Enforced disappearance has been a defining mechanism of state violence in Syria, systematically employed by both Assad regimes—father and son—to silence dissent and install fear. While rooted in earlier decades, the practice has, over the past fourteen years been deployed on an unprecedented scale, reshaping Syria’s social and political fabric. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with families of persons who were forcibly disappeared in the wake of the 2011 revolution, this talk examines how they navigate the prolonged uncertainty of waiting for their loved ones, tracing the evolving intricate social, emotional, and political dimensions of their responses over time. Engaging with concepts of the temporalities of waiting and ambiguous loss, the talk analyses the affective and political practices through which families endure and make meaning amid uncertainty, highlighting how acts of remembrance and collective mobilization emerge as vital strategies for restoring dignity and asserting agency. By linking intimate narratives to broader struggles for truth, justice, memory and accountability, the talk seeks to narrate disappearance in Syria beyond the language of statistics and legal reports, situating it instead within the everyday lived experiences of those who continue to endure its presence, even beyond the Assad era.
Rashof Salih is the Scientific Coordinator for Research Data Management of the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She studied Social and Cultural Anthropology and Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin, with a focus on psychological anthropology, collective memory, and politics of violence.
Anne-Marie McManus heads the ERC-funded Starting Grant SYRASP (“The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria,” Grant no. 851393) at the Forum Transregionale Studien. She is the author of Arab Nationalism, Decolonization, and the Making of a Transregional Literature (forthcoming Cambridge UP, 2025); co-author and editor of Design of Necessity: Resilience and Survival in Syria’s Sieges (forthcoming, coculture); and a member of the Lab for the Study of Violence. Her research has been supported by the ERC, the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and NYU Abu Dhabi, among others.
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