacuum that the Islamists very quickly filled within U.S. organization. And this goes back to their preoccupation with, you know, with trauma work, you know, narrating Their trauma, which required over identification with the suffering masses. And this over identification was perhaps for sure noble in its motivations, you know, empathy and recognition, but necessarily led to a suspension of critique of the people, of the rebelling masses, the people. So it led to what you said earlier, like in your question, like it led to this logic of the. Which meant postponing internal critique, postponing criticism of the revolution and how it was shifting and changing its strategies more and more towards kind of Islamized, fraternized and militarized, which were things they initially, many of them, most of them initially had rejected initially. But then they adopted them, accepted them completely without any hitting because of this, you know, radical embeddedness, this logic of deferral, like it's not the time to criticize anyone but Assad and the regime. And so in practice, that meant creating a discursive vacuum that undemocratic, mostly Islamist forces were able to quickly occupy and which eventually, I mean, you know, lead us to this way. Right. So, yeah, radical embedded moves basically weaken intellectual autonomy and prevailing. And when the political situation deteriorated in 2012, start in 2012, increasingly, intellectuals found themselves without a distinct role, having aligned too closely with a movement that could no longer sustain their position and drifted very far from how it started. The ideal thing was called for dignity, justice.
- [45:12]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, and I think you bring this out again really well in your book in terms of those consequences and how it almost fed somewhat naturally from the positions that these intellectuals took in that radical impedance. So I'm going to quote you now, Tina, this is a long quote, but I think it really speaks really well to what you've said already and leads us on to the next thing I want to discuss. So you say this quote. The book has argued that at a time when the role and relevant support public intellectualism are contested at a global scale, intellectuals garner renewed authority and relevance in context of acute political unrest, particularly during the onset of revolutionary movements. This manifests itself in a broadening of audience and a deepening of the significance of their actions. However, this influence is volatile. The rise in intellectuals relevance and influence with the onset of revolutionary movements is also susceptible to political infectious ineffectiveness, particularly when they limit their involvement to the discursive field. In the case of Syria, these volatilities have resulted in a fast decline of intellectuals and their eventual discrediting and disempowerment, along with mass scowl devastation and the movement's on the ground failure. This diverted intellectuals interventions away from mobilization, critique and praxis towards trauma work, work that is focused on Garnering compassion rather than an influence change from within. And you've mentioned already this concept of trauma work, which takes up a chapter in your book. So I wondered if you could tell us a bit more about what is meant by that term, which I believe is taken from Geoffrey Alexander and what you call as part of this, the right to meaning.
- [46:46]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah. So trauma work, as you mentioned, is Geoffrey Alexander's term in cultural trauma theory. It refers to the narration work that carrier groups undertake in the context of collective trauma. And I use it to describe a shift in intellectual work from political intervention towards narrating suffering, documenting violence, loss, displacement, and soccer in ways that seek recognition and compassion. And while this is an important component of what Jeffrey Alexander would call cultural formal construction written, I argue in the book that it can also become a haven't seen political practice in the context of democratization, particularly when it becomes the main focus of intellectual labor. The right to meaning is related, but also different. It is a concept that I developed to describe a demand by my interlocutors. I mean, not directly, but that was easily inferred by me from interviews. A demand that went beyond immaterial survival or even formal political rights. It. It emerged as a way of understanding how people were struggling not only for freedom and dignity in a political fence, but also for the rights to live light, but are recognized by enough, meaningful, valuable, and historically significant. And I developed this concept. I published it elsewhere on an article to. In the article, I identify core dimensions of meaning. So meaning in a linguistic sense, for example, like restoring social language after decades of dictatorship, had distorted many words, including citizenship, security, came to mean basically muhabarat, freedom, even socialism, which basically was still being used to describe what was effectively a crony, capitalism, et cetera. So there's, you know, there's this meaning in the linguistic sense, meaning asymmetry. And then there is the second one is existential. So the desire to live a life with agency, with purpose and political participation, rather than one reduced in kind of passivity and fear. Then there is a third meaning for meaning, which is kind of meaning as significance. So the idea that people suffering lives, deaths, should matter, should have meaning, should be recognized rather than treated as disposable. And the fourth and final one is meaning and essence. So questions about what the revolution itself means, what kind of future or moral world was it trying to achieve? And the argument I make is that many Syrian intellectuals came to experience the flavor of the international response to Syria not simply as clerical abandonment, but as a denial of meaning. Their trauma work generated sympathy and dignity, but not justice, not reparations or meaningful political action. They were all not. They were all against military intervention, but they somehow believed that the political stakes could have been restricted through, you know, more support for the revolutionary movement. So the concept became a way, I think I. I'd expand it to make it into a way of thinking, theorizing global inequality, where some populations are fielded as fully entitled to meaningful lives, meaningful suffering, meaningful death, meaningful political futures, while others are treated as if their deaths, aspirations, claims for meaning, you know, what the meanings of their revolution are, et cetera, carry less.
- [50:47]
Matt Dawson
Yeah. And as you say, part of this right of meaning is grappling with what hadn't happened with the revolution. When you finish the book and before you get to the epilogue, which we're going to talk about in a bit, it seems that when one reaches gender conclusion, the intellectuals you're speaking to, reflecting the progress, or lack of progress of the revolution that time, we're in somewhat of almost a dead end politically for all the reasons you've discussed. And you finish with this wonderful phrase. When you talk about the way these intellectuals operate in the world, you talk about them having a quote. Beautiful, just and hopeless perseverance. So what did you mean by that?
- [51:27]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah, I mean, where I get. I'm trying to capture with this expression the attitude of my little officers, most of them, when it comes to why they persist in doing the work they do at first. It describes a form of commitment that persists even when political odds, when political horizons have collapse. And there's something I found ethically powerful about continuing to speak up, write and bear with them as, you know, adopting this as kind of an ethical and aesthetic even stamps whilst knowing that it's not, not necessarily, in fact, is very unlikely to lead to the kinds of aspirations that they have. Many would tell me it was, you know, I don't have any illusions about the impact of my work, that that's the only way I know how to be. So I felt there was something really quite ethically aesthetically powerful about the same systems, this perseverance, but it was also marked by a sense of futility or hopelessness and fairness, really, and beauty. And that's, I guess what I. I was trying to reflect in. In that expression. You know, maybe it was an encapsulation of a tension between moral necessity and political impossibility.
- [52:50]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, and I think it is beautiful. I think it's the right word. You know, it is a really admirable sort of feeling for your participants to have. But of course, the Thing that's sort of hanging over our discussion as far we have mentioned is obviously once you'd finished the book, there was a major change in. In Syria. The Assad regime fell. And you provide an epilogue which you date as having been written in February 2025. And you reflect upon that and what it meant. And obviously you're sort of writing and reacting in real time at that point. And I was taken there with. You talk about the right to mean. You bring this back and you talk about how in the moment of a new political moment, a new regime, this right to be, meaning becomes particularly significant. New narratives, new ideas, new meaning of terms, linguistic things you mentioned earlier come to the fore. Of course, when you wrote that, it was barely months into the post desired era, so it was February 2025. And my memory, you can correct me in this, he fell in December 2024, so two to three months. So I'm not going to ask you if you have any reflections about where Syria is, particularly not there, too big a question at this point, but feel free if you want to. But I wondered if you have any reflections about how this new political moment that Sierra is in has impacted the intellectuals you spoke to.
- [54:13]
Zina Al Azmi
I mean, I, I'm not continuing the research, but I am following other, you know, interests and, you know, love and respect, you know, what, what they're working on and how they are repositioning themselves after following Gary Tymby, their writings, following the fall of the regime. I suppose the fall of the regime reopened the question of meaning in a very immediate way and it certainly created a new struggle over narratives that is even more palpable than when the Assad regime was in power. Also a struggle over legitimacy and whose vision of what the future Syria, what kind of country, identity, society, culture, Etheria is. It would. Is highly contested in the contemporary alien political sphere. So for intellectual, I suppose, but I, that I, you know, that were part of my study, but also others that are more lately. Um, this moment is both an opportunity and a high risk because it could lead to complete collapse or to a country that it can't even recognize, let alone live in or identify with. Um, they've taken very different stances, but generally there. There is a shared narrative that, you know, the need to resist continuous. The right to meaning, particularly in its existential interpretation, like the ability to live a life that you choose, is under a very serious threat. Of course, it is a shifting landscape. It's changing every day and you don't know whether the transitional government will remain in power. Four years from now. But what not what, what kind of government will emerge after that and what kind of Syria, the new constitution and other kind of formative or reform formulating initiatives that are taking place now would result in. But I think in either cases the right to meaning becomes even more contested as different actors attempt to define what the revolution was, more importantly what it was for, for what it achieved and most importantly, what comes next.
- [56:43]
Matt Dawson
Indeed, and as you say, we'll have to see what comes next is a very open question. So as you mentioned, you haven't continued working on this, so can you tell us what you're working on now?
- [56:54]
Zina Al Azmi
Yeah, so I'm currently working co authoring a monograph which still I deliver how to the Adv Scholar and the Saftaru. It's Knowledge, Power and Intellectual Agency under author. It's forthcoming with Rutledge and the book builds on our comparative work on Syrian and Turkish academics in exile. It examines perhaps more theoretically how authoritarianism, how displacement of wealth and what's new to my biggest research, the neoliberal transformations of of higher education, of intellectual fields and more broadly are reshaping intellectual life globally. So focus is you know, we use this comparative lens Flui and Turkey. But the aim is to theorize more broadly how you know, the role of the egg laud scholar in contemporary intellectual fields. The project broader kind of question, this illogical question is like what happens to knowledge production, to critique and to intellectual responsibility? What is the role of intellectual when scholars are displaced or are precarious or politically constrained in context of rising authoritarianism? So we look at exile not only as a condition of love, but even or even more so perhaps as a potentially generative space that can produce new forms of political imagination, new forms of pedagogy, even as we saw in Syria and Turkey, both new forms of kind of transnational solidarity. As we see with almost all of the interviews both in Turkey with Turkish with the basic exiled scholars and Syrian intellectuals in exiles. And you know what what this generatives faced at the exiled scholars scholar can also tell us about alternative modes of knowledge making. Yeah. One of the arguments, for example is that, you know, exiled scholars often become unusually sensitive indicators of broader transformations within universities analytical life more generally. Their experiences kind of reveal tensions between critique and for example, if jobs the fluency or institutional survival saw this figures a in the war on Gaza, different institutions degree in the US but also in the UK and around Europe responded to exiled scholars or other scholars who both in a way in way that they felt were used the language of risk and reputation and whatnot to kind of coerce, type of self sufficient censorship. So basically, yeah, we want to look at how the experiences exiled scholars reveal tensions between critique and institutional survival, between intellectual autonomy and kind of bureaucratic or market pressures, between the university's public mission and its increasing instrumentalization. At the same time, the book wants to explore exile, you know, as a site of creativity, of ethical reflection, of political, you know, reorientation rather than simply as a condition of precarity or victimhood.
- [60:23]
Matt Dawson
Sounds like an absolutely fascinating book. I look forward to seeing it out. So as a reminder for listeners, I've been speaking to Zina El Azme, author of Syrian Intellectuals in the Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving. And as we've noticed here, as we've spoken about as we got to the end, this is very much a book that you're writing where you responded to these events almost in real time. History is unfolding before you. And I think to do what you've done here, to be able to capture this moment so well in terms of these intellectuals in exile and how they're relating to Syria and at the same time not only have the type of rich empirical discussion that we've discussed here, but also to make the number of interventions you've made and the number of concepts that you've developed or adapted to help us think about intellectuals especially. And it's interesting you're carrying this on, thinking about exiled intellectuals or intellectuals outside the west is really impressive. And I'd say this trip it was a really wonderful book, a really thought provoking book that I really enjoyed reading and I'd really prefer recommending it to listeners out there to go and pick up yourself. Tatina, thanks for joining us today.
- [61:31]
Zina Al Azmi
Thank you so much, Matt. Thanks for having me.
- [61:45]
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