Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria

by Lisa Wedeen

If the Arab uprisings initially heralded the end of tyrannies and a move toward liberal democratic governments, their defeat not only marked a reversal but was of a piece with emerging forms of authoritarianism worldwide. In Authoritarian Apprehensions , Lisa Wedeen draws on her decades-long engagement with Syria to offer an erudite and compassionate analysis of this extraordinary rush of events—the revolutionary exhilaration of the initial days of unrest and then the devastating violence that shattered hopes of any quick undoing of dictatorship. Developing a fresh, insightful, and theoretically imaginative approach to both authoritarianism and conflict, Wedeen asks, What led a sizable part of the citizenry to stick by the regime through one atrocity after another? What happens to political judgment in a context of pervasive misinformation? And what might the Syrian example suggest about how authoritarian leaders exploit digital media to create uncertainty, political impasses, and fractures among their citizens?
 
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a variety of Syrian artistic practices, Wedeen lays bare the ideological investments that sustain ambivalent attachments to established organizations of power and contribute to the ongoing challenge of pursuing political change. This masterful book is a testament to Wedeen’s deep engagement with some of the most troubling concerns of our political present and future.

Genres: Middle East, Politics, Political Science

285 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2019

About the author

Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in comparative politics, the Middle East, political theory, and feminist theory. Wedeen received her Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Hanna Pitkin. She has taught courses on nationalism, identity formation, power and resistance, and citizenship. Her work on the Middle East includes Ambiguities of Domination, an ethnographic study of the culture of the spectacle in Syria under Hafez al-Assad. In addition to writing and teaching, Wedeen sits on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture, an interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies.

Reviews

[Muhammad Ahmad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is a book written by an intelligent person who clearly knows Syria but ends up confounding the reader because in an attempt to uphold postmodernist dogma she has to level truth and nonsense. Everything is a "narrative" and all "truth claims" are equally valid with the ultimate purpose of establishing uncertainty, which is an inescapable human condition. This leads her to write atrocious sentences like these:

"And here, too, science worked less to establish truth (or falsify fallacious claims) than to convert what might have been provisionally consensual knowledge into entrenched political conviction, including the conviction that we can never know what happened. The scientific democratization of expression personified by Higgins could not override the views of experts like Lloyd and Postol, but those MIT-authorized scientists could do nothing more than produce knowledgeable speculations in a world saturated by claims at work reinstantiating communities of agreement already in place."

The book is full of this turgid prose. Which is my other issue with postmodern theorists. Why can't they speak human? Why do they write in this weird language that is alien to most readers and leaves even academics mystified?

[Yaaser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inconsistently good, not-so-beautifully written, and a bit overindulgent of postmodernism and psychoanalysis. Other than that, it's a rich and useful analysis of the workings of ideology and symbolism before and throughout the Syrian war.

Wedeen starts her book well and ends it well, laying out in the introduction key theoretical notions she employs to analyze the forms of rhetorical and symbolic power the regime has enjoyed. The final chapter also provides a fresh take on sectarianism as "residual" cum "emergent sociality", a structure of feeling evoked by historical and quasi-factual anxieties. One significant and exuberantly delineated idea of Chapter 3 is that the regime's survival was crucially dependent on a "silent majority", and that this was produced and reproduced by a latent ideology embedded in the regime's social and political world, including widespread efforts to sow doubts and relativize the truth. Added to that are the fantasy investments by a new generation in the allure of a good life and the temptation of shuting down any public demands.

The remaining chapters mainly tackle what Lisa Wedeen persistently calls "neoliberal autocracy" and its "unmaking", with her ethnographic data being interviews with Syrian interlocutors, the PR products of the first family, and a variety of films, TV series, documentaries and web shows before and after the uprising. At times, the book feels like a media or cultural studies piece of work rather than political or social science, with something perceivably missing between the Syrian communities she refers to and the select representations she uses to analyze their realities. A good book for theoretically oriented "students" of Syria, but not necessarily a must for general analysts.

[Emma Roshan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unnecessarily wordy at times, but an interesting read nonetheless. I might be stating the obvious here, but her unique perspective as someone involved in the Syrian community for years provides an insight into the reality of the country in a way the news or bite-sized pieces of information swarming the internet never could. This is the kind of book that'll take you longer to get through because there's a lot to analyze and process, but if you're into that, it might be for you.

I just felt like the book placed too much emphasis on specific media (comedic pieces, TV shows, movies, etc) analyzed by the author, which goes for pages and pages, while actual the anthropologic/political analysis is only truly strong in a few select chapters.