On Revolution, Tyranny and the Struggle for Democracy in Syria: A Conversation with Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

Yassin al-Haj Saleh is Syria’s leading dissident intellectual. He is often called the conscience of the Syria’s 2011 Arab Spring Revolution. Born in Raqqa in 1961, he was arrested in 1980, while a medical student in Aleppo, and imprisoned for his membership in a left-wing organization. He remained a political prisoner until 1996, spending the last of his sixteen years behind bars in the notorious desert-prison of Tadmur. Yassin has written several books on Syria, prison, contemporary Islam and intellectual responsibility, including The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy and The Atrocious and its Representation (English edition forthcoming). He lives in exile in Berlin.

Moderator:
Dr. Marwa Daoudy is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (SFS) and the Seif Ghobash Chair in Arab Studies at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS). Prior to Georgetown University, Dr. Daoudy was a lecturer at Oxford University (UK) in the department of Politics and International Relations, a fellow of Oxford’s Middle East Center at St Antony’s College and a visiting scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Dr. Daoudy's second book on The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (Cambridge University Press, 2020) won the 2020 Harold and Margaret Sprout Prize by the International Studies Association and her first book The Water Divide between Syria, Turkey and Iraq: Negotiation, Security and Power Asymmetry (CNRS Editions, 2005) received the Ernest Lémonon Prize by the Institute of France at the French Academy (Académie Française).