Syria post-Assad: Questions and views on freedom of artistic expression

When examining the state of artistic freedom of expression in Syria, fear emerges as one of the most influential forces shaping the individual’s capacity to act, to express, and to understand their own position within the limited space available today. This experience of fear is not confined to a direct relationship with political or religious authority, or an even combination of the two. Most social structures that an individual encounters, beginning with family and extending through their neighborhood, school, and workplace, contain their own forms of authority. These structures often enforce surveillance-like behavior and strict rules that govern conduct and expression, either out of deeply rooted conviction or out of concern for potential consequences that might affect the individual or the community around them.

Hozaifah Horieah, speaks about fear as a hereditary force that dominates the experience of Syrian artists. He says: “Fear, for us as Syrians, is always present and even inherited. Like any acquired genetic trait, our fear is passed down. We have lived under a repressive authority for sixty years. My grandfather passed fear to my father, and my father passed it to me, and so it continues.”

Hozaifah adds a personal example from the years when he experimented with drawing Assad: “I used to try sketching him in a satirical way, but I could never forget a drawing inside a notebook or on a loose sheet, even in my own room. Anyone could find it during a routine security raid. You know what that means and what could happen to you if you draw ‘the god’ in a mocking form. Each time I drew him, I made sure to tear the paper into very tiny pieces.”

Generations of fear created by the authoritarian regime, and the logic of power it represents, had become embedded inside every Syrian in the form of an internal censor, making free expression a difficult act, burdened by the awareness of possible consequences for crossing taboos or red lines. These consequences included repression, arrest, torture, disappearance, or even death. Silence within such a landscape, filled with security branches and torture facilities, is not necessarily a sign of approval or support for the regime.

Syrian artists found themselves confronting this fear constantly. Over time, they developed professional and artistic strategies, along with coping mechanisms, within an environment that provided very limited space for independent artistic activity, particularly practices that did not align with the dominant cultural direction. One example can be seen in the experience of the Malas brothers, known for their experimental theater work and specifically the “Room Theater” project during the years before the uprising. Later, after taking a public stance against the regime and leaving Syria to settle in France, Mohammad Malas reflects on the role of fear and the unstable relationship with censorship in Syria, and how it shaped their initial artistic experience in France.

He recounts an incident while preparing their first theater text in French: “After I finished writing the text in French and it became ready for performance, the first question I asked a French friend was: How can I get approval for the script? He genuinely could not understand the question. I explained that we needed official approval in order to perform it. He truly did not grasp what script approval meant, and he told me that my relationship is only with the theater itself. No one interferes with your text.”

Experiences like this open a path for extensive studies on how fear of expression persists, how it travels with the artist into exile, and how it shapes the artistic experience of Syrians long after leaving the original context.

The role of self-censorship for the artist or cultural practitioner does not end with fear of political authority or with choosing which topics to address. After the fall of the regime, another factor emerged as a defining element of the current Syrian reality, namely the role of social censorship. This appears most visibly through comments and reactions on social media, which have become a central part of the environment described by every person interviewed for this article.

For example, Hozaifah recalls several incidents that followed the publication of his drawings on Instagram. He describes the insults and threats he received, even though the drawings themselves addressed a social issue that criticized the polarized atmosphere and attempted to redirect attention to the harsh living conditions experienced by people in the city.

Within the relatively new field of stand-up comedy in the Syrian artistic scene, fear takes on another shape. The concern is no longer limited to the figure of the leader or the army, as it was in previous decades. The anxiety now comes from a society exhausted by war and armed with accumulated anger. Sharief Homsi, founder of Styria Comedy, explains this situation:

“We understand that there are deep wounds that remain open. The unrestrained spread of weapons can lead to dangerous consequences on the ground.”

For this reason, even a joke can escalate into a major confrontation. The performer is placed before a difficult equation: they want to speak openly about everything they observe in the new reality, using their own satirical lens; yet they face the risk that “a joke about a local accent may be interpreted as an attack on a community or region that suffered bombing and siege, or as disregard for their pain.”

Although many practitioners have a sense of unprecedented space for expression after the fall, there is a shared understanding that this freedom remains conditional. There is also fear that these conditions will persist or even grow stricter. Sharief recalls statements from officials and armed personnel: “They told us to say whatever we want on stage, but not to film or post controversial clips on social media, explaining that it is difficult to control an angry, armed society even today.”

This reveals how the digital sphere has shifted from a space of connection and expression into an additional site of surveillance, dominated by language of accusation, threats, and defamation. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to regulate this environment in the absence of laws capable of addressing such forms of harassment.

This lack of regulation in online spaces has resulted in the wide spread of hate speech and harassment online, exerting significant influence over Syrian public debate. Creators, discussing their rapidly changing reality, find themselves exposed to an open arena filled with incitement, between takfiri-Excommunicationist rhetoric and treason-accusing rhetoric, with no legal frameworks that can restrain this escalation. Each incident of polarization or controversy is treated as an individual matter, with little consideration for the role of state institutions in delineating and regulating the boundaries of expression, action, and artistic practice.

In discussing the exclusionary discourse that has come to dominate public life—emerging whenever an event or statement diverges from the rhetoric of the new authorities or touches its taboos—Jumana drew attention during our interview to what I would call a controversial example from the Syrian sphere, one she had followed closely this year. It concerns a famous Syrian actress who had defended the Assad regime both before and after its fall, and as a consequence, was stripped of her membership in the Syrian Artists’ Syndicate.

The actress in question had gone to extraordinary lengths in a provocative denial of the regime’s crimes or the involvement of the head of the regime in any of them- crimes whose reality is known to every Syrian regardless of differing interpretations and histories of opposition to them. Her statements, made in a personal capacity on television and on social media, resulted in what Jumana described as a study in what she calls the emergence of a new “Syrian cancel culture.” 

Even though this example is deeply contentious for many Syrians—and legally fraught, given that the actress’s statements preceded the constitutional declaration criminalizing the denial of war crimes committed by the Assad regime—it remains revealing. Together with other cases, perhaps less extreme, it illuminates two important dimensions directly relevant to this research.

The first is the absence of a clear understanding of freedom of expression as a right belonging to any citizen, versus freedom of expression solely within an artistic practice or cultural output. The fear of censorship here exceeds direct institutional or official oversight of a cultural or creative act. Rather, it is becoming a fear of a generalized form of censorship—one that strips individuals or groups of their sense of autonomy. Artistic or creative practice can be understood precisely as a platform for such capacity to act, especially for artists and cultural practitioners whose work relies on direct communicative engagement with audiences and on presenting critical perspectives on contentious social issues.

Meredith D. Clark argues that cancellation “is itself an expression of agency: a choice to withdraw one’s attention from a person or thing whose values, (behaviors), or speech are so offensive that we no longer wish to honor them with our presence, time, or money.” (Clark 2020).

Yet, for many, the scene in Syria today resembles a gradual takeover of the public sphere and of the fragile agency of expression—a sense of freedom that was reborn the day the regime fell. It was this same need and search for agency that, after decades of repression, helped give rise to the Syrian uprising of 2011: an act of refusal and civil disobedience through which younger generations and marginalized communities—whose voices and capacity to express or object had been steadily eroded—sought to reclaim their lost capacity, caught between an internal patriarchal authority of clan elder or family head on one side, and the Leader, his army, and his absolute power on the other.

While the transitional authority’s discourse promises a coming era of freedom, dignity, and vitality, the sense of agency, or the feeling of regaining it, among supporters appears to draw from a mixture of fear and anger, coupled with a heightened sense of grievance and hypersensitivity toward the “other.” This resurfaces whenever anything threatens to disturb the state of euphoria, spectacle, and awe produced by displays of power, the restoration of historical glory, and the celebratory rituals marking this past year. Such a reality extends far beyond a media statement made by a famous artist or actress. For most of the individuals I spoke with, this extends to evaluating artistic practices that hold critical value in their message, or those that introduce, through approach or discourse of this practices, opinions or ideas unfamiliar or unacceptable within a particular social environment.

This leads to the second aspect illuminated by the case Jumana mentioned previously: the cancel culture emerging today is a representation of a new de facto authority, a “symbolic power,” as John B. Thompson originally described it, and was later reframed within social media by Christian Fuchs. In other words, in the absence of structures that regulate justice, accountability, civil peace, and other foundational mechanisms, or amid a systematic marginalization of these mechanisms, despite their necessity for societal recovery and renewed social communication, this void becomes fertile ground for forms of community-driven censorship rooted in accumulated anger, monopolization of grievance and marginalization experienced under the former regime. Such mechanisms then claim legitimacy in passing judgment and exert influence over the decisions of authorities and institutions—institutions that, in turn, appear to rely on prevailing discourse and social-media sentiment as indicators of public mood, or even as tools for producing it.

The result is a digital sphere functioning as a substitute for absent representative and participatory structures—structures that remain entirely missing from the Syrian reality today, including any political sphere where Syrians can act collectively, or any long-term societal dialogue employing all possible tools for communication, representation, reconciliation, and reconstruction.

Before closing this fear chapter, when looking at its consequences from the position of practitioners, cultural workers, and artists—one last point emerges, rooted in the same chronic anxiety: fear’s transformation into a productive and active force. After the fall of the regime, Syrian practitioners and actors in the cultural and artistic fields appear to be gripped by an acute fear and sensitivity toward losing any space or platform for expression, practice, or production. This is a condition Hozaifah described when commenting on the attempted closure of the Madad Arts Initiative headquarters earlier this year—an incident he witnessed firsthand:

“There is fear and apprehension among many in the cultural field about losing the place of art, cultural institutions, and their roles in the country. It’s a defensive state: fear and urgency. We were stunned by the way so many people reacted when someone—angry as well—tried to shut down the Madad space less than a month after the fall of the regime, on the grounds that it was linked to the old one, which was slander. But what surprised us even more was how artists and media figures rallied around us, using their channels of communication with the new authorities and their visibility on social media to draw public attention to the issue. That wave of posts, calls, and appeals was the reason the security official responsible for Damascus at the time came personally, and why the authorities were keen to resolve the matter immediately, given its impact on the image of the new power—especially in that early phase.”

Incidents like this reveal the need for collective action driven by an awareness of the need to exert pressure and raise one’s voice, particularly in a political and social transformation of this scale. They also illustrates how individuals come to test a possible form of collective action: as a reaction to a threat targeting their position within society and their ability to practice and produce.

Fear is a form of knowledge, an understanding and awareness of the narrow space for expression and the possible consequences of crossing imposed boundaries. In this sense, the productive dimension of fear becomes a motivating power, pushing artists or performers to refine and develop their tools. Sharief Homsi explains:

“Before the fall of the regime, our awareness of the red lines—and the constant negotiation of a very tight space of what could and could not be said—was an important factor that sharpened our experience and improved the quality of the performances themselves: what we say, how, and when. Today, drawing on that past experience, we are negotiating the available expressive space more intelligently. We present material and content that can be interpreted in multiple ways, allowing us to maneuver and continue working…”