Search results

As the Syrian civil war winds down, the massive reconstruction of the devastated cities has become a recurring subject of political and scientific discussions. A crucial question pervades all these debates: is the current legal framework adequate for confronting the reconstruction challenges in an effective way? With the purpose of understanding and informing the question, this study aims to analyze the most important legal instrument for the Syrian urban reconstruction, Law 10/2018.

A functional analysis of the legal text and of its effective implementation is provided. Following a doctrinal legal approach, internal inconsistencies are highlighted, as well as possible “legal gaps” that might allow and favor instances of disrespect of the rule of law and regulatory capture.

The main hypotheses discussed are, first, from a descriptive-analytical perspective, that the neoliberal trend in the Syrian political economy underpins the legal framework for the Syrian reconstruction. Second, from a design perspective, that, while offering a strong mechanism for disciplining the Syrian urban planning, Law 10/2018 does not warrant a scenario of respect of the rule of law and seems too easy prey for regulatory capture.

While the most recent and prominent legal instrument aimed to frame Syrian post-war reconstruction, Law 10/2018, has been subject to multiple policy analyzes and critiques, these have focused almost exclusively on its presumed warchitecture dimension, lacking contextual depth and, most worryingly, ignoring any kind of doctrinal legal analysis. Setting the Law 10/2018 in its legal context is something that has not been done yet, even if, according to their own ontology, legal provisions have to be understood within the context of the legal system they are inserted in. This paper delves into the subject, analyzing the legal text, its juridical context and the way it has been interpreted by the administrative decision-maker while looking at instances where the axiological goals constitutionally proclaimed and legally enshrined might be prevented by the very regulatory configuration.

With no fund in the horizon for large-scale reconstruction in Syria due to the absence of any political deal, the Syrian government has been designing and implementing neoliberal reconstruction policies that are socially unjust, economically exclusive and politically driven.

The focus of this paper is on the latest urban policies that have been set regarding reconstruction since 2011, such as Decree 66/2012 and Law 10/2018. It also looks at the extent these legislations are negatively affecting Syrian citizens and cities. The paper explores the impact of the current reconstruction policies on the Syrian citizens starting from removing people from their home without adequately compensate them, dispossessing people of property rights, advancing the agenda of external ‘developers' and in many other ways showcasing the mentality of leveraging urban reconstruction as a powerful political tool in the conflict.

Informal housing stands out as a major challenge surrounding the massive reconstruction of Syrian cities, devastated by a bloody war and a terrible earthquake. The purpose of this article is to assess the adequacy of the Syrian Law to adequate provide a solution to this problem.

With the purpose of informing the question, this paper offers a legal-institutional analysis of the informal housing phenomenon and the corresponding regulatory responses in Syria. A literature review is conducted, and functional analysis of the legal texts and their effective implementation is provided.

First, informal housing in Syria has been fostered by the existence of an erratic regulation, particularly burdened by the incoherence of passing repressive provisions against informal housing while master plans were conspicuously absent or incomplete. Second, the regulatory policy seems to be leaning toward the urban renewal option, indicating a supply-oriented housing approach that may face serious challenges due to the scarcity of capital. In this context, regulation should not underestimate any policy tools at hand (renewal and upgrading; with the contribution of public, private and cooperative sectors).

Although there have been several studies on informal housing in Syria, none has taken a legal institutionalist approach. Furthermore, this study offers an up-to-date account of the problem, taking into account the problematic after the 2023 earthquake and the content of Law 2/2023.

This paper recovers some theoretical elements of the sociology of childhood in the Anglo-Saxon field, to discuss their contributions, scopes and limits about child agency in children living in poor and urban contexts, in Latin America. The objective is to contribute to the debates within the field of childhood from a sociological perspective that accentuate the capacity of action and resistance of children even in the framework of structural restrictions, without assuming a decontextualized and ideal approach about the agency.

The colonially imposed, exploitive, narrow meanings of gendered nurturing have limited how we as Indigenous Ubuntu discourse and dialogue about our contextually diverse, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory meanings about our experiences of being other-mothered and other-fathered (Mucina, 2018; Wane, 2000). In an effort to theorize these Ubuntu experiences of educational leadership beyond my own limited masculine understandings, I center an African intersectional feminist perspective. This theorizing perspective helps me to understand more fulsomely the political leadership women continue to offer in our Ubuntu nations, communities, and families. In this chapter, I want to share three stories about being mothered by my sister-cousin, being community-mothered across ethic identities, and how I am currently being fathered by my father's sister. I want to contend as fraught as it may be that the oratures (stories) I share convey and communicate our understanding of nurturing beyond procreation, which is an important aspect of Ubuntu educational leadership. For example, the orature (story) that I will share about female-fathering offers evidence, which challenges the binary of fathering as a set gendered activity. I also view the telling of these Indigenous Ubuntu stories as an act of creating what Shiv Visvanathan (2016) identified as making space for “cognitive justice.” For me, this means moving our Ubuntu knowledges from the colonially created margins to the shared center of diverse multiple knowledges.

In this chapter, we share narratives from our personal experiences with a shared focus on the relationships between personal identities and family language. The acquisition of a family language is said to be accompanied by a specific ‘intercultural burden’ (Kagan 2012), which is manifested at the intersection of different influences and psychological tensions. This psychosocial and cultural reality has the potential for the development of a true intercultural identity that brings together contradictions and conflicts of inherited cultural differences. Here, through a prism of three personal narratives, we create a series of questions and reflections in relation to the family language. The three voices are articulated through three auto-ethnographic accounts of individuals – two linguists and a theatre scholar who are both personally and professionally invested in the topic of post-migration. The common thread of the three narratives is the experience of Serbian as the first language. As an aspect of personal identity, the idealised concept of family language affects one's identity and makes a decisive impact on investment and potentially life-defining decisions.