It is predominantly known that history is written by winners. However, this statement is true when a conflict has a symmetric tendency. In the case of Syria, where the conflict has been widely ...considered asymmetric, history is being written by a regime/government that won the war by not losing it. This article investigates the interconnection between heritage and politics in Syria by scrutinizing heritage practices, uses, and abuses since the colonial period. First, this article examines regime/government-led post-conflict reconstruction projects in the aftermath of Syria’s current conflict. Then the article moves on and explores the creation of war narratives and the selective memorialization of Syria’s recent conflict by looking at the portrayal of contested war memories in the media and the production of oral history. I argue that heritage practices, uses, presentation, and promotion in Syria since the colonial period have produced a politicized, one-sided (hi)story influenced by political agendas. This history includes highly politicized, ongoing tangible and intangible heritage reconstruction works, freighted with cultural meaning and primarily intended to bolster the power and authority of the ruling regime.
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The war in Syria, and the rise of non-state radical actors placed a spotlight on the scale and intensity of destruction of cultural heritage sites in Syria. The Ancient City of Aleppo, a World ...Heritage Site was particularly hard hit by the conflict and when the city was re-unified in late 2016, several national and international organisations started to plan its post-war reconstruction. However, despite the fact that the war in Syria is now approaching its end, the prospects of finding a sustainable route for heritage reconstruction in Aleppo are far from good. This article sets out to critique the top-down governmental approach to the reconstruction of Syria's cultural heritage. By drawing upon empirical data collected from a survey conducted with people from Syria and Iraq, this article argues that if cultural heritage assets are to provide a unifying force for reconciliation, reintegration of displaced people, and future social cohesion then such an approach should be opposed and replaced by a bottom-up participatory approach, which gives voice to and builds consensus among all members of Syrian society.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
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Since the beginning of the armed conflicts and public uprisings that accompanied and followed the ‘Arab Spring’ that started in 2010, cultural heritage sites have been hit hard, damaged and often ...destroyed by different perpetrators. The Syrian Civil War has resulted in unprecedented damage to cultural heritage sites, monuments, and facilities. This has provoked observers, politicians, and international and national non‐government organizations to debate about the impacts of damaging Syria’s ‘irreplaceable’ patrimony and how to safeguard its past from the ongoing destructive actions. This paper investigates the transformation of the terminology of heritage—and the uses of heritage—in Syria before and during the ongoing conflict, and how the internationally renowned term ‘heritage’ emerged to promote the destruction of Syria’s cultural patrimony. This paper explores the semantics and impacts of the continuous destruction and the ongoing reconstruction plans on the cultural heritage of Syria. To conclude, I argue that those destructive actions started a process of ‘heritagizing’ the present which will eventually become a part of the Syrian collective memory.
The destruction of statues representing political figures carries symbolic meanings that are negotiated by the people who attack the statue and the regime that the statue represents. Across the ...Syrian territory, statues of Hafez Al-Assad symbolized the oppressive Ba'athist regime which shaped Syria's past and present for more than almost half a century. As a result, a cult of personality ensued. This paper analyses the destruction of Hafez Al-Assad statues as a case of iconoclasm, framed by how the Ba'athist regime used elements of the past to glorify the personality cult of Hafez Al-Assad (1971-2000) and later his son Bashar Al-Assad (2000-present), Syria's current president. Drawing on the work of political scientists, the paper will establish how this cult of personality operated, to understand how Syrians living under an authoritarian regime engaged with images of Hafez Al-Assad and on which terms. Furthermore, by considering the re-erection of statues representing Hafez Al-Assad the paper will also discuss unfallism to better describe the process of destruction and re-erection of statues in Syria. The underlying argument of this paper is that the destruction and re-erection of statues in Syria are acts that question the purpose of destroying a statue today, amidst the current climate of removal of statues in different parts of the world as a response to dismantling systems of oppression.
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On the 24
th
of February 2022, Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian Federation in a televised speech announcing a 'special military operation' against Ukraine. Putin castigated the West as an 'Empire ...of Lies' and drew upon Russian history and cultural heritage to justify his invasion of Eastern Ukraine. This article investigates how cultural memory has been manipulated in the war in Ukraine, and in the previously occupied Crimea. We argue that cultural heritage, memory, and museum collections have been removed and/or repurposed to legitimise the current invasion by linking it to a grand narrative of Russian power and the recovery of ancestral lands. We present case studies from the annexation of Crimea (2014), the war in Ukraine (2022 -), and make a brief comparison with the armed conflict in Syria (2011 - 2022).
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Cultural heritage has fallen under the threat of being of damaged and/or erased due to armed conflicts, and destruction has increasingly become a major part of daily news all over the world. The ...destruction of cultural heritage has escalated in Syria as the ongoing armed conflict has spread to World Heritage Sites, such as Palmyra and the old city of Aleppo. The devastation of Syria’s war has deliberately and systematically targeted archaeological monuments dating from the prehistoric, Byzantine, Roman, and Islamic periods, with no distinction being made of the cultural, historical, and socio-economic significance of such sites. The violence of this conflict is not, of course, limited to the destruction of cultural property, and has first and foremost served to introduce non-state radical actors, such as Daesh, who targeted local people, archaeological site, museum staff and facilities.
The destruction and re-purposing of monuments in Syria, such as Daesh’s attempts to turn churches into mosques, are heavy-handed attempts to re-write history by erasing physical evidence. In this paper, I explore the semantics of continuous attempts to reconstruct cultural heritage sites, destroyed by Daesh, during the ongoing war, and how the destruction and reconstruction of Syria’s heritage have been deployed to serve political agendas.
Armed conflicts are one of the primary reasons that endanger heritage and the symbolic value of cultures. Both the protection of cultural legacy and the promotion of the plural interests and ...identities that intersect and construct heritage in times of war should be reinforced with an effi-ient strategy and effective actions. The unprecedented destruction of renowned cultural heritage sites in Syria has not remained unnoticed. The contentious violations that occurred during the hostilities of Syria’s ongoing conflict have drawn the attention of international organisations such as UNESCO, ICOMOS, ICCROM, and ICOM.
Following the constant media reports and aerial photos of heritage destructions in Syria, UNESCO held an experts’ meeting in Berlin to discuss its safeguarding. The meeting was envisioned as a follow-up to the implementation of the UNESCO action plan for the Emergency Safeguarding of Syria’s Cultural Heritage (UNESCO 2014). The three-day conference (2 - 4 June 2016) aimed to continue the work of the 2014 Paris conference, supported by the three-year EU-funded project on the Emergency Safeguarding of the Syrian Cultural Heritage.
The introduction of this special issue not only underscores the significance of engaging local communities in the reconstruction of their heritage in post-conflict contexts; it also emphasises the ...necessity and importance of including local researchers from the affected area, in this case the Arab region, in producing knowledge about its rich past. This special issue contributes towards a comparative knowledge base on the obstacles to and enablers of heritage reconstruction, management of cultural resources and recovery of societies in the Arab region. This introductory piece starts with examining the impact of colonial and post-colonial regimes on producing knowledge about the past and how the latter regimes introduced societal elitism in studying the past. I argue that by giving a voice and a chance to local scholars and early career researchers coming from the studied regions (even if they are currently based abroad), we would be taking another step towards decolonising the past by empowering societies and producing local decolonial knowledge about the region’s iconic ruins. Allowing alternative forms of non-Eurocentric (culturally diverse) knowledge production about the past, primarily generated by local scholars, to be introduced, presented, published and promoted would render knowledge production authentic and simultaneously delink heritage from decades of knowledge coloniality.
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Contradictory results exist regarding the importance of early-life exposure to phthalates for development of childhood eczema.
We evaluated the association between maternal urinary concentrations of ...phthalate metabolites between the 24th and 28th week of gestation and occurrence of eczema in their sons up to 5 y of age, according to allergic sensitization as assessed by total immunoglobulin E (IgE) in a subsample of individuals.
Data on health outcomes and background factors were collected using five standardized annual questionnaires completed by parents at the children's ages of 1-5 y, and their associations with phthalate metabolite urinary concentrations were assessed in 604 mother-son pairs with adjusted multiple logistic regression and Cox's survival model. Several eczema phenotypes were considered. Atopic status was assessed at 5 y of age in 293 boys through total IgE assessment.
At 5 y of age, the prevalence of ever eczema was 30.4%. Metabolites of di-isobutyl phthalate (DiBP) and di-isononyl phthalate (DiNP) were positively associated with early-onset (0-24 mo of age) eczema (15.7%) and late-onset (24-60 mo of age) eczema (14.7%). Applying the Cox's model showed a significant association of occurrence of eczema in the first 5 y of life with DiBP and DiNP metabolites. Among IgE-sensitized boys, metabolites of di-
-butyl phthalate (DBP) and DiBP were significantly associated with ever eczema {hazard ratio (HR)=1.67 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.10, 2.54,
=0.01 and HR=1.87 (95% CI: 1.01, 3.48),
=0.04, respectively}.
Occurrence of eczema in early childhood may be influenced by prenatal exposure to certain phthalates in boys. Further investigations are needed to confirm this observation. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP1829.
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CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
Teachers’ feedback is vital part of teachers – students’ interaction in EFL classroom where students’ language can be evaluated by the teacher. This study examines teachers’ use of elicitation as ...corrective feedback to students’ grammatical errors. In order to achieve this objective, qualitative method was adopted in data collection and analysis. Accordingly, two sessions of EFL classroom with 90 minutes for each, were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Two English lecturers who are teaching Speaking at UIN (Islamic State University) Ar-Raniry Banda Aceh were participants for this study. The transcribed data was processed by following Mile’s and Huberman’s (1992) model of data analysis including data reduction, data display, and conclusion. The result shows that the teachers in both classrooms only used elicitation by questions as corrective feedback to students’ grammatical errors where they always prompted a question to request students to reformulate their inappropriate grammar in their speaking. This successfully led them to the correct answer. Nonetheless, the teacher did not use elicitation by strategic pausing and gesture to elicit students’ responses. This study suggests more techniques of elicitation feedback should be utilized for correcting students’ errors in grammar and maximized to enhance students’ proficiency of grammar knowledge.
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