The Performative Possibilities of Temporal Work in the Syrian Refugee Diasporic Counter-Archiving Movement

Sharkawi, Talia (2025) The Performative Possibilities of Temporal Work in the Syrian Refugee Diasporic Counter-Archiving Movement. In: Alternative Futures and Popular Protest 2025, 2025-06-16 - 2025-06-18, University of Manchester.

Abstract

This paper draws on multi-sited ethnographic field research of the practices of Syrian activists engaged in acts of commemoration, documentation, and archiving of atrocities committed by the Syrian regime. The paper draws on conceptualizations of temporal work to highlight how by taking part in intersecting activities of collective memorialization, atrocity-archiving, collective organizing, and activist war-crime litigation campaigns, these actors are engaging in scrutinizing and reinterpreting the collective past, assessing and addressing the present, and imagining future possibilities of successful transitional justice for a post-war Syria for all Syrians. The findings reveal the processual dimension of what started as uncoordinated grassroots DIY atrocity recording with the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian uprising, evolving into collective archival efforts, and eventually to a sophisticated extraterritorial counter-archiving movement emerging from but also parallel to collective expressions of loss, memorialization, and grievances expressed in diasporic protests against the Syrian regime. The technological advances adopted by Syrians, transitional justice scholars and practitioners argue, changed the temporalities of practices of atrocity recording raising questions about what these practices entail in terms of praxis on the ground and how to make sense of pre-transition transitional justice. In so doing, these projects and their processes of documenting the dead through the composition of contestatory archives constitute an epistemological experiment, within the broader Syrian extraterritorial anti-authoritarian movement, that is constructed through time. Moreover, the movement that these projects have coalesced into constitutes sites of critical knowledge production co-created relationally over time. This paper also provides an illustrative case of the temporal dimensions of the processes through which post-revolutionary national narratives are constructed in exile and the centrality of subaltern experiences in these processes. The paper highlights the performative possibilities of the temporalities of collective action embedded in archival and memory work.