Abstract
This chapter investigates the shifting dynamics of risk that arose during the first year of the Syrian Uprising, focussing specifically on the period of March 2011 until the author’s departure from Syria in January 2012. Employing mosques, graffiti and social media as our ethnographic axes of enquiry, the chapter begins with an examination of the mosque as a ‘traditional’ site of protest at the start of the uprising and its subsequent ‘silencing’ as such by the Syrian regime. Following this, the chapter then traces some of the various ‘non-traditional’ forms of ‘leaderless resistance’ (Ross 2011) with which opposition activists then responded, including graffiti and social media, in order to subvert regime attempts to silence them and, in the words of Richard Rorty (1979), ‘keep the conversation going’. The chapter then concludes by employing Rorty’s philosophy to take a ‘conversational approach to risk’ in light of the ethnographic examples presented.
Published Version
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