Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how a Syrian community expelled during the Battle of al-Qusayr reengineers time through intimate engagement with nature amid the voids of war. Nature as temporal repair reveals how para-human formations exceed humanitarian victimhood and revolutionary afterlives.

Paper long abstract

Al-Qusayr, a region nestled between Homs and the Syria-Lebanon border, gained international prominence as the theatre of a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign led by Hezbollah and Assad regime forces against rebel factions controlling the region. Culminating in the Battle of al-Qusayr in spring 2013, this counterinsurgency led to the destruction of the region’s natural and built environment and the expulsion of the local population. Some members of the community found refuge in Lebanon, where they built an informal camp and school, confronting what I define as “the voids of war.” Produced by political violence interlocking with defeated revolution and Lebanon's humanitarian management of Syrian presence, these voids are temporal-spatial collapses that disrupt linear time, infiltrating the community’s social time and threatening social reproduction itself. Inhabiting the aftermath and its voids, Qusayris faced not only the impossibility of returning to al-Qusayr but also the fear that the aftermath would become a perennial liminal condition between wartime and postwar, home and exile.

This paper examines Qusayris’ efforts to reengineer time through intimate engagement with nature, cultivating para-human formations across generations. Adults transmitted sensory knowledge, artistic sensibilities, and agricultural skills to children, creating affective spaces through which they reinhabited intimate bonds with nature—as if the loss of land had never occurred. Nature became both a medium for regenerating temporal flow and a bearer of multitemporal family histories tying Qusayris to their land. By foregrounding nature as temporal repair, this paper reveals how para-human formations exceed humanitarian parameters of victimhood and revolutionary afterlives.