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Violence and legal responsibility: the construction of criminal narratives in contemporary
Syria Concepts of collective and individual legal
responsibility in the Islamic world, Danish Institute in Damascus, 5-8 May 2005. Zouhair Ghazzal Loyola University Chicago In many rural and semi-urban communities of the eastern
Mediterranean, violence may constitute a means, both political and economic,
for social cohesion among agnatically organized groups. It may simultaneously
be a means to ensure male domination through the perpetration of values along
honor and shame codes. The advent of the modern authoritarian nation-state,
after centuries of Ottoman decentralized feudalism, has forced such
communities to articulate and legitimize their violence through narratives in
order to account for what state institutions might classify as
Òcriminal behavior.Ó In effect, the sudden advent of the modern
nation-state implies, above all, that the state has the legitimate right to
monopolize violence, a precept which often leads to the criminilization of
pre-state violence. Thus, for instance, a criminal file typically narrates
violence from the viewpoint of actors unevenly distributed along the social
spectrum: policemen, prosecutors, judges, plaintiffs and defendants,
witnesses, doctors and psychiatrists. In all such narrations, the attempt is
either to legitimize or delegitimize violence, hence to criminalize it in
case of any wrongdoing. The same incident is thus narrated from different
standpointsÑeven though, in the final analysis, the one adopted by the
courts is the one which prevailsÑcreating various linguistic
constructions of collective and individual legal responsibility. Based on criminal cases of the last couple decades from
the regions of Aleppo and Idlib (north of Syria), this paper would like to
explore collective and individual legal responsibility from narratives which
have been generated by actors in the wake of violent acts, and upon criminal
investigations by the state authorities. Once acts of violence have been
labeled as ÒcriminalÓ by the state, they have to be accounted for
by social actors for the sake of oneÕs own community and the other as
well (the judicial authorities and the nation as-a-whole). A new form of
responsibility may henceforth emerge. |