Rubble as an 'Anti-Politics Machine'

Open almost any commentary on Syria’s reconstruction and one is likely to encounter the image of rubble. In the Atlantic Council, there is a plan to go “From Rubble to Rebirth”; in The Guardian, the “Islamic State [is] emerging from the rubble of north-east Syria”; and in Foreign Policy, “High Rises” tower “Amid the Rubble in Syria.” Even Jacobin, a publication one might expect to scrutinise such imagery, finds someone “Squeezing Water from the Rubble in Syria”.

Many of the people who write this way may have never visited Syria, but that makes no difference anyway. The image has only a loose relationship to the physical country. It belongs instead to a political vocabulary. As the jihadi stands in for Syria’s security landscape and the refugee for its population, rubble stands in for its economy. Each image renders the country more legible to policymakers, helping them chart Syria’s economic future without confronting the people, property, and history already there. 

Consider, for example, the investment pitch offered by Ahmed al-Sharaa himself. “Every calamity Syria has endured in the past is an investment opportunity,” al-Sharaa told the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh in October 2025. Syrians, he promised, would rebuild “from nothing”.

The simplistic picture of outside money entering Syria and “rebuilding [it] from nothing” bears little resemblance with reality. Many of the announced megadeals depend on opaque arrangements through which land is transferred to developers, whether public land recovered from real or alleged Assad-era cronies and placed in the Syrian Sovereign Fund, or property assembled through reconstruction schemes imposed on small landowners. And permanent income-tax exemptions require the public to contribute future revenue the state has agreed not to collect. Foreign capital cannot “rebuild” Syria without the extraction of Syrian land and future public revenues.

The decisions underway are therefore nothing if not political: they concern the distribution of land, wealth, risk, and power. But imagine the country as a physical blank slate, as the authorities want you to, and Syria appears to possess nothing worth preserving. Its existing industries, public assets, property claims, and forms of social provision are conveniently whisked away. 

With them disappears room for politics. You cannot transfer wealth away from a public that has been represented as possessing nothing. The sale or concession of public land, natural resources, and future tax revenues appears as the creation of value rather than its redistribution. 

Once Syria’s existing assets disappear, so too does its past. Syria’s present market turn has an obvious prehistory in Bashar al-Assad’s “social market economy,” whose liberalisation of trade and subsidies enriched a politically connected business class and deepened the grievances preceding 2011. But once rubble becomes the starting point of analysis, Syria’s economic problems become consequences of the war alone, rather than the political choices that preceded it. Syria enters a Year Zero, its economic history collapsed into a largely undifferentiated “before”; followed by the war, and now reconstruction. Rubble allows these policies to return stripped of their contested history, as memory of the country’s earlier neoliberal turn – and the role of the IMF and World Bank in advocating and legitimating it – fade from view.

The myth of a blank slate similarly disposes of the people who own, use, and make claims upon those assets. In humanitarian writing, rubble becomes a condition of suspended agency: UNICEF writes of helping a Syrian community “rise from the rubble” and promotes a project under the headline “Schools Rise from the Rubble.” Security writing populates that same landscape with threats, as the Islamic State “emerges from rubble” in The Guardian and “new risks emerge from the rubble in Raqqa” in The Washington Post. In one account, Syrians are victims awaiting rescue; in the other, they are terrorist groups and security risks. Neither leaves much room for Syrians to appear as citizens with rights and claims upon the state.

In each case, rubble successfully replaces politics with a slew of technical problems. In the vocabulary of investors, humanitarian organisations, and security studies, the questions are how much reconstruction will cost, how many people require assistance, and where extremism may reemerge and how it can be contained. Questions of ownership, taxation, and social provision become impediments to reconstruction rather than decisions about who reconstruction is supposed to serve.

The image of a physical blank slate, first purveyed by the policy community and now happily adopted by the authorities, thus does political work – that of depoliticising everything. Rubble acts, to borrow James Ferguson’s phrase, as an "anti-politics machine": it recasts political choices as technical necessity, all the while facilitating its own political operation – the transfer of staggering sums of public wealth into private hands.

Contesting the authorities’ reconstruction model begins with rejecting the fiction of a blank slate. Syria’s reconstruction will need to begin not from “nothing,” but by reckoning with what and who is already here.