Deen Sharp is a visiting fellow at the Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science. He was formerly a fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the co-editor of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Urban Research, 2016) and Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope (American University in Cairo Press, 2021). He has written for a number of publications, including, Jadaliyya, Portal 9, MERIP, Arab Studies Journal, and The Guardian. He has worked for several UN agencies, including UNDP and UN-Habitat, governments and international NGOs. Twitter: @deensharp
Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. His most recent books are ‘Imarat al-Mudun al-Mayyita (The Architecture of the Dead Cities, 2018), and an online book, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS, co-edited with Pamela Karimi (2016). His book on the great fifteenth century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi came out in late 2022. Twitter: @nasserrabbat
The following excerpt is the latest in Democracy in Exile's book series. The edited excerpt comes from the introduction to "Reconstruction as Violence," edited by Nasser Rabbat and Deen Sharp. The book can be purchased via the publisher, American University in Cairo (AUC) Press.
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In 2017, Bashar al-Assad delivered a macabre speech that was supposed to mark the start of reconstruction in Syria. While acknowledging that the conflict had cost many lives, he declared that Syria had gained a "healthier and more homogenous society." This chilling statement encapsulates what we call "reconstruction as violence"—the weaponization of rebuilding to cement demographic change, eliminate opposition and secure hegemonic control.
Since 2011, we have witnessed how modern technologies can enact destruction on an enormous scale in the wake of the Assad regime's brutal attempt to eradicate the popular uprising against its authoritarian rule. The scenographic urban horror of Syria's war, shared through countless news reports and social media, has pushed urbanists to reconceptualize their terminology to grasp the vast unmaking of the country's cities. Yet even as the destruction continues, a parallel process unfolds: reconstruction deployed not as healing but as another form of violence.
The Seismic Shifts: From Earthquake to Regime Collapse
Since initiating our scholarly dialogue in 2019 on the political and social implications of reconstruction in Syria, the urgency of this conversation has only intensified. The earthquake on Feb. 6, 2023, that devastated large parts of Turkey and Syria exacerbated an already decimated urban landscape. In northeastern Syria, the earthquake's human toll and destruction were magnified by political failures and ongoing conflict. A political earthquake soon followed. On Dec. 8, 2024, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied rebel groups toppled the Assad regime, ending fifty-three years of authoritarian rule.
The scenographic urban horror of Syria's war, shared through countless news reports and social media, has pushed urbanists to reconceptualize their terminology to grasp the vast unmaking of the country's cities.
- Nasser Rabbat and Deen Sharp
This book now serves both as historical testament and cautionary narrative. It documents the Assad regime's use of reconstruction as a weapon of war—a theme we explored in our 2019 conference "Reconstruction as Violence." As Syria confronts the challenges of transitioning to a post-authoritarian future, such critical historical analysis becomes indispensable. We offer this work as a guide for rebuilding cities that are not only functional but just, beautiful and equitable.
Despite Syria's descent into lawlessness, the Assad regime was highly attentive from the conflict's start to issuing new laws that consolidated its control, particularly regarding housing, land and property. The year 2012 marked a turning point in the weaponization of property and urban planning laws. Through what Emma DiNapoli terms "legal regimes of urbicidal reconstruction" in the book, previously heterogeneous spaces of urban mixing are homogenized.
To understand how reconstruction intersected with violence, we must first grasp Syria's property landscape. Before the war, only about half of Syrian land was formally registered with proper documentation. Many Syrians, especially the urban poor, lived in informal settlements; areas built without official permits or on unregistered land. This pre-existing informality provided the regime with a lever: It could criminalize, demolish or reallocate entire districts under the guise of legality. The conflict dramatically expanded this informality.
As Valérie Clerc details in this volume, while state authorities were preoccupied with suppressing demonstrations, residents took advantage to construct illegal buildings, add floors to existing structures and create entirely new neighbourhoods without permits. Simultaneously, the destruction of homes drove displaced populations to create makeshift shelters wherever possible. The war thus transformed Syria's already complex property landscape into an even more precarious terrain of informal ownership and a political instrument readily weaponized by the Assad-led state.
Urbicide: The Killing and Remaking of Cities
The destruction of Syrian cities represents one of the most drastic cases of urbicide in recent history. Urbicide is articulated primarily in relation to genocide and has traditionally referred to the intentional destruction of urban life and the built environment. As Marshall Berman notably wrote, urbicide is the killing of the city. But in Syria, we witness something more complex than destruction alone.
Building upon the concept of urbicide, we argue that reconstruction itself can be a form of violence. Several contributors to this volume employ urbicide as a framework. Sawsan Abou Zainedin utilizes the concept to show how urban sites were systematically targeted to eliminate opposition communities. Ammar Azzouz advances the concept of domicide—focusing on the destruction of homes rather than cities—to shift attention from monumental sites toward everyday spaces. As he argues, domicide brings the meaning of loss closer to the pain and voice of the Syrian people.
Deen Sharp's definition of urbicide as the violent struggle over urban arrangements encompasses both destruction and construction of the built environment. This includes intermediate processes such as controlling access to infrastructure—granting or denying electricity, water or road access. The overarching goal, as Sharp outlines, is hegemony. Reconstruction as violence is used to "secure the area" and enforce internal colonization, pursued through rubble removal, legal regimes and urban planning.
Centering Syrian Voices Against "Objective" Reconstruction
Reconstruction discussions, whether led by the Assad regime or in international forums, frequently marginalize Syrian civilians and experts. By excluding these voices, both local expertise and lived experiences are sidelined, creating a disconnect between envisioned reconstruction and actual population needs. International contributors often justified this exclusion under the guise of objectivity, claiming their observations and recommendations are unbiased by possible nationalist or sectarian leanings.
We offer this work as a guide for rebuilding cities that are not only functional but just, beautiful and equitable.
- Nasser Rabbat and Deen Sharp
This book stands as the antithesis to claims of objective or politically neutral reconstruction in Syria, or anywhere else. It emphasizes Syria's socio-political and economic history, particularly the turbulent years right before and during the conflict, as the requisite framework for any critical thinking about reconstruction. "Reconstruction as Violence" approaches its topic with a recognition of the subjective underpinnings of any interpretive history and affirms its subjectivities front and center.
The historical depth necessary for understanding reconstruction is exemplified in Nasser Rabbat's contribution, which traces Syria's long and manifold history—from colonial legacies that produced contemporary forms of confused national identity and sectarian violence, to the heritage of multi- and inter-culturalism that defined the country for two millennia. Any reconstruction, Rabbat asserts, must attend to the long and complex heterogeneity that constitutes Syria.
He warns that reconstruction cannot be a straightforward act of rebuilding, but must address the underlying roots that produced Syria's disastrous political conditions. Without confronting the political tyranny, economic corruption and ideological perversions imposed for decades, reconstruction risks reinforcing societal divisiveness and urban degradation in potentially more malign forms.
Most importantly, this book advocates for the inclusion of Syrian expert voices in the evaluation and critique of reconstruction literature and in conceptualizing comprehensive approaches to reconstruction. Rather than maintaining distance from the conflict and existing proposals for reconstruction, we push our analysis closer to the streets, homes and political discourses occurring within Syrian contexts.
Our contributors include Syrian architects and scholars who draw on intimate knowledge: Rim Lababidi begins with her memories of Aleppo's suq and her great-grandfather's fabric shop, passed down through generations. Ammar Azzouz, a "Homsi," demands we focus on the intimate spaces of homes in conflict, not only iconic sites. He draws on dozens of interviews with residents from his home city, narrating their stories of war's consequences. Sawsan Abou Zainedin sources her analysis from countless conversations with friends and colleagues, many personally caught up in the conflict and displaced by it.
This is not to suggest that only Syrians can speak about Syria's internationalized destruction. Many contributors to this book are not Syrian but have sustained engagement with the country that allows them to empathize with its people and their struggle. Syria and Syrians need international solidarity in all its manifestations, not just with reconstruction of their destroyed country. But the persistent marginalization of Syrian voices undermines the legitimacy of reconstruction efforts and perpetuates the top-down, externalized approach that contributed to the conflict in the first place.
Such frameworks dangerously depoliticize the conflict, reducing it to a humanitarian crisis while turning immense human suffering and urban devastation into opportunities for profit extraction through reconstruction. The lack of any political, social, historical or economic context in many technically driven reconstruction proposals risks further entrenching the violence of this conflict into the rebuilding process. Reconstruction is political, social and historical, and must be engaged with as such.
Toward Reconstruction as Liberation
The focus on reconstruction as violence aims to ensure that reconstruction efforts are directed toward a just peace, community building and decolonization—that is, reconstruction as liberation. Ultimately, this book is grounded in the Lefebvrian idea that space holds the promise of liberation and that people have a right to a city free from oppression and tyranny.
The need for more critical, analytical and nuanced understandings of reconstruction in Syria's case—not to mention the broader Arab world, where Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Sudan all experience some type of large-scale urban reconstruction—is urgent. The book thus espouses the critical revolutionary imperative that another Syria, another world, is possible and desirable.
