On December 8th, 2024, Syria – my country of birth and the place where I lived for twenty-four years – experienced a dislocatory moment in its history: the liberation from a dictatorial regime that had held power for the past 54 years. This event marked the collapse of a deteriorating structure that had long constrained the aspirations for democratic governance of Syria. The rupture of Al-Asad’s narrative announced the advent of an uncertain future, which harbours many possibilities that vary from the transformative and prosperous era in modern Syrian history to a descent into renewed violence and proxy wars or other unpredictable scenarios. Regardless of the eventual outcome, this pivotal moment holds a promise of change. How do we bequeath and inherit this dislocatory moment? What stories will convey the experiences of the five and half decades of dictatorship in Syria? They will be stories to tell about what had been missed and shall form the discourse of how to restore.
What stories will convey the experiences of the five and half decades of dictatorship in Syria?
Dislocation encompasses the absence of, the opposite of, or being deprived of having location. Etymologically, it signifies a specific position within a “topographical structure” that has been “pushed ‘out of place’” (Marchart, 2018:94). These linguistic roots awaken negativity toward the term, as if it indicates a defect necessitating rectification; for instance, in medical contexts, a dislocated shoulder induces significant pain until it is realigned – or put back to its location (Masoud, 2024; forthcoming 2026; Masoud, 2025) In Arabic, events of December 8th, 2024, have prompted the application of the adjective “dislocated” (Arabic: Makhlūʿ) to characterize the previous sovereign. The latter aimed to endure forever, as this was its slogan “Al-Asad forever.” To stress this claimed unchanged status over time, the regime led tireless attempts to arrest permanent changes in the socio-political landscape. Ernesto Laclau portrayed such attempts of any discourse as laying layers of sedimentation. The occurrence of dislocatory moments is inherently unforeseen, and their outcomes remain unpredictable, instilling anxiety within any established system of meaning (see Laclau, 1990 and Derrida, [1993] 2006). To create a foundation for new discourses, such dislocatory moments must be framed not only as temporary, transient, and liminal periods but also as singular events that are not to be anticipated to recur in the future. This approach allows new discourses to validate their own positions within power dynamics. Consequently, dislocatory moments not only violate the premise of being unique unrepeated events, but they also pose a risk to the foundational structures: the occurrence of such moments means that negated individuals and concepts penetrate the centre and disrupt it from within. Until new mythical narratives carve out their own domains, the uncertainty surrounding these events remains centrally pervasive. The mitigation of dislocatory effects relies on laying new grounds in the form of linearity, which are solidified through the cultivation of repetitive practices. Nonetheless, the effects and potentiality of dislocatory moments shall never disappear.
Until new mythical narratives carve out their own domains, the uncertainty surrounding these events remains centrally pervasive.
The sedimentation of Al-Asad’s structure manifested in a regular collective celebration of its achievement alongside satire of its enemies. For instance, it became a mandate for Syrian schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the president and commit to combating perceived enemies of the state each morning. Following the peaceful demonstration in 2011, individuals residing in the rebel areas had been stripped of their rights to remain in their homes, punishing them collectively by relegating them to the status of refugees. Many Syrians experienced horrifying conditions of incarceration and were deprived of articulating their trauma in the public sphere. Being exposed to such imprisonment was not an exception, but rather each Syrian feared entering such nightmarish detention centers, a fact that instilled a pervasive fear among the population under the Al-Asad government. State-controlled media presented any potential opponent to the regime in a derogatory manner, labeling such individuals “infiltrators” (mundassūn), “revenge seekers” (Mawtwrūn), or as belonging to “environments that incubate terrorism” (yantamūn ilā Bīʾāt ḥāḍina lilʾrhāb) thereby framing them as threats to “national unification.” This dominant structure systematically negated these persons, continuously designating them as “bad” Syrians while contrasting them with the regime’s self-portrayal as the embodiment of “good.” Precisely through this act of negation, those marginalised citizens were a “constitutive outside” (Laclau, 1994) to the regime: the latter needed them urgently to constitute own spaces of governance.
After December 8th, 2024, numerous exiled Syrians returned to their homes and reached out to the global community by sharing photographs and videos depicting them in their neighborhoods. The refugees, previously denied basic needs to reside in their homes, returned to what they consider their home. Their narratives have transitioned into vicarious accounts, allowing their experiences to be seen and heard. Furthermore, the pictures of liberated political prisoners took a central stage in social and mass media, not only because of the horror they revealed but also because the detainees who endured captivity in dark, underground prisons were able to experience the sunlight again. This shift initiates new discourses about the socio-political landscape in Syria. Individuals — who were marginalized from the dominant narratives surrounding the Al-Asad regime — have the opportunity to engage and assert their presence within the yet-to-be-designed discourse. Doing so necessitates fixing the dislocation into a location, following Derrida. The way of historicising this dislocatory moment will shape the narratives in Syrian educational curricula, literature, and national mass media, consequently the canon for Syrian collective memories and identities in the near or far future.
The first step of such an imagination is to learn how to narrate the story of the fall of the Al-Asad rule.
The individuals who have been denied their rights to representation have dislocated sedimented layers of an archaic dictatorial regime at the dislocatory moment in late December last year. Their potential to construct a system of meaning that facilitates an improved quality of life is high. A critical question remains to be answered: what is going to be negated in post-Al-Asad Syria? The question of inheriting the glory of liberation and horror of dictatorship entails exclusivity, as it is by necessity impossible to include all aspects of a historical dislocatory moment in any possible prospective discourse. I wish that the radical hope Syrians experienced around the moment of December 8, 2024 would produce a continuous self-critique, in order to mitigate and ideally avoid engendering new marginalized groups within Syrian society. The dislocatory moment meant to pass the unpassable door and dare to hope for a world in which different chains of solidarity between Syrian citizens are constituted. The first step of such an imagination is to learn how to narrate the story of the fall of the Al-Asad rule, as bequeathing the heritage of this dislocatory moment scaffolds the next dislocatory moments, which are yet to come.
Featured image: Some dislocations within the urban historic fabric of the old city of Aleppo. Photo taken on December 11th, 2018. © Zoya Masoud.
Bibliography
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2006.
Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. Phronesis. London: Verso, 1990.
Marchart, Oliver. Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Masoud, Zoya. Dislocated. Heritage Construction through Experienced Loss in Aleppo. Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming 2026.
Masoud, Zoya. “Dislocation.” In Dis:connectivity in Processes of Globalisation: Concepts, Terms and Practices, edited by Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci and Roland Wenzlhuemer, Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming 2025.
Abstract: On December 8th, 2024, the Syrian regime collapsed, featuring a decisive rupture in a dominant discourse that had persisted for 54 years. In the aftermath, many previously marginalised Syrians have taken on influential roles in public discourse. While the future of Syria remains uncertain, how to bequeath and inherit this dislocatory moment? Who narrates which story and for which purpose? This contribution offers initial reflections on the dissolution of established power structures in contemporary Syria.
