Robin Jones
Al-Jumhuriya
Beirut, Lebanon
My name is Robin Jones and I’m currently pursuing a master’s in Near Eastern Studies at NYU. My academic research focuses on Syrian politics and society, particularly in the context of the 2011 revolution and the ongoing war.
I will be traveling to Beirut, Lebanon this summer to work with Al-Jumhuriya, a Syrian media publication founded by activists and writers as a platform for discussion on the 2011 revolution and ensuing conflict. Al-Jumhuriya publishes reporting and commentary in English and Arabic dealing with a wide range of sociopolitical questions and human rights issues in Syria.
My project will involve participating in the editorial process for Al-Jumhuriya’s English platform. I will work alongside others from the team to decide on topics to cover and articles to publish, while also editing and proofreading pieces. I will also be writing and publishing articles of my own on topics related to Syrian politics.
For my own written work, I’m particularly interested in writing about an older generation of Syrian activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s and 1990s for criticizing the ruling Ba’ath Party. I would like to know more about how the dissidents of eras past related to the 2011 uprising. In particular, I’m interested in considering the life stories and ideological transformations of leftist political prisoners, and examining how they perceived and related to international human rights organizations that advocated on their behalf.
I also hope to engage with the debate surrounding “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, which has been discussed in the context of well-documented, large-scale war crimes by the Syrian regime. Critics suggest that modern humanitarian interventions replicate past colonial structures and serve as an alibi for Western foreign policy goals. While this may often be true, appeals for support from Western states have commonly featured in media produced by Syrian protesters, putting anti-war ideals in tension with imperatives of solidarity with a popular uprising. I hope to think further about the Syrian war in the context of other conflicts where questions of foreign intervention and transnational solidarity have loomed large, such as Libya, Kosovo, and the Spanish civil war.
While this is a unique opportunity to engage more deeply and directly with a political cause that I have studied largely from a distance, I anticipate that it may be challenging to navigate traumatic issues sensitively. As such, I will seek to remain aware of how my presence might alter or negatively affect certain situations throughout my work with Al-Jumhuriya.