Family Matters in Conflict

Abstract

Through an ethnographic account of quotidian family activities like cooking or watching the news, this article investigates how authoritarian history and ongoing conflict in Syria play out in the everyday life of Syrians displaced to Lebanon and Turkey. It traces the day-to-day activities through which the value of the anti-authoritarian actions of some family members is recalibrated in friction with the social and material price the family has paid for such actions, the futures various family members imagine for themselves and the particular family history of adaptation to authoritarian rule. The article argues that unfolding these recalibrations among the displaced allows us to see how Syrians formulate the conflict (also) as a family matter. Investigating this family layer of the conflict in turn alerts us to the ways in which political contestation and collaboration in authoritarian contexts is navigated (also) through ethical propositions related to the family.