Betrayal of the Homeland (S. 15, Ep. 15)

I'm Marc Lynch, and we're now joined by Samer Abboud to talk about his new book, Betrayal of the Homeland.

Samer, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Mark.

I really appreciate you inviting me to be here with you.

So I'm really excited to see this book come out in my Columbia University Press series.

It's a really interesting look at a period of Syrian history that I think a lot of people don't really pay attention to because the war was over, presumably, but before the transition.

And so tell us a little bit about how you came to write this book.

What were you trying to accomplish with it? And what's the major contribution?

Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head there.

Trying to understand what is the state of the Syrian conflict now, what was its trajectory, especially after the Russian intervention in September 2015, I felt like there was just this path politically towards normalization.

Academics were not really studying what was happening inside of Syria.

There was a lot of focus on... refugees, on migration, on displacement.

And there was just this assumption that Syria was sort of petering out and the regime was slowly taking back land.

And that was not really cohering with what I was understanding to be the situation on the ground in Syria.

And then I became very interested, as I have been for most of my life, with the way that the state was functioning in this particular moment.

So the way that the state was absorbing this normalization, this kind of post-Russian intervention reality, and orienting around the punishment of populations that were deemed to be, you know, effectively disloyal.

And so a lot of those things that were happening more like on the granular level, and I was also hearing a lot in an interview study I was doing on fear among Syrians, I didn't think that that was represented anywhere academically.

And so I wanted to write about this question of how is the state absorbing conflict and what does it mean for Syria's future?

And one of the things which is really important here, I think, is this notion that we've talked about before about how we shouldn't think about wars as starting and ending, per se, that the legacies of the 2011-2015 period carry over very clearly into the so-called post-war period.