Dominant or dominating? Imaginaries of higher education in Turkey and Northern Syria

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which administrators, academics and students living under conditions of authoritarianism come to imagine the university’s political possibilities and horizons. To this aim, we first consider how alternative imaginaries are constructed and contained at Boğaziçi University, where the parameters of political possibility are pre-figured both by the current ruling regime and the enduring histories of empire that pre-date it. Then, we turn to Aleppo countryside, where we compare Syrian opposition universities to newly established Turkish ones. In doing so, we attempt to trace the ideational lifeline of Syria’s revolutionary imaginary as it persists in higher education under conditions of disillusionment and co-optation. When taken together, we argue, these two cases point not to the primacy of belief in creating or sustaining imaginaries, but rather to the constitutive role of violence, coercion and control in shaping notions of who and what the university is for.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• imaginaries
• authoritarianism
• conflict
• ideology
• belief

Introduction

Higher education (HE) has long served as a site of contestation over questions of state-building, sovereignty and international recognition. At present, however, the university’s geopolitical role is increasingly animated by issues of populist insurgency, authoritarian encroachment and armed conflict. From Orbán’s Hungary and Bolsonaro’s Brazil to post-Trumpian America and the Awami takeover of Bangladesh, many albeit nominally liberal institutions are under threat from intensely illiberal forces (Enyedi 2018; Azevedo and Robertson 2022; Muñoz et al. 2018; Jackman 2021).

Here, Dillabough (2021) writes that these pressures expose a contradiction at the heart of the contemporary university, which is tethered between the directives of ‘statecraft’ on the one hand and the ‘promise and aspiration’ of knowledge-making on the other (21). The resultant tension underscores the immense flow of competing ‘desires, investments and identifications’ projected at and through universities – projections that often coalesce in ‘social imaginaries’, or the ‘shared matri[ces] of meanings and horizons of possibility’ that define who and what the university is for (Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti 2017, 174).

Significant work has been undertaken to examine the relationship between imaginaries and higher education, including the neoliberalisation of universities, their increasing internationalisation, and their relationship to social movements (ibid; Lumb and Bunn 2021; Rizvi 2011; Cole and Heinecke 2020). Others have examined how conflict and authoritarianism are shaping HE as an institution, its knowledge-making practices and the daily lives and trajectories of its inhabits (Dillabough et al. 2019; Doğan and Selenica 2021; Janenova 2019; Ryder 2022), as well as the diminishing role that universities are playing in producing, maintaining or defending liberal values (Brown 2015; Butler 2017; Giroux 2019; Holmwood 2017; Koch and Vora 2019). In extending this concept to the cases in question, however, our aim is to understand how HE members navigate the overlapping imaginaries and ‘multiple modernities’ (Gaonkar 2002) of contemporary authoritarianism. This includes negotiations of socially-prescribed – and at times contradictory – meanings and aspirations, as well as the ordering effects of violence and paradox contained within them. Set against a backdrop of risk and resistance, death and disavowal, our inquiry surfaces imaginaries as they are contained and co-opted by resident dictatorial regimes. In effect, this analysis focuses on emergent political subjectives – or the new ‘objects and subjects of power’ (Dillabough 2021, 12) – as mediated by trans-nationalised struggles to determine the purpose and authority of both the state and its university.

While the imaginary, like ideology, is managed in ‘social rather than individual terms’ (Wedeen 2019, 5), this paper explores the concept in more intimate relief. We share in Strauss’s (2006) concern to understand ‘the imaginaries of real people, not the imaginaries of imagined people’ by asking, ‘whose imaginaries are these?’ (339). Eschewing the nation-state as the primary unit of geopolitical analysis, we instead offer an asymmetrical comparison between two low-lying scales: the institutional and the regional. First, in the Turkish context, we consider how alternative imaginaries are constructed and contained at Boğaziçi University, where the parameters of political possibility are pre-figured both by the current ruling regime and the enduring histories of empire that pre-date it. Then, in Northern Syria’s Aleppo Countryside, we compare Syrian opposition universities to newly established Turkish ones, tracing the ideational lifeline of Syria’s revolutionary imaginary as it persists under conditions of disillusionment and co-optation. In joining these cases together, we endeavour to ask: how do collectively-imagined geopolitical landscapes enmesh within the ‘promise and paradox’ of the universities under examination?

Theory and methodology

The imaginary as an analytic concept is infrequently applied to contexts of authoritarianism, a disparity that reflects the term’s enduring epistemic bias towards participatory ideals of politics. Here, the imaginary is said to reflect the value system of a given society, ‘carry[ing] within it an image of moral order … [and] legitimacy’ (Gaonkar 2002, 11). Implicit to this formulation is an interchangeable view of collective imaginings and collective beliefs, such that to imagine the nation-state is, at some level, to also believe in its project and claims to power. As we wish to argue, however, this misrepresents expressions of recognition as matters of judgement, in turn delimiting the scope of the concept and its relevance to domination. These limitations stem from notions of power and ideology common to the field, including those rooted in the study of ‘self-governing societies’ and their institutions (Adams 2019). For example, ideology is often described as a realm of collective deliberation within which claims to truth are waged and won. Overtime, claims that amass authority through processes of legitimation – rather than, say, coercion – are absorbed into the imaginary as pre-conditions of social and political life (see Steger and James 2013).

To this end, however, political frameworks bound by concepts of legitimacy are often inadequate for apprehending the material-ideational dynamics of authoritarian rule. As Lisa Wedeen (2015) has shown, the term’s ambiguous premise – which often conflates a moral right to rule’ and ‘the belief in the appropriateness of a regime’ – obscures messier underlying processes of compliance and acquiesce (xii). In her account of pre-revolutionary Syria, Wedeen instead argued for the importance of political unbelief – or, the means by which the regime commanded widespread participation in its ideological cult without also producing a shared investment in its political project or values. Despite this dissonance, forms of dissimulation carried in and through songs, images, spectacles, rituals, narratives and registers of humour still worked to naturalise regime penetration of social and political life. An Althusserian perspective like the one she employs thus situates ideology, rather than the imaginary, as the larger encasing system. She writes, ‘ … conceived in this way as form, [ideology] is itself structuring. Within it are occasioned all the psychic, embodied and imaginative processes that go into people’s social and political experiences’ (2019, 5).

For Althusser, the imaginary is not so much a symbolic field as it is the mediational quality of ideology’s structure-agent relationship (Kamola 2014). ‘What is represented in ideology,’ he explains, is ‘not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relations of those individuals to the real relations in which they live’ (Althusser 2009, 101). This imaginary relationship, he contends, is constituted by the material practices of powerful social institutions, such as the school and the church – or more contemporarily perhaps, the social media platform. In his work on the globalising effects of higher education, Kamola (2019, 23–4) clarifies this idea, writing:

because the social whole cannot be objectively seen from some outside vantage point, subjects must imagine themselves in relation to [it …] understanding the world as global does not originate from some transcendent truth […] but rather from the repeated practices taking place within the apparatus of the university.

While his work is critical to our own, our approach differs from Kamola in that he goes on to situate belief as a correlative outcome of social practice. This is a common reading of Althusser’s famous ‘religious scene’, which Kamola (2014) takes to mean social rituals produce subjects’ beliefs, such that repeatedly kneeling and praying in church ultimately leads to faith in God (522–3). As Lampert (2015) points out, however, Althusser’s broader writing on religion is premised on Pascal’s ‘defensive dialectic’, or the idea that ‘it is not that the words spoken in a religious ritual compel belief; rather, it is that a ritual is followed as if those words were true, whether we believe them or not’ (129).

This sidelining of practice-as-belief in turn requires a more varied account of the imaginary’s constitutive forces and effects. Such an endeavour does not presuppose that belief is irrelevant entirely; beliefs can of course intensify ideological uptake to extreme heights. Rather, the task is to clarify that ideology as a collectively-imagined relation is both brought about and reproduced through a range of affective positions and mechanisms, of which belief is merely one. Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti (2017) address a related set of issues in their conceptualisation of the ‘modern/colonial global imaginary’, which demonstrates how centuries of Western dominance have ‘naturalised’ and ‘enforced’ a racist and capitalist worldview as ‘a universal blueprint for global designs’ (173). Critical to our aims here, they write ‘as a result, even those who are most subjugated by its ordering matrix may take on some of its shared aspirations and social meanings – whether as a strategic means of immediate survival, sincere investment or some combination of [the two]’ (176).

In addition to foregrounding the role of violence, this account also underscores that people relate to imaginaries on both reflexive and pre-reflexive terms, an argument that represents a significant break from more traditional literature. Often, imaginaries are said to function like Bourdieuan doxa, or the latent, taken-for-granted social knowledges that quietly generate common sense (Lumb and Bunn 2021). HE scholars have nuanced this point by drawing on theories of ‘misrecognition’ (ibid; Lumb and Burke 2019) to explain how forms of illusion and deceit make it difficult, if not impossible, for subjects to gain critical distance from dominant discursive frames. By contrast, we explore moments of recognition – however slight they may be – in which subjects knowingly abide by the pre-figured conditions of dominant imaginaries as a matter of risk management or necessity. In a similar light, Ismail (2018) has described political violence in Syria as a ‘modality of government’ (4), one that inscribes itself within the body politic by ‘order[ing] citizens’ interpretive horizons and understandings of state/regime power’ (2). The author evidences the 1982 Hama massacre as an ‘instructive’ moment in this conditioning: ‘Hama’s place in the imaginary – haunting and haunted – is the unsaid that elicits silences’ (3). The point here is not that some actors posses a more objective view of social relations, but rather that many recognise their own subjugation when yielding to practices and expectations of power. If ritualised or observed long enough, such practices can also shape symbolic and common sense understandings of what is possible and permissible, in turn producing deeply engrained social codes and shared narratives rooted in acquiescence, resignation and fear, rather than persuasion or deceit.

In what follows, we attempt to transpose insights of this kind to two case studies on the political imaginaries of Syrian and Turkish higher education. By broadening the scope of analysis beyond matters of belief to also include the ordering effects of violence, these examples show that imaginaries can be both dominant and dominating. In this conception, subjects imagine the world in particular ways not because they necessarily believe in the moral or ethical basis of those particularities, but rather because they recognise–consciously or otherwise–that they must. Methodologically, the opportunities for studying these issues are limited by the very projects of power under examination. Here, concerns over the distortion of social science research conducted under securitised or authoritarian conditions is becoming an increasingly significant topic (Glasius et al. 2017; Sluka 2020; Yusupova 2019). Crucially, the affectual dimensions of the researcher’s experience, such as fear and defiance, are caught up within the research process itself, shaping the topic of study, angle, sampling methods, interview questions, and participants approached (Nassif 2017). The diverging threat levels, varying surveillance intensities, and prevalence of armed conflict posed by each regime shape the methods that can be ‘safely’ employed. Accordingly, the Aleppo countryside case study was conducted through remote digital methods, whereas the Turkish study was undertaken primarily as an in-person ethnography, albeit without regime permission.

Particularly difficult is the navigation of the information asymmetry constructed by regime security practices, in which researchers and participants are forced to negotiate considerations of risk and safety through an estimation of the state’s surveillance capacities. Here, we erred on the side of caution – preferring the loss of ‘thick’ data over potential harm to participants or researchers. Further, participants were constantly negotiating trust levels with us, which inevitably altered conversations, perceptions and the scope of interviews (Zadrożna 2016). However, as this paper illustrates, politics and the practices of regime crackdown are constantly changing and thus the choices we made towards or away from risk are never certainties. Unless punitive action from the state is taken, the degree of risk will always remain unknown, preventing a cumulative and clear understanding of the total possibilities and limitations of securitised research. Finally, we acknowledge the contexts of study are rapidly changing in ways that may undermine the longer-term relevance of our work. As such, we offer these two cases as snapshots of the political moment within which the interviews were conducted (Bose undertook the Turkey research and analysis in 2019/early 2021 and Rubin oversaw the Northern Syria research and analysis in late 2020/early 2021), and make no anticipatory claims regarding future trajectories or possible outcomes for this reason.

The institutional: Boğaziçi university

Formerly an American secondary school named Robert College, Boğaziçi University (BU) was officially instituted in 1971 by the Turkish government during a period of inflamed political tensions and student unrest. From the late 60s onward, Turkey was embroiled in the wider geopolitical conflicts of the Cold War, alongside deepening internal rifts over nationalist movements, the rise of the Left and anti-imperialist sentiment regarding US overreach in the region (Lüküslü 2020). A former student activist of the 68’ generation explained that the country had become a ‘playground of [intelligence] agents from all over the world’ (Bose 2022, 158), further exacerbating a view of students as geopolitical and national security threats (Gorgas 2013; Neyzi 2001). Universities in particular were singled out as breeding grounds for subversive political activity and thus became targets for both regime and neo-imperial foreign interventions.

For example, a 1977 US Congress report lauded the comparatively moderate and liberal stance of BU campus culture, which it attributed to its American history. The document went on to recommend that the US finance the exchange of Turkish and American academics to ensure its continued influence at the university, which it slated as a ‘battleground for political ideologies’ (US Congress 1977, 61). Nonetheless, while BU’s current liberal stance has US origins, institutions in Turkey underwent their own internal conflicts and struggles over the meaning of ideology, politics, and the moral values behind the two (Keskin-Kozat 2013). Former BU rector Üstün Ergüder explained that BU has both inherited and developed upon its predecessors’ liberal traditions, working for decades to uphold a horizontal, transparent system of institutional governance. This system includes equality of all faculty members and their role in directing and governing the university (Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association [OTSA] 2021). This enabled BU to address student political polarisation internally, which transformed potentially violent student unrest into democratic processes of discussion and debate. The ability to resolve internal student conflicts peacefully allowed BU to evade government infiltration in its formative years and bolstered its ability to resist subsequent waves of authoritarianism in Turkish politics (ibid).

However, following the 1980 coup, Yükseköğretim Kurulu (YÖK) – the Turkish Higher Education Council – was established to ‘tame the universities’ (Ergüder in OTSA 2021) blamed for the preceding period of political unrest by creating a legal framework for their securitisation and surveillance (Mizikaci 2006). As a result, in 1982, a regime-appointed rector was assigned to BU. Nonetheless, according to participants, as the country stabilised after the coup, political space eventually opened up at the university, allowing its members to rebuild and construct new heritages and traditions of democratic and horizontal governance. This included student-centred management arrangements, as well as the election of rectors who would serve as ‘coordinators’ or ‘facilitators’ rather than directors (Ergüder in OTSA 2021). As such, up until 2021, BU primarily succeeded in electing its own rectors and prohibiting police from entering the campus in contrast to several other Turkish public universities, which were subject to more intense regime intervention.

This context-driven history underscores, as Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti (2017) have argued elsewhere, that BU as a public university is not a universal good or moral standpoint, but is situated in complex power arrangements that transcend national boundaries. When speaking to participants about Turkey’s most recent authoritarian turn, many would laugh, wryly stating ‘I’ve seen this movie before’, only to elaborate stories of parents or former teachers who had been removed from universities in previous decades. In this way, BU’s internal political culture reflects both the imperial history of American liberalism and patterns of regime intervention undertaken by the Turkish government. Often coupled with violent practices, the university was thus subject to competing HE imaginaries, including those that called upon illiberal, authoritarian and nationalist values. These imaginaries serve – both then and now – as a competitive problem space (Dillabough 2021) upon which geopolitical interference contends with regime mechanisms for domestic, socio-political control (Giroux 2015). While administrators, academics and students seek to negotiate and realise alternate political freedoms, many are forced to take on the aspirations and social meanings (Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti 2017) of these contradictory forces out of sheer necessity.

BU as an ‘Island of freedom’

In 2019, students, faculty and alumni from BU often gave the assurance that the university was a ‘safe space.’ They claimed that interviews and focus groups could be held freely on campus without fear of government surveillance. This was in direct contrast to students or faculty from Istanbul University who, for example, maintained it was safer to hold interviews in Leftist cafes. A student feminist explained, ‘Boğaziçi [has] the best conditions about free speech, and student movements. I mean this is not really good, but we are in the best position in Turkey. […] I mean we are kind of lucky.’ A young Kurdish student elaborated that in her hometown of Diyarbakır ‘as a student, you can spend your whole life in the jail’, but in BU ‘because of the international atmosphere […] its not that easy to arrest students, […] though it happens.’ However, BU participants also described their respective freedoms as tinged with slow and creeping state surveillance practices, such as the recent installation of security turnstiles and private guards, or the occasional undercover police spotted in lecture halls. Nonetheless, echoing Turam (2021), many members maintained that BU functioned as an ‘island of freedom’ in an otherwise authoritarian sea – even though some lecturers practiced self-censorship regarding red-line issues such as the Armenian Genocide or Kurdish massacres.

However, on January 1st, 2021, with no warning, Erdoğan bypassed BU’s electoral precedents with a presidential decree and appointed Melih Bulu as the new rector using remnant legislation from the 2016 state of emergency. This was met immediately with protests from students and faculty who claimed that the appointment was an assault on academic freedom, HE autonomy, and democracy (Gokmenoglu 2021). Despite BU’s relatively protected status, the regime responded with a shockingly violent ‘police siege’ (Arslanalp in OTSA 2021), mass arrests, the detention of students, public smear campaigns against academics and the torture of LGBTQI+ student protesters (Civic Space Studies Association 2021; Duva R. English 1 April 2021; Reidy 2 April 2021 ).

An abundance of creative resistance emerged in objection to the state’s violence, including concerts, yoga sessions, open lectures, art exhibits, citizen journalism, and daily protests in front of the rector’s office that continue on till today. Additionally, a core part of the resistance has been the rigorous and systematic documentation of protest and acts of solidarity through social media, in part creating a counter-narrative and archive against the regime’s depiction of academics and students as ‘terrorists’ who ‘incite hatred’ and are ‘LGBT freaks’, (Cupolo 3 February 2021; France 24 3 Februrary 2021). These non-violent resistance practices served as the constitutive defending force of BU’s democratic imaginary, meant to reaffirm the university as tolerant, progressive and deserving of international solidarity from other elite institutions and social movements.

In particular, the conflict over gender and LGBTQIA+ communities illustrate wider geopolitical conflicts enacted through HE spaces. For example, Erdoğan positioned ‘the LGBT movement as incompatible with Turkey’s values’, claiming, ‘LGBT, there is no such thing, […] this country is … moral’ (France 24 3 February 2021). Framing the LGBTQIA+ movement as a moral issue emerging from Western degeneracy weaponises opposition to queer communities as a matter of nationalist struggle (Altay 2021) and is ultimately aimed at consolidating support around the country’s conservative right. It also acts as a signifier against the universalism espoused through the modern/colonial imaginary (Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti 2017). By situating Turkey’s moral value system in antithesis to the West, Erdoğan appropriates the language and spirit of post-colonialism for the purpose of nation building (Çapan and Zarakol 2017) in order to challenge the dominant, global ordering logics. Thus, through the criminalisation of LGBT activists and political action, this strategy also aligns conservative Turkish nationalism with authoritarianism, thereby pushing liberalism as one of the few viable options to achieve relative freedoms within the national context.

Repressed HE Imaginaries

In the case of BU, the authoritarian crackdown has bifurcated political possibilities, whereby subjects can either acquiesce to HE infiltration or appeal to liberal imaginaries of the university. In practice, many activists and academics within BU drew upon liberal political frames to defend their diminishing freedoms, not as a corollary of belief, but as a judgement that liberal claims would carry greater resonance abroad. Within informal discussions amongst students and academics, many would lament this forced choice, citing the limitations, paradoxes and problems of liberal ideologies that could only lead to partial freedoms. For example, while walking around Istanbul with a BU graduate, the participant admitted that she knew she was being forced into a campaign-based resistance strategy – one that was only able to address immediate threats rather than broader issues of freedom or autonomy. However, as she explained, the emergencies imposed by the regime meant they had no other choice. By discussing the meaning and logic behind activist’s political expression, it is clear that restricting analysis to tangible actions, often liberal in orientation, is insufficient for apprehending the beliefs or desires that are repressed into scales of acquiescence and control.

For many activist-academics and students, it was viewed as important and necessary to express discontent with the regime. In reference to her own involvement in subversive student political theatre in the 1980s, a BU academic affirmed that authoritarianism pushes people to creative acts of resistance, often relying on the symbolic and metaphoric to avoid direct violent conflict. Academics and students alike maintained that it was imperative to avoid the worst violence of the state where possible. A law student elaborated that they often compromised in this way by being less direct in their approach – not defying the state in open resistance by, for example, being anti-regime, yet still being vocal about their awareness of human rights issues. Further, after students were arrested in the 2018 BU Afrin Delight conflict, a group of their comrades gathered on campus, loudly claiming that they were ‘waiting for their friends’ and ‘keeping the area busy.’ In actuality, they were conducting an ‘occupation’, though they intentionally avoided using the word ‘occupy’ as ‘nobody wanted to get arrested for this.’ However, as one student explained, it was ‘important to know that we are standing with our friends. And we are not accepting that this situation–it is not normal, we don’t want it to be normal.’ The students involved in this protest admitted that these creative negotiations ‘often decrease the effect of the action’, though in this case were a result of strategy, assumed cost–benefit analysis, and assumption of risk – rather than actual belief in a purist liberal ideology. Thus, these BU students, in the pursuit of defensive strategies against authoritarianism, were forced to ‘employ dominant logics and structures [that] risk reproducing the very problems they are contesting’ (Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti 2017, 176).

In essence, particularly within an authoritarian context where negotiating risk becomes a prevailing governor of action (Bose 2022), it is necessary to interrogate the discussions and logic behind political expression in order to unearth the hidden imaginaries and visions of the future that exist alongside or underneath normative politics. By solely focusing on outward expression, researchers are likely to miss the depth and variety of the inner political worlds of students and academics that are repressed by authoritarian tactics. One student explained, ‘we are also trying to protect our lives and our institutions, our campus spaces. We are also in a dilemma, how to do this. Should we produce more radical discourses?’ She continued on, ‘If I know I am not alone and I know people would come with me I can be really radical. It's that I think.’ These young students imagine themselves to be far more radical than their expressed politics would otherwise suggest, indicating that it is not belief that necessarily drives liberal politics, but rather a belief in what is possible. In other words, liberalism is not necessarily seen as the moral alternative to authoritarianism or a true freedom, but rather a strategic solution in an impossible political moment in which there is little to no space for radical political alternatives.

Within the context of authoritarian crackdowns, practices of resistance are often shaped by forms of recognition necessary for surviving domination. In Turkey, liberal values represent the only perceived moral alternative from which HE members can claim universal political recognition globally. Their fluency in both liberal and illiberal imaginaries illuminates the depoliticising interplay between the two. Here, liberalism and its limited freedoms are ultimately contained by the repression of the ruling regime, which sets the parameters of political possibility through forms of symbolic and material violence. Simultaneously, Western imperial narratives regarding the liberatory promise of democracy are reproduced by the binary terms of engagement, narratives that flatten out the contributions by BU members in shaping the history, culture and relative social autonomy of the institution. This bind in turn raises questions regarding the extent to which HE subjects can, if at all, act outside of these rigid containers of action and practice. Are the notions of academic freedom and autonomy perpetually shaped by the competitive landscape of imaginaries made in the image of the state and its neo-imperial projects? Are ‘islands of freedom’ possible under conditions of authoritarianism? And if so, how long will they last?

The regional: Aleppo countryside

In February 2021, President Erdoğan signed a decree to establish the Cobanbey Medical Faculty and Vocational School of Health Services in al-Rai, Syria, which will be Turkey’s fifth institution for higher and continued education in the area. The others – which include a department for Islamic Theology, a Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, and a school for Educational Studies – are scattered across the 5,500 square-mile region of Aleppo countryside under Turkish control at the time of research. The decree in turned sparked stern condemnation from the Assad regime for what it viewed as a ‘flagrant’ transgression of international law and its claims to territorial sovereignty (Tastekin 12 February 2021).

Existing media coverage on Turkey’s intention in al-Rai largely aligns with broader journalistic and political analysis of the country's presence in Aleppo, where Erdoğan’s actions are believed to represent either a policy of benevolent stabilisation and containment, or by contrast, imperial efforts to ‘Turkify’ and later annex the territory (see The Economist 1 August 2020). Proponents of the former narrative point towards Turkey’s longstanding support for Syrian opposition actors, including the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian Interim Government (SIG), which share – to a limited degree – in administrative and security oversight of Turkish-controlled areas. Here too, Turkey’s role in keeping the Government of Syria (GoS) and its allies from retaking the area means that Erdoğan’s troops are among the few factors protecting some 3.6 million Syrians from Assad’s reach (Gall 16 February 2021).

For others, Turkish strategy in Syria represents a neo-Ottoman ambition to fold swathes of Aleppo into its permanent influence and control. Far from merely stabilising the territory for the protection and return of war-wary Syrians, Erdoğan’s critics point to the scope of political, civic and economic activity taking place under his direction. To this end, Turkey’s presence has become unavoidable: its flag appears beside the Syrian opposition one on signs, placards and documents, which are often written in both Arabic and Turkish; financial transactions are largely conducted in Turkish Lira; most telecommunication relies on Turkish infrastructure and networks; the Turkish Ministry of Health has opened five hospitals in the area; and the country's security forces were critical in establishing local police units there (Ashawi, Dadouch, and Coskun 12 October 2017; Tastekin 12 February 2021). What is more, these developments take place in the wake of Turkey’s efforts to dispossess the Kurdish communities and People's Protection Units (YPG) that once ran Afrin, in turn pursuing a decades-long campaign to squelch the Kurdish political struggle for emancipation (Eralp 2020).

Our concern, however, is not whether Erdoğan intentions in Northern Syria are just, but rather the extent to which he is able to author and impose the terms of justice itself, in turn delimiting how Syrians come to imagine opportunities for political action. In reality, the effort to protect and the desire to ‘Turkify’ are more complementary for Turkey than they are contradictory. Its occupation of the borderlands, made possible by Erdoğan’s support for the opposition, is underwritten by aims that serve his broader political project. While Syrians there have benefitted in real terms from his government’s protection, it has not come without costs. For those in Aleppo countryside who still espouse revolutionary commitments, coming to terms with Turkish power and influence means turning from one authoritarian leader to another. Here too, foreign intervention and abandonment vis-a-vis the humanitarian aid apparatus exerts further international pressure on HE actors in the area, with many left to contort their political values to fit within terms dictated by the western ‘will-to-care’ and its associated liberal imaginary (see Reid-Henry 2014). As a result, the revolutionary imaginary born out of the 2011 demonstrations–fundamentally a vision of freedom, democracy and self-determination–endures today through varying forms of ideological accommodation and resistance to foreign powers.

Higher education on the move in opposition-held Syria

The two largest universities in Northern Syria – Idleb University and Free Aleppo University (FAU) – were created by oppositionist academics in late 2015. Under the auspices of the Syrian Interim Government, FAU operated through a highly improvisatory and decentralised approach, opening ‘branches’ in liberated areas wherever qualified instructors could be identified. As a lecturer and founding member explained, ‘[the] university worked in a strange way. If we had professors in a location, we would offer classes … if we had someone who could teach, we would have a branch, even if there were only ten students’.¹ Before long, FAU was administering courses on law, economics, foreign languages and Islamic Studies across Eastern Ghouta, Homs, and rebel-held areas of Aleppo City. In doing so, its founders sought to continue a revolutionary legacy that began at the regime-held University of Aleppo (see Aljasem 2022) . For some, these revolutionary commitments served as the basis for perseverance during extraordinary circumstances of hardship, especially at branches in areas under siege. In recalling an experience of proctoring an exam while barrel bombs fell overhead, the same lecturer explained, ‘teaching for me is a kind of activism … I teach something more [than just the humanities], I teach their freedom, their rights … its not only a matter of teaching or because its a job, no. It's bigger than that. It's to give life and hope to those who were without’.²

By the end of its first full academic year, the Assad regime recaptured most of FAU’s initial areas of operation. As a result, the university was displaced to Idleb Province, where it would eventually grow to include some 5,000 students across 17 faculties. At the time, however, Idleb was controlled by military factions that would later form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its Salvation Government – which seek to create a religiously homogeneous state founded upon Islamist doctrine (Carenzi 2020). To this aim, it moved to consolidate control over universities in the area by creating the Council for Higher Education. Administrators at FAU were then given an ultimatum: allow the university to be incorporated into the council, thereby acquiescing to HTS inference in matters of governance and service provision, or surrender the institution’s facilities and evacuate the area (Enab Baladi 18 March 2019). In choosing the latter, informants again surfaced their political commitments: ‘I told them if we surrender now, then why did we [resist] from the beginning against Assad? […] We were seeking freedom, we are suffering for seeking freedom, a lot of lives were lost for that, so we don’t want to give up for anyone’.³

Ultimately, FAU would move its operations to Turkish-controlled Azzaz by March 2019 (ibid; Enab Baladi 04 June 2019). Facing a different set of constraints, however, Idleb University continued to negotiate a relationship with the Salvation Government, often to the institution's detriment. While the security situation throughout Northern Syria remains volatile, the geopolitical dynamics surrounding HTS cut much of Idleb province off from the outside world. As one administrator at the university explained, this onstricted the flow of essential human and material resources, and left the university dependent on ‘illegal’ trade and travel routes to sustain its activities.⁴ Here too, the Salvation Government's religious agenda diminished academic and political freedoms of expression, including the imposition of gendered regulations that require males and females to study separately. This doubled lecturers’ workload, as well as demands on institutional assets, without opportunity for recourse.⁵ Yet perhaps most damning of all, many fear that the university will be stigmatised by its forced association with the Salvation Government, despite the limited extent to which the group has successfully politicised students, faculty or administrators towards it cause – in turn thinning what little hope remains for international university partnerships, support or recognition.

Meanwhile, members of FAU describe the higher education landscape in Aleppo countryside as both rich with opportunity and rife with obstacles. Regarding the latter, self-organised student activists report that they have mounted large-scale campaigns over the past year, including public demonstrations and a research project involving 700 respondents.⁶ Their demands span issues of access, quality and equity, including the dire need for affordable student housing and the lowering of tuition fees in light of widespread financial deprivation (Enab Baladi 04 June 2019). Nevertheless, several informants also view the situation in Aleppo and at FAU in particular as representing the ‘height’ of the institution’s history. While security risks such as aerial bombardment, ground offensives and militia-related lawlessness continue to unsettle day-to-day life, the broader effect of Turkey’s presence in the area has begun to stabilise the local economy to the benefit of universities. Though FAU lost thousands of students in the move from Idleb to Azzaz, faculty members report positive enrolment trends that mean the university is likely to surpass student body figures reached during its time in Idleb.⁷

Turkish universities in Aleppo countryside

Set against a decade-long struggle to create and sustain an opposition system of higher education, Turkish institutions in Aleppo countryside appear to many as both privileged and inaccessible. Here, Turkey’s assumed authority to accredit degrees endows its satellite campuses with legal rights unmatched by Syrian universities – an issue that has plagued opposition efforts since their inception. Young people in particular have expressed a sense of hopelessness and injustice over the limited validity of their certificates, discontent that prompted the province-wide ‘Pluto’ campaign, which was named to capture the experience of ‘an existence stripped of its recognition’⁸. Though the campaign collected some 6,000 signatures in just 15 days, Syrian administrators downplayed the significance of the issue. As a leading academic argued, ‘I don’t think international accreditation is worth the time. It is good, but it is not our priority now. It should be the quality of education, to support students, to build their capacities and skills. I think this is the first thing to work on. Not something we know we will not achieve’.⁹

Yet many interlocutors did not look toward Turkish satellite universities as a feasible or desired solution for the problem of accreditation. Despite their depiction as extraordinary examples of trans-nationalised power in political and media discourse, in closer relief the faculties appear less remarkable. Though Turkey's grip in the area is understood as ‘absolute’, the significance of its universities from a service provision perspective pales in comparison to Syrian ones. At the time of writing, administrators estimate a combined 30,000 students attend Idelb and Free Aleppo universities; by comparison, less than 800 students were enrolled at Gaziantep’s four satellite campuses in Aleppo (Tastekin 12 February 2021). Their restricted reach is further compounded by some of the highest tuition fees in the province, as well as entry requirements seen as unrealistic for most young people.

Syrian administrators instead point to the number of their alumni now studying at universities inside Turkey – facilitated in some cases by bilateral agreements – as evidence of their growing international ‘legitimacy’. These claims and agreements are paradoxically generative in that Syrian actors attempt to derive political recognition from affiliations with universities inside Turkey as a way to substantiate their independence from the country's occupation of Aleppo. The necessity to do so also reflects the growing role that foreign universities are playing in contexts of conflict – both in Syria and beyond – where online course offerings and institutional partnerships are being used to fill support gaps left by more traditional emergency response organisations. As the case of Idleb University demonstrates, the aid industry's donor patronage system politicises resource distribution in such a way that can leave educational communities in need completely deserted.

Nonetheless, these negotiations of international intervention and abandonment illuminate varying instances of ideological accommodation and resistance, whereby educational imaginaries premised on a struggle for self-determination are transposed to contend with foreign intervention and co-optation. For some, a revolutionary spirit animates how HE members represent and imagine tertiary education, casting FAU as the living legacy of liberation struggles rooted in 2011. Others now reject an explicitly revolutionary ideal of universities for myriad reasons, including a deep sense of disillusionment with politics or as a tactic to engage supposedly apolitical international actors for support. These negotiations are regularly justified by the pursuit of ‘education for education’s sake’, a refrain often made in reference to the international human rights regime.

In both cases – whether the university is imagined as a mechanism of political sovereignty or as a pathway to personal autonomy – educational activity in Aleppo countryside is framed by narratives of emancipatory struggle. The plausible political actions, aspirations and identities contained within these narratives are heavily shaped by the pressures of outside actors. Externally-imposed constraints in turn form epistemic enclosures regarding what HE members imagine to be either possible or permissible, even in instances where these parameters contradict their values or beliefs.

Such enclosures illuminate, for example, the politics of HE member encounter with the Turkish occupation, especially for those interlocutors who expressed hope for or confidence in Erdoğan’s project. As parties to the conflict continue to show blatant disregard for human life, many subject to their control have relied on a deeply pragmatic approach to negotiating lesser evils. In this light, perhaps the most fundamental political signifier to be deduced from Syrians’ interest in Turkish satellite universities lies in the tenacity with which they seek better educational opportunities for themselves and their families. These efforts may involve bending toward vying projects of power, though in doing so, many endeavour to protect – rather than give up on – the pursuit of a more self-determined future.

Conclusion

How do HE members living under conditions of authoritarianism imagine the university’s political possibilities and horizons? And how are these collective imaginings enmeshed within overlapping histories of state-building, empire and geopolitical power struggle? In Aleppo countryside, these concerns led us to the Syrian administrators, academics and students working to mount an opposition system for tertiary education. Despite tremendous effort, their project is severely delimited by externally-imposed constraints, be it Assad's violence, Erdoğan’s occupation, or the aid system’s abandonment. These vying regimes in turn frame significant aspects of how HE members there imagine the political trajectories of the sector – a dynamic that at times involves reconsidering or even rejecting revolutionary visions in service to more pragmatic alternatives. Meanwhile, at BU, university members articulate political aspirations and practices of resistance through a vocabulary of liberalism, not as a matter of belief but rather as a tactic of political viability. Though many hold more radical commitments, their sense of what is immediately possible or permissible is governed by the compounding terms of regime intervention and western imperialism.

Taken together, the material presented here thus challenges the notion that imaginaries are ‘prototypically grounded in belief’ and moral accord (Taylor 2019, xvi). In this light, HE members at BU and FAU seem to imagine the university through frames that simultaneously resist and accommodate power. In many cases, they are drawn into practices that require concealing or even giving up on more radical or revolutionary ideals – a reckoning often accompanied by some degree of awareness regarding their subjugation. Over time, acquiescent practices are ritualised as a matter of necessity to protect and sustain both the university and its members. In these instances, educational imaginaries animated by the interrelated yet competing demands of liberalism and authoritarianism are both dominant and dominating. While these imaginaries may produce positive affective attachments, they also discipline ‘interpretive horizons’ (Ismail 2018) in ways that subjects are capable of recognising. As such, understanding how and why imaginaries come to pre-figure social meanings, aspirations and identities requires attending to ‘foreclosures’ (Stein and de Oliveira Andreotti 2017) erected not only through processes of deceit, persuasion and collective deliberation but also violence, coercion and control.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Remote interview with FAU lecturer, April 2021 (NS6).

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid

4 Remote interview with Idleb University staff member, April 2021 (NS3).

5 While gendered segregation practices in the Syrian education system pre-date the revolution, these regulations were introduced at Idlib University by HTS and not as a matter of precedence.

6 Remote interview with student activist, March 2021 (NS5); remote interview with an area youth worker, March 2021 (NS4).

7 Remote interview with former FAU lecturer, March 2021 (NS2).

8 Remote interview with area youth worker.

9 Remote interview with Syrian academic, March 2021 (NS5).