SYRIANBORDERS · The Fall of a Colonial Legacy: A Modern History of Syrian Borders (1920-2015)

The Fall of a Colonial Legacy: A Modern History of Syrian Borders (1920-2015)

The « SYRIANBORDERS – Fall of a Colonial Legacy » project aimed to propose a contemporary history of Syrian borders from their origins (1920) to the present day (2018). Although this application to the MCF was sent in 2015, the project dates back to 2011. Since this moment, the Arab world, including Syria – a state barely one century old – has been engaged in a major revolutionary process. In March 2011, a large segment of Syrian society demonstrated against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Despite the initial peaceful character of the uprising, the opposition to the regime had no choice but to arm itself in response to the terrible repression led by Damascus. A year later, the country was engaged in a wide-ranging civil war, largely depicted by the regime as a “sectarian plot” encouraged “from abroad” to “destabilize the country”. Then, a process of “jihadisation” followed this militarization with both sides of the conflict attracting foreign fighters, mercenaries and militia coming to act as proxies of Damascus. Furthermore, since 2013, the Syrian revolution has faced a new challenge: the Islamic State and the Kurdish movement, both of which took control of several territories and immediately engaged in contradictory state-building processes while working on the creation of new states, i.e. a Sunni caliphate and an autonomous Kurdistan, respectively. Although the Syrian state itself could have collapsed, both projects revealed that a rigorous contestation of Syrian territory and its colonial boundaries was underway. For a growing portion of the Syrian opposition, their refusal of the former colonial border order, defined in 1920 through the Sykes-Picot Agreement, is a major political undertaking that could affect not only Syria, Iraq and the entire Middle East, but also Europe. From 2015 onwards, several EU countries were hit by a series of terrorist attacks directly connected to the post-2011 political, social and economic reconfigurations in Syria and its neighbouring countries. In 2015, this research project on Syrian Borders was originally proposed and designed as a response to the fact that major research programs on contemporary Syria were lacking. The literature, mainly monodisciplinary, was even more scant when it came to the study of borders, a field that suffers globally from theoretical weakness and the use of outdated research methods and techniques. At the time, there were no major studies on Syrian borders. Hence, this project is important for European and Mediterranean societies, as it could help researchers, political actors, civil servants and the public to understand the post-2011 reconfigurations of the Middle East as well as the potential implications for Europe. This project had two main objectives: (1) contribute to the history of contemporary Syria by analysing the country through the prism of its borders; (2) produce a monograph that would include post-2011 dynamics.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union