Nasser Rabbat and Deen Sharp (eds.), Reconstruction as Violence in Assad’s Syria (American University in Cairo Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Deen Sharp (DS): In 2018 I joined the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, directed by Nasser Rabbat, as a post-doctoral fellow. In 2019, Nasser and I organized the conference “Reconstruction as Violence in Aleppo” at MIT, which brought together many of the contributors who later formed the core of this edited volume, alongside additional scholars invited during the editorial processes. For me, the conference built directly on earlier work at the intersection of urban theory and war, including my 2016 chapter on urbicide in Syria in Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings, where I argued that acts of construction must be understood as integral to urban conflict. The concept of “reconstruction as violence” thus emerged as a continuation and deepening of this line of inquiry. The timing of the conference was also significant, coinciding with the proliferation of large-scale, highly-technical—and all too often overtly apolitical—reconstruction studies on Syria produced by international organizations. Many of these studies neglected the aspirations of the Syrian population and questions of the right to the city, an issue that Nasser and I discussed extensively and that ultimately shaped both the conference and this volume.
Nasser Rabbat (NR): The book developed out of the 2019 MIT conference and was subsequently modified and expanded to include additional contributors whose work we considered essential to the project. The conference itself formed part of a broader three-year project at AKPIA entitled Ethics of Reconstruction, which brought together several postdoctoral researchers working on questions of destruction, reconstruction, and memory, and culminated in two conferences as well as this publication.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
DS: The contributors to the book come from a range of disciplines, from human rights law to art history, urban studies, and architecture, and subsequently the book address a range of topics and issues in relation to the idea of “reconstruction as violence”. The Syrian architect and urbanist Ammar Azzouz, through extensive interviews with his fellow Homsis, examines the war in his city through the concept of domicide, the deliberate destruction of home. For Azzouz, the concept of domicide enabled him to recount the impact of the war at the everyday urban level rather than the typical focus on world heritage sites, such as the Palmyra. Art historian Heghnar Watenpaugh provides a deep historical overview of the struggles over what constitutes cultural heritage in Aleppo and the power struggles around it. The architect Omar Ferwati introduces the idea of civilian crisis architecture that focuses on “construction in the heat of conflict”. In my chapter, I build on the work of the architectural theorist Paul Virilio and his idea of endo- and exo-colonization, in focusing on how the construction and planning of the built environment can be part of warfare.
NR: The most important point that the book makes, and the one undergirding most of its essays, is the insistence on the civic and ethical dimension of any intervention in the built environment. A corollary point is that reconstruction cannot happen without the direct involvement of the ultimate stakeholders, the people whose neighborhoods have been destroyed and who have been displaced and who are now coming back to participate in the rebuilding of the country on just, fair, and representative bases.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
DS: Perhaps naively we hope that those engaged in the physical reconstruction of Syria—from academics and architects to urban planners and government officials—will read this book. In post-Assad Syria, there is a space for real politically and socially engaged dialogue over what the reconstruction should looks like and how it should be conducted. I do hope that this book is engaged within Syria. There is of course a lot of uncertainty that remains and opaque geopolitical maneuverings over the reconstruction. But the hope is that the book serves as a warning of what not to do and to contribute to pushing the reconstruction in Syria to less violent ends and more just, beautiful, and sustainable outcomes.
NR: We are now trying to translate and publish an Arabic version of the book for the benefit of our Arabic-speaking readers, who are ultimately our most important audience. We are negotiating with a publisher in the Arab world and hope to conclude an agreement soon.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
DS: I am currently working on a special issue for the Urban Studies Journal on the Urbanization of Conflict and Conflict Urbanization that I hope will be complete by the end of 2026. This special issue includes my own writings that continue to focus the intersection of urban theory and war to enhance our understanding of the impact of conflict on the formation of our cities and the processes of urbanization.
NR: I am working on an edited book on the cultural history of Syria that spans the period from the third century BCE to the present, and argues for continuity across time and epochs. Alongside this, I am working on another book on the history of Mamluk Cairo and a novel that imagines the life of Abu Shama, a thirteenth-century historian from Damascus.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction)
INTRODUCTION
RECONSTRUCTION AS VIOLENCE
Nasser Rabbat and Deen Sharp
Tyranny is more lethal than plague, more horrible than fire, more destructive than flood, more humiliating than begging. When it enslaves people, you can hear their souls praying to God for justice, and their land calling for mercy.
‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1854–1902)
Cities are the most complex product of human societies. Ever since their first documented emergence in lower Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, cities have controlled most of the organizational functions that define, govern, structure, nurture, and hierarchize people living within their boundaries or in their hinterlands, near and far. They have been the locus of power and the seat of government, the framer of identity and the promoter of individuality, the manager and consumer of surplus produced elsewhere, and the predominant site of commercial, social, and cultural exchange in all settled communities. In short, cities have been synonymous with civilization: they have been both the most effective civilizational gauge and the embodiment of various civilizations of the past. Names such as Thebes, Babylon, Athens, Rome, Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, Tenochtitlan, Constantinople/Istanbul, and Paris not only designate some of the greatest cities in human history; they also epitomize the civilizations that built them and prospered in them. It is no wonder the two words, cities and civilization, are cognates in many literary languages: Greek, Latin and Romance languages, and Arabic (madina for the former and madaniya for the latter). And it is also no wonder that building cities has been one of the utmost acts of sovereignty throughout history, while capturing them has been one of the surest signs of political and military triumph.
Ironically though, the destruction of cities has carried connotations of power and dominion not so different from those of construction, as if the two acts were the opposite faces of the same emblematic coin. Gods destroyed cities as punishment, retribution, or projection of their divine power. Yahweh in the Tanakh boasts of the destruction of many sinful or vainglorious cities of ancient nations. He even warns the Israelites, his chosen people, of his destructive wrath when he decrees their first exile to Babylon: “The inhabited cities will be laid waste and the land will be a desolation. All so you will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 12:20). He was not the only destroyer though. Other leading gods in the ancient world also employed the destruction of cities to vent their anger and punish those who strayed from their worship. Likewise, powerful kings, many of whom fancied themselves as partially or fully divine, deployed the destruction of cities as a mark of their absolute power, or as the fulfillment of an oath, dream, or divine intervention. Thus, we have a long record of civic devastation. Each left behind scattered ruins and slowly fading memories, which often became the kernels of myths and legends.
The rise of the nation-state and the parallel development of firearms and cannons from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries meant that the motivation for conquest and the capacity for destruction escalated significantly. The cities destroyed during the European wars of nation building, for instance, which have since disappeared from the map, are too numerous to list. Similarly, the colonization of the four corners of the world after the age of discovery by the rising European naval powers led to the destruction of countless cities in the Americas, Africa, and Asia that vanished with little record or architectural traces to be remembered or reimagined. In modern times, new factors entered the causative inventory that have to do with enormous advances in the technologies and strategies of destruction and reconstruction coupled with the modernist philosophical and legal reframing of the individual and the collective, as well as the rise of economics to the top of the modern state’s metrics of self-evaluation and international standing.
All along, the destruction of cities has been foremost an architectural and urban gesture of no less importance than the construction of cities, which gave us the critical term urbicide, coined after the destructive streak of the grand American urban vision of the 1960s. Urbicide is articulated primarily in relation to genocide and refers to the intentional destruction of the city; as Marshall Berman notably wrote, urbicide is the killing of the city.
Syria was one of the most drastic cases of urbicide recently. Since 2011, we have witnessed once again 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 the Syrian war, shared through countless news reports and social media videos and images, pushed urbanists to reconceptualize their terminology in order to grasp the vast unmaking of the country’s cities. In a 2016 essay, Deen Sharp utilized the concept of urbicide in an attempt to comprehend the urban destruction of Syria beyond the framing as simply the evil inherent in conflict or wanton destruction. Synthesizing previous work by urban studies scholars on urbicide, he stressed not only the significance of destroying the built environment in urban conflict, but also its construction and planning. Sharp defined urbicide to be the violent struggle over urban arrangements, one that can entail the destruction and construction of the built environment. In addition to these extremes, urbicide also entails intermediate processes, such as looting or controlling access to infrastructure like electricity, water systems, or roads, either by granting or denying it.
Building upon this conceptualization of urbicide in the case of Syria, we—Deen Sharp and Nasser Rabbat—placed the concept of “reconstruction as violence” as the central framing idea for a conference that took place in May 2019 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sponsored by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Developing the symposium’s papers, debates, and conclusion, we invited several scholars to contribute their observations on and analysis of reconstruction efforts in Syria or to provide a comparative frame for such analysis. The result is this edited volume, which combines papers presented at the 2019 symposium with freshly commissioned papers that complement the symposium’s aims and explore various aspects of destruction and planned reconstruction in Syria in further detail.
Since initiating this scholarly dialogue in 2019 on the political and social implications of reconstruction in Syria, the urgency of this conversation has only intensified. The seismic earthquake on February 6, 2023 that devastated large parts of Turkey and Syria exacerbated an already decimated urban landscape. In north-eastern Syria, the earthquake’s human toll and destruction to the built environment were magnified by the political failures and ongoing conflict in the country. A political earthquake soon followed. On December 8, 2024, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied rebel groups toppled the Assad regime, ending fifty-three years of its authoritarian rule. The regime’s collapse has profoundly altered Syria’s social and physical landscape, though the situation remains volatile. As of April 2025, cautious optimism persists both domestically and internationally that Syria might transition to a post-authoritarian era, fulfilling long-held aspirations for social justice, economic empowerment, and freedom.
This book aspires to serve both as a historical testament and cautionary narrative. It documents the Assad regime’s use of reconstruction as a weapon of war and as a tool of colonial-style oppression, a theme explored in our 2019 conference “Reconstruction as Violence.” That event emerged amid apolitical discourse on Syria’s rebuilding efforts, even as the regime and its adversaries weaponized urban planning to entrench power. Today, as Syria confronts the challenges of transitioning to a post-authoritarian future, such critical historical analysis is indispensable. We offer this work as a guide for rebuilding cities that are not only functional, but just, beautiful, and equitable.