Zoya Masoud (BEYONDREST / Forum Transregionale Studien) talk “Dislocation and Heritage: On Radical Hope and Experiences of Loss in Aleppo/Syria” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 04 June 2025. The talk was chaired by  Çiçek İlengiz (BEYONDREST / Forum Transregionale Studien).

Centered on individuals from Aleppo, this seminar explores how the extensive destruction of urban heritage affects the sense of belonging and self-identification(s) with urban or built heritage. The old city of Aleppo, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, became a focal burning point during the war between 2012 and 2016. In this period, the inhabitants of Aleppo were dislocated from the center by military interests of the warring parties who regarded them as dispensable. For the local population, the experience of loss became a daily routine, manifesting in the loss of friends, family members, property, and cultural heritage. Throughout these years, individuals found themselves in a perpetual state of exception and vulnerability. Through my research, I identified various patterns of belonging and self-identification tied to built heritage, which emerged in response to the experience of loss and the processes of understanding that loss. These patterns indicate my interviewees’ attempts to reach an understanding of their reality during the war, particularly as their state of exception became normalized, while standing continuously on the brink of the abyss of many discourses they adopted. The fugitivity of their own agency became evident and influenced their interaction with their (host) communities. 

This seminar is part of the open lecture series “Syria at a Crossroads”, organized jointly by the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg, the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis, and Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME). It is also part of the conversation series “Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm” of the ERC-project “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST).

For more information: https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/dislocation-and-heritage-on-radical-hope-and-experiences-of-loss-in-aleppo-syria

Zoya Masoud: Dislocation and Heritage: On Radical Hope and Experiences of Loss in Aleppo/Syria

In the first decade of his reign, Vladimir Putin de-emphasized ideology to consolidate control and reinstate legitimacy of state power. The 2011 protests led him to shift gears and assume an ideological approach to consolidating legitimacy. This approach, however, led to the empowerment of “ideological entrepreneurs,” some of whom the Kremlin views as a liability. Who are the ideological entrepreneurs and how does the Kremlin manage them? What are the components of the Kremlin’s ideological operation and how does it impact ordinary Russians? Maria Lipman addressed these questions in her talk.

Speaker:
Maria Lipman - Editor, Point & Counterpoint

02/05/2019 - The Kremlin and Its Ideological Toolbox

"A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories" by Oleksandr Zabirko in the framework of the Prisma Ukraïna workshop "When the Muses are not silent: Intellectuals’ and Artists’ Responses to the Ukraine-Russia Conflict and post-Maidan Developments in Ukraine" in Berlin on 19 June, 2018

As one of the most popular types of speculative fiction, the “alternative” or “counterfactual histories” constitute a literary genre, in which one or more historical events occur differently than in the historical record. While in the Western fiction the literary models of time travel and counterfactual history function as the elements of the unreal “secondary world” and thus construct a distance between the fantastic and the mundane, contemporary Russophone  authors exploit the generic conventions of fantasy or science fiction in order to suggest a continuity between fiction and reality. Being omnipresent in various media, this aestheticized, counterfactual reality captivates its consumers and is arguably capable of substituting the real world, thus making it possible to read and interpret current geopolitical conflicts (like the war in Donbas) through the prism of speculative fiction. Focusing on geopolitical and social modeling in post-Soviet speculative fiction, the paper claims that the images of the Other, the archaic communal structures and the transformations of historical time provide here an aesthetic ground for a large patriotic consensus of a community united by common resentment.

O. Zabirko: A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien is a platform that promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It is dedicated to a research agenda that systematically links disciplinary approaches and the expertise of area studies by focusing on entanglements and interactions across national, cultural or regional borders. The Forum invites scholars from all over the world for fellowships and develops transregional communication formats.

The Forum provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. In cooperation with universities and research institutions in and outside of Berlin, it carries out research projects that examine other regions of the world and their relationship to Germany and Europe systematically and with new questions.

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Zoya Masoud: Dislocation and Heritage: On Radical Hope and Experiences of Loss in Aleppo/Syria

Forum Transregionale Studien

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