Search results

This paper aims to illustrate some of the negative heritage created in Syria over the 11 bloody years following the start of the uprising in 2011 and how this heritage can be managed to promote justice.

Different motives and methods for negative heritage management are exemplified and compared to find out the most appropriate one(s) that can be adapted and adopted in the Syrian context. Based mainly on Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports, suggestions are made for the management of three cases of negative heritage in Syria by planning measures and solutions to promote justice. The three cases are the targeting of schools and hospitals, chemical attacks and Aleppo’s River Massacre. The effectiveness of the proposals is discussed and piloted by conducting a one-on-one conversational interview in 2021, related to the first proposal, and soliciting feedback on a social media platform, related to the third proposal.

Values-centred preservation based on the efforts of the community concerned with negative heritage, rather than the four existing governments in Syria, can lead to good management of recent negative heritage. The proposed virtual application of the proposals is a step that may itself be useful and may facilitate future practical application, as most of the exemplified sites are no longer accessible on the ground.

Ethically productive management of the negative heritage is promoted to seek more value-oriented dimensions of the conflict. Considering a fruitful use of the conflict in Syria can encourage positive thinking and counter the passive attitude towards the prolonged conflict.

Several historical examples are given that indicate that people taken prisoner appear to psychically freeze and/or become compliant to their captors, even when death at the captors' hands is imminent and when small numbers of captors make escape a real possibility. It is argued that: freezing is a normative response to apparently inescapable capture; ‘escapability’ of capture is underestimated as a result of freezing; and rebellion is rare. Psychological theories of this psychic freezing include: 1) social psychological explanations of learned helplessness in prisoners; 2) trauma reactions of dissociation and numbing; and 3) studies from affective neuroscience suggesting freezing is a brain response to a perceived inescapable attack and may be related to hiding.