Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced in a decade of conflict in Syria. The devastation caused by the unrelenting war makes this crisis one of the most serious humanitarian disasters in recent history. The widely reported and available numbers—more than six million internally displaced and five million refugees, roughly half the population of the entire country—reflects only a fraction of the conflict’s toll (OCHA 2019). Hundreds of thousands of people have been besieged, hospitals have been destroyed, and humanitarian access has been restricted. This has led to countless denunciations from international organizations, states, and civil society movements calling for the laws of war to be respected, sieges lifted, and humanitarian access facilitated. But beneath each of these humanitarian appeals lies a complex reality extending beyond the binary narratives that have come to define the Syria war: of an “evil regime” willing to demolish neutral hospitals in its quest to defeat a popular uprising, or of “terrorists” using hospitals to launch attacks against a legitimate government. Indeed, each reasonable demand for a more humane conduct of warfare interacts with the complexity of Syria’s history and the role of social services in the postcolonial period, the evolution of the application of the law of war in the context of a war on terrorism, the lived experiences of the tactic of siege that follows Syrians across borders, the use and manipulation of humanitarian narratives to fuel complex ...
The Relationship between Local and International Organizations and Community Development
