EPISODE · Jan 11, 2021 · 56 MIN
Lisa Wedeen, "Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
from New Books in Middle Eastern Studies · host Marshall Poe
How has the Syrian regime been able to bear the brunt of the challenges raised against it? And, what can we learn about the seductions of authoritarian politics more generally from the study of Syria? These questions animate Lisa Wedeen’s Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her answers to them journey far beyond narrow causal inferences about the war in Syria, into an empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated account of the part that ideology as form plays in the making of subjects. Drawing on a decade of multi-sited ethnography, Wedeen traverses the day-to-day violence of war to attend to how Syrians are interpolated into arrangements for political domination through logics of disavowal. Weaving her interlocutors’ cultural products and interpretations of conditions in Syria together with work by Althusser, Arendt and Wittgenstein, she offers a complex and unsettling account of how people are brought into deeply ambivalent relationships with neoliberal autocracy, at once desiring political change and craving social order. Listeners to this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science might also be interested in two other episodes on exemplary interpretivist political scientific studies featured in this series: Sarah Marie Wiebe on Everyday Exposure, and James C. Scott on Against the Grain. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies
What this episode covers
How has the Syrian regime been able to bear the brunt of the challenges raised against it? And, what can we learn about the seductions of authoritarian politics more generally from the study of Syria? These questions animate Lisa Wedeen’s Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her answers to them journey far beyond narrow causal inferences about the war in Syria, into an empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated account of the part that ideology as form plays in the making of subjects. Drawing on a decade of multi-sited ethnography, Wedeen traverses the day-to-day violence of war to attend to how Syrians are interpolated into arrangements for political domination through logics of disavowal. Weaving her interlocutors’ cultural products and interpretations of conditions in Syria together with work by Althusser, Arendt and Wittgenstein, she offers a complex and unsettling account of how people are brought into deeply ambivalent relationships with neoliberal autocracy, at once desiring political change and craving social order. Listeners to this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science might also be interested in two other episodes on exemplary interpretivist political scientific studies featured in this series: Sarah Marie Wiebe on Everyday Exposure, and James C. Scott on Against the Grain. To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies
NOW PLAYING
Lisa Wedeen, "Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
No transcript for this episode yet
Similar Episodes
Mar 19, 2026 ·34m
Feb 18, 2026 ·11m
Feb 11, 2026 ·45m
Nov 12, 2025 ·35m
Oct 17, 2025 ·40m