Driving across the warscape: Syrian cross-border taxi drivers and the politics of mobility

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research with Syrian cross border taxi drivers in developing an argument about how their mobility is a crucible of the interlocking relations between the production of masculinity and political economy during wartime. I propose that thinking with the Syrian cross-border taxi driver advances our theoretical approaches to the temporality of war and the conceptualization of warscape. In so doing, I challenge the unidirectional (out of Syria) notions of movement which have dominated our spatial understandings of the long conflict and which circulate around the figure of the refugee.