From protest to Civil War. An analysis of the Syrian uprising from the theory of overflow

Abstract

The Syrian popular uprising of 2011 has been the subject of numerous studies. However, the period from the beginning of the protests in February 2011 until the definitive transformation of the protest into a civil war in the summer of 2012 has not been the focus of detailed studies. The thesis proposes an analysis of the conditions that led to the uprising and then influenced its shift towards a civil war, using an innovative theoretical framework based on José Matos Mar's overflow theory for the case of Lima/Peru, and considering contributions from Gilbert Achcar's neo-Marxist critique. Overflow refers to the masses taking to public space to express their will without intermediaries. To verify the hypothesis, which places the Syrian revolt within the framework of popular overflow and not just as an uprising, revolt, or revolution, as is customary in existing works, an analysis of five key factors is proposed: time, territory, rituals, revolutionary subject, and regime. Based on these factors, the specific objectives address the primary research question of whether the Syrian uprising exhibited the characteristics of massiveness, rupture, conjuncture, and empowerment of an anthropo-sociological "overflow," and why these same characteristics, when confronted with systemic repression and the war strategy of the Assad regime, led to a gradual evolution into a civil war