Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore everyday forms of the securitization of bodies and borders through a focus on male Syrian mobilities across the region during the last decade. How have Syrians navigated various and overlapping security regimes in order to find ways to move, to migrate, and to live?

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I draw on thinking in the anthropology of security, war, and conflict to explore everyday forms of the securitization of bodies and borders through a focus on male Syrian mobilities and migrations across the region during the last decade. How have Syrian men strategized around and navigated various and overlapping security regimes in order to find ways to move, to migrate, and to live? Based on in-person research undertaken in Lebanon and Qatar as well as the engagement of remote research methods, I show how being mobile across a highly securitized warscape – on roads, at transnational border crossings, in airports -- crystallizes the masculinized forms of duress and diminishment experienced throughout the course of Syria's protracted conflict: the stresses of the male provider struggling to eke out a living in a destroyed economy, the threat of conscription for military age males, and the exodus from the country of men seeking out both ways to provide and ways to escape military service. It is also through these experiences that we see how people demonstrate the skills and practices they have cultivated amid these conditions that involve identifying openings and opportunities and taking certain risks that push back against the livelihood and life-course disruptions of the conflict. Through an analysis of these skills and practices, I show in this paper how strategies around and navigations of everyday forms of securitization have been a key aspect of Syria's wartime political economy.