How to abandon an archive

For all its misery, the Syrian conflict always had one, thin, silver lining. Never before have so many Syrians been able to express themselves and their experiences with repression as after 2011. As refugees fled the country en masse, so have Syria’s human stories poured out, in memoirs, interviews, blogs, social media posts, public discussions, television programs, podcasts, theater, music, and every other cultural form. The two writers of the essay you are reading are historians of the Middle East who met at a Dutch university in 2016, and who, since the beginning of the uprising, had been interviewing Syrians about their experiences with violence, with torture, with flight, with loss. We’ve carried on that work as the conflict churned grimly on. Grimness notwithstanding, interviewing Syrians is an enjoyable exercise: they will invariably invite you for strong, bitter coffee offset by fragrant, handmade sweets. The bitter and the sweet: in Syria they go hand in hand. Boundless kindness and unfathomable cruelty. As a friend from southern Syria once summarized: « Syrians? Magnanimous people. Monstrous killers. »

Our interviews, while valuable in and of themselves, were borne of necessity: any and all forms of research inside Assad-held Syria were impossible. No library was accessible, no archive was even cataloged, and history itself seemed to exist only in whispers and half-erased memories. In fact, there were no real departments of history at Syrian universities. Strict censorship and restrictions on sources constrained research on the regime; much of the regime’s concrete workings, past and present, remained obscure. No bookshop inside Syria would sell any books of any political significance, of course, because the prospect of torture dungeons loomed. No historian in their right mind would walk around Damascus with a notepad and digital camera, asking around for historical archives to delve into. Any bookseller who thought differently was heroic, any historian who thought differently was suicidal.

All of this changed on 8 December 2024, when Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow and his regime collapsed.