State Building and Bread: Sovereignty in Contested Syria

[00:00:15]morning everyone I'm Jose martinz I'm uh as M said I'm a PhD student in political science before I begin I just wanted to thank uh Naim Jenna and ACH for inviting me I grew up in a small island in the Caribbean called Rico and South Africa its struggle for uh self-determination its example of non-violent resistance I always stood out as an example for us so to be here is uh is quite a distinct honor and pleasure so today I'm going to talk about uh theories of sovereignty and then I'm going to try to bring it back and uh talk about the Syrian Civil War I'm going to dwell quite a bit on Theory here because I think the concepts we use and the terms we employ to study places like like Syria are important so uh forgive me for this but I'm going to take many of you back I guess to political science uh 101 so sovereignty uh it's a term we throw around we like to use it and generally when political scientists talk about sovereignty they refer back to Max vaper's uh kind of original definition which is uh the institutional bureaucracy that claims the monopo the Monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force with within a given territory so this is the classic definition it's the one we constantly use it's the basis of much of international law and I think there's a problem with this definition and I think it hinders our analysis and my my first and primary critique of it is that it equates the state Sovereign sovereignty and territory basically it imagines all states uniformly exerting their control over what are kind of the static uh spaces of territory so imagine when we talk about States when we talk about international law this is the the conceptual apparatus that is implicitly operating almost always but as most people here know no such Monopoly in Syria exists I mean this is an old map of the regions controlled and the areas controlled by different fighting forces but where exactly is the institutional bureaucracy with the Monopoly on legitimate use of force I mean clearly there's more than than one group competing for sovereignty and here's another map also a bit dated but it shows the variety of people struggling in over control and how about the legitimate use of force I mean I think it'd be hard to claim that any one group in Syria has the Monopoly on uh on the legitimate use of force so I think clearly what we need to do is to decouple sovereignty the state and territory and I'm going to try to show why that is an important kind of theoretical move so over the last 10 years especially over over the last uh five kind of a growing literature has emerged called The Rebel governance literature and what it tries to do is to say okay in war zones clearly there is not just uh we don't just live in a Hoban world right where Li where life is nasty rudish and short where there's Anarchy and Chaos there are other groups competing and offering public services and the term that they've that this literature and these Scholars have come up with are Rebel governance and I've put up here some of the main sources if anyone would like to go and and read some of this and they push against I guess the classic uh assumptions of the literature that are you know there there's one uh institutional bureaucracies that has the Monopoly un legitimate force and they study places like Colombia all sorts of different countries in Africa where there various people trying to claim uh sovereignty and uh legitimacy and what they claim is that we have competing sovereigns and I think this is uh quite a useful lens it can help us study why different Rebel groups and insurgencies provide Public Services right I think it can also help us look at things like judicial institutions right why is it that Rebel groups in uh throughout the African continent in the Middle East have established uh these sorts of uh public services but I still believe this approach which is kind of the most Innovative and Cutting Edge has some very serious limitations and I think for one it can only accommodate and do justice to wellestablished Rebels and government forces so this is kind of what I see as the classic Paradigm of Rebel governance right you have good guys you have bad guys they both don't look particularly nice and they both are trying to secure a monopo un legitimate use of force but I think this approach has no anal analytical room for actors that play a key role in Syria I mean this is a very crude cartoon but clearly it points to the fact that all sorts of international actors are uh rolling the dice as we as one would say right and uh there obviously other actors involved in the Syrian theater and in Iraq as well but the rebel governance assumes these two sovereigns right we have one against the other but it has no analytical space how can we analyze what it is that these Regional actors are doing I also don't think it has space for humanitarian actors I mean 15 to 35% of syrians now depend for their livelihood on the provision of of of uh foreign aid International Aid generally provided by the UN world food program and its local its local um kind of or the organizations it outsources it works it's works too so I think uh yeah the predominant approach cannot help explain what it is these actors are doing so basically what we have is this in the classical Vision right you have two you have the rebels you have the government and the civilians are stuck in the middle and there's no one else participating right but I think uh what it misses out on is uh as Charles Tilly this kind of eminent scholar that Ibrahim mentioned yesterday is that most people most of the time in war zones are interacting in non-violent ways and I think Iman andara's presentations helped show there's a lot going on in these places it's not just violence war and fighting so I think uh when I was trying to make sense of what was going on in Syria I found a few kind of post structural approaches very useful and I'm going to try to outline this now but it is quite crude because of because of time but I'm happy to talk about to talk more about this in the in the Q&A so I draw mainly on fuk aguman and aguman is this very interesting Italian political theorist who traces his conception of sovereignty back to Roman law and his contention is that sovereignty is not an Institutional bureaucracy with the controls over the Monopoly and legitimate Force but it's the Monopoly to decide kind of who lives or dies generally through the law but not necessarily and what I find a gumin useful for is kind of decoupling sovereignty from the state right so it's no longer State actors who are sovereign or as the rebel governance literature would argue it's not just Rebels either but it's a it's more complex and then uh what aguman what people who have studied aguman and have used him have argued is that what we see when we apply his theoretical lens to places like Syria and Iraq is mobile sovereignties graduated sovereignties right where the Monopoly to decide shifts right and I think this is very useful for studying uh the Islamic State because its territorial control is fluid its boundaries are also fluid some places have been under its control for longer but others are uh are shifting are not necessarily stable so I think uh it shows us that sovereignty is constantly in production right we do not need to think of it as a static uh sort of sort of order and I think the empirical added value which I'll go on to now is that we can more fully grasp its iterations uh during the Syrian conflict and I see State Building the provision of everyday what we conceive of as state Services as an attempt to strive uh for sovereignty so I'm going to talk now a little bit about uh the Islamic State and these are some of I mean this is also a map from about a year ago and uh most of my most of the information I draw on comes from interviews from information released by the information office of the of where most people call it describe it as the epomis capital of the Islamic State so it's been of control of around 2 million residents this obviously fluctuates in 21,000 Square km and it's the place where Isis has been control for the longest and the most consistent and has been able to develop its kind of administrative apparatus in the most extensive ways so what do we see Isis do in the places of controls and I mean Ian and Mara have gone into this at length but I think I want to dwell on what has been uh published for internal consumption so in their internal pamphlets they talk about agriculture there's a very elaborate plan for growing wheat there's a public service department the DW Alat which does things like pick up trash fill up potholes on the street all the things you would expect of kind of your local municipal government there's education which Iman also touched upon there's public security there's a court system there's flour provision and then uh my own interest is in their uh in their bread in the provision of bread and what it means and what it demonstrates about the Islamic State so I want to dwell on bread a bit here because uh subsidized bread is one of the the most longest standing welfare programs in Syria so beginning in 1970 when Bashar Al Al Assad's father took over the country for the last 40 years 45 years syrians have been receiving subsidized bread it cost around 12 cents a kilo it's been the same price for 20 years and H alassad uh took counsel from the Soviets actually in the early '70s who told him you need to control wheat and bread this is our experience and he elaborated a kind of a development plan in which from the beginning of the supply chain Until the End wheat was completely controlled by the Syrian government so farmers grew wheat with seeds given to them by the government with fertilizer subsidized in turn by the government they were only allowed to sell their wheat to the the government's agricultural Ministry who then sent it to flower mills controlled by the government who then distributed to bakeries who had to give it at a certain price so over 45 years and uh I mean the ubiquity of bakeries in Syria for anyone who was able to visit before the war was incredible right there was one in every corner people depended it depended on it for their kind of their subsistence their everyday livelihoods in certain areas of uh of Syria before the war 40% of caloric expenditures came from from bread so I guess it's no surprise that most groups in Syria both Rebel Islamic State and the ypg once they take over a new section of the country one of the first things they do is to take control of the bakery in the flower Mill and to provide bread I mean it's a classic example of a state service an example of exerting your sovereignty that Syrian citizens find to be very important and there have been protests in all areas of Syria where bread has been of uh bad quality or as bread has been of uh has has not been available to all of its residents right and this shows also I think the agency that civilians have in war zone and how their demands can alter the patterns of governance in certain places so what I have founded uh and many others is that especially in it ear in its early iterations kind of 2014 the first half 2015 Isis kind of constantly found the need to perform the state right to strive for sovereignty and it did this through kind of the micro practices of authority which iman's documents I mean do an incredible task of kind of demonstrating right they they want to strive to look like a state to act like a state and this involves a symbolic acts of statehood like setting up a education system like a how do you say um like collecting taxes as Mara said and then everyday techniques of governance like uh providing bread and what I think these do is more than just a kind of co-opt local residents keep them quiet but I think it also is crucial to giving a governing Authority like the Islamic State its institutional appearance and its power and ironically over the last um six or seven months because of a host of factors but it has a lot to do with kind of the bombing efforts led by Russia and the Coalition one of the first things that Isis has had to retract for lack of funds is its uh bread provision services and you've seen increasing levels of of protests in certain areas so I think a crucial thing when we Ponder the area the areas that Isis has controlled especially going forward is to dissect these kind of everyday Services right what are they doing are they they uh are they successful how is it that they go about performing like a state trying to demonstrate their Authority and not just for Isis right but for every other Group performing in Syria I think one of uh the key tasks of any kind of governing Authority whether it be at the local level the regional or the national if if we want to ponder what the S the options for the Iraqi government is going forward is to act like a state right to perform services that are expected by by its population I think the added value of this approach is to ponder right who is The Sovereign when we look at an area in Syria or Iraq I think minbid is a very interesting place to ponder because of uh kind of the Coalition forces with the the I guess the Syrian Democratic forces as they're called is probably going to take over the area before the take over the area in the next month and it's an interesting case because in mbid before the Islamic State took over one of the first things it did was to take over a flower Mill just outside the the town and one of the biggest demands of the local coordination Council which are these like local bodies that that offer administrative services in Rebel held areas was to demand from foreign donors flour and bread right this is something we need to be able to feed the local population maintain their allegiance and the Islamic State very cleverly took over it right so now that they are very probably going to get uh kicked out I think it'll be interesting to see if the Syrian Democratic forces if the administrative the civilian kind of administrative structure does things like like provide bread so I think uh wondering who violence legit is legitimate and who is Sovereign in these sort of situations it's a difficult question right I mean this is a a parody here but as we all know I mean the Russians have been very uh very involved let's say in the Syrian theater and is their violence legitimate is it not so under the classical definition it's difficult to answer who who would be the Sovereign in Syria right because you have all sorts of actors participating who has the Monopoly to decide this is a local Dean deciding I think it is on Tri on yeah it's a tribal council who's trying to decide uh I believe this is the case of uh of One Tribe which was loyal to the Assad regime and what to do with them and uh so they clearly have some uh decision-making power and then the other question is uh yeah who has the Monopoly to decide who lives or dies when so many syrians are dependent on foreign aid clearly the world food program wields incredible Sovereign power right when you feed 15 to 35% of the population you you wield a certain sort of uh Authority so I think these actors need to be integrated into our way of thinking about sovereignty and statemaking and I want to dwell on this last picture a bit just to kind of demonstrate the importance of what I was saying this is a world food program package and you can see it just sticking out on the left the the slogan of the world food program and Isis uh the Islamic State took uh took these uh food packages that were being they were supposed to be sent I think it's to idlib they they took them and then they recovered them with their own propaganda de you know announcing that they were the ones Distributing bread and it wasn't the UN so the fact that they took and I believe there were 7,000 packages in this delivery the fact that they took so much effort to put their own sort of propaganda on top of the un's I think demonstrates the importance of being seen to be acting like a state during during a civil war so what I found and what I think it is important to think about is that sovereignty in these places is not uniform it's not easy to Define but it's shared or contested by an array of organizations and the poststructural kind of approaches that I've mentioned can integrate all these actors in ways that I think kind of the classical definition simply cannot and I think what we see in Syria is a a field of contingent or mobile sovereignties right and what is uh necessary to ponder going forward is that populations throughout the country have been subject to different forms of rule and citizenship right so what does that mean for National reconciliation what does that mean for State Building in the future when everyone has had various experiences of local governance for the last four or five years and the longer it lasts the more varying these experiences will come right so I think when sovereignty is tentative when it's hard to Define emergent and constantly shifting I think a useful lens is to look at the mundane right to return to that which we tend to under estimate but when you don't have running water or electricity or food to feend your family the mundane becomes uh very important so I think we should Ponder these kind of symbolic acts of statehood these everyday techniques of governance and of course this is an exaggeration because it's my own field of study and Specialty but in some ways it is uh all about [Applause] bread