The Syrian surveillance architecture & the Stasi – Do intelligence agencies learn practices of social control from each other? This paper examines the Syrian architecture of surveillance and social control, focusing on the surveillance practices of the intelligence agencies (“Mukhabarat”) during the period of the Cold War. I understand intelligence agencies as Bourdieusian fields that interact with each other and I approach the issues of surveillance, social control, and security from an International Political Sociology perspective situated within the broader theoretical frame of my PhD research, emphasizing everyday practices and social relationships. Syrian surveillance practices include, among others, 1) the recruitment and deployment of informal informants from local communities to gather information on individuals and the society as a whole, 2) monitoring and violent repression of dissident groups (most prominently, the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1970s and 80s leading to the 1982 Hama massacre) and 3) the acquisition of surveillance technologies from abroad. The paper compares the Syrian surveillance practices with similar practices found in the East German intelligence agencies’ (“Stasi”) repertoire of social control and explores the question of whether some striking similarities can be traced back to knowledge exchanges between the Syrian and East German intelligence agencies. Was knowledge learned and transmitted from one agency to the other (directly or indirectly), and if so, how? The empirical analysis of this paper draws on both secondary and primary sources (political memoirs and archival documents from BStU Archive, Bundesarchiv, CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room). Keywords: Mukhabarat/ Syria, surveillance, Stasi/ East Germany, Cold War, Muslim Brotherhood, learning