The bureaucratic revolution: the Syrian opposition’s civil registry system

Marika Sosnowski

Third World Quarterly, 2025, vol. 46, issue 8, 896-912

Abstract: Adding to the anthropological literature on revolutions, this paper argues that the Syrian revolution should not only be seen through its violent iconography or as a lost cause but rather as an ongoing, bureaucratic process. Based on over 60 in-depth interviews with Syrian lawyers, judges, civil servants and civilians as well as with international humanitarians and legal experts, it examines the vision, hopes and legal aspirations of bureaucratic revolutionaries – lawyers and judges, administrators and civil servants – who established and implemented the Syrian opposition’s civil registry system. Using Veena Das’ idea of magic and the Arabic Islamic concept of al-ghayb (the hidden or unseen), the article highlights and unpacks the tension and co-constitutive nature of the magical, unseen vision of the revolutionary bureaucracy and its legible, rational reality. Through such a lens important insights can be gleaned about the grey zone that revolutions, and revolutionaries, beyond Syria inhabit – between legible and illegible, real and vision, a state and a state in waiting.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2025.2514570

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