Conventional accounts of war in Syria depict a state whose sovereignty has been “shattered” by violent contest over control of territory. Such accounts foreground strategic interaction among the key armed actors, implying that the emergence of political order in wartime Syria is centered on the front lines dividing the regime, opposition, PYD, and ISIS. But crucially, key forms of wartime mobilities have emerged that not only cross these front lines with great frequency, but connect the territories of Syria’s conflict to places at great distances. This paper argues that political order in wartime Syria emerges out of evolving forms of connectivity rather than purely from interaction among armed actors. It draws on a topological conception of space that foregrounds actors whose practices of wartime mobility reproduce particular kinds of distance, connection, and thus political relationships. Focusing on the cities of Jarablus and Azaz in Aleppo Province, this paper traces how these wartime mobilities have led to the creation of new centers and peripheries which do not neatly correspond to maps of territorial control, or even the map of Syria itself.

This paper deploys the concept of topology to examine the emerging geographies of in/equality in Ras Beirut, Lebanon. Known as a site of intense regeneration and social change, this neighbourhood is an interesting site for understanding the ways in which Syrian refugees have been folded into the everyday life and urban fabric of Beirut. Drawing on emerging research conducted by the RELIEF centre that examines how communities affected by mass displacement might build a prosperous and inclusive future, we trace the multiple lines of dis/connection through which Syrian refugees are included and excluded from Lebanese society. In doing so, we move beyond topographic renderings of refuge, to argue for and extend topological approaches to political space in the Levant. Such an approach is vital in the context of Lebanon because it foregrounds spaces of relief and repair for Syrian refugees.

Since the outset of the Syrian conflict, lines of support, assistance and hostility have not been bounded by the spatiality of the interstate system or that of some sectarian regional order. Transactions and movements across networks, between communities and amongst charitable organizations link imperial cores with hitherto unknown Levantine villages; Turkish border outposts with global markets; Lebanese ports with besieged Syrian towns; ISIS controlled electricity grids with regime-held areas. These linkages are far from banal. They shape interactions, resources and relationships that remain crucial to the everyday lives of Syrians, not to mention shifts and exchanges on the ‘battlefield.’ Yet their importance is not well captured by the version of the modern international that has monopolized Anglo-American international relations. Nor are they more accurately portrayed as the product of regional rivalries amongst states and their “proxies” on the ground. While students and scholars of the Middle East have largely, although not entirely, avoided these intellectual confines, discussions of certain wartime phenomena continue to lack the tools through which they can be more fully examined. Building on insights from critical human geography, this paper seeks to demonstrate the need to think “topologically” about the proximate and distant relationships shaping the daily lives of Syrians by honing in on one object crucial to their survival: bread. It draws on multi-sited research conducted between 2013-2016 to trace the pathways that make the availability of bread possible in wartime Syria. In so doing, it will illustrate the partnerships, political intermediaries, associations and connections that shape governance in two very different parts of the country (Idlib and Damascus). The more fluid set of political relationships that will be discussed help call into question the usefulness of continuing to represent rebel and regime held areas as territorially fixed. The paper concludes by discussing how thinking topologically about Syria compels us to not only see the war in a new light, but also to rethink the geographies of responsibility such that we relate to the conflict differently as well. Ultimately, and in conjunction with the rest of the panellists, the paper hopes to shift understandings of space from an ontological object characterized by its stasis to an ontogenetic one—always unfolding, produced through ongoing social processes.

To make sense of the spatial deployment of refugee flows during the Syrian civil war, current displacement needs to be studied in the context of longer mobility histories in the Levant. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Jordan with Syrian refugees originally from remote rural areas in the Homs and Aleppo governorates, this paper highlights continuities between pre-war circular migrations of Syrian peasants to Jordanian borderlands and more recent forced relocations to the same area. By asking how old and new mobilities constitute social relations among Syrian refugees and with their Jordanian hosts, it therefore suggests applying the transnationalism paradigm to the study of the displaced. While drawing inspiration from the “mobility turn” in social sciences, the paper is far from romanticizing mobility nor equating the mobile with the powerful. Rather, it paints a nuanced picture of mobility as an ambivalent lifeline for disenfranchised rural populations in times of peace and conflict. Prior to 2011, seasonal mobility of men and entire families kept precarious rural livelihoods in Syria afloat, while creating a subaltern transnational space under the radar of Jordanian immigration authorities. After the onset of the Syrian civil war, cross-border employment connections oriented flight trajectories and survival tactics in exile. However, research on remittance patterns and refugee labour shows that the closing of borders and humanitarian action have also reconfigured transnational networks. Ultimately, this paper thus argues for rethinking the relationship between power, territory and movement. It shows how violent power relations – conflict, but also more longstanding economic marginalization – put subaltern populations in place, but also into forced movement, and how the latter employ mobility, but also waiting strategies to survive and resist.