I am not looking for a formula that explains everything. I look for the mechanisms that repeat themselves, and for the point where each context departs from them.
Visible and hidden power
Alongside formal institutions, informal networks are at work: families, clans, security services, notables, religious communities. Power becomes understandable when you look at how these dimensions fit together, and at what happens when the balance breaks.
The intermediaries
Between the state and society there is always someone who translates, mediates, bargains: mukhtars, mayors, tribal leaders, businessmen, militiamen. Following them is the most concrete way to watch negotiation at work.
Discontinuity on a carpet of continuity
News agency reporting records the day; Ottoman and Mandate history explains why that day went the way it did. Beneath every change of regime lies the relationship between local elites, centres of power, and regional and international actors.
The language of the other
Reading Arabic newspapers, listening to people speaking in dialect, translating documents: without the language you end up looking at the region through imported categories, which recognise only what resembles us.
Partial representations
Diplomats, aid workers, activists and soldiers tell the same crisis in different ways. No one has the whole picture. The work is to compose these views into a design that respects complexity.
Space
Maps, borders, neighbourhoods, crossings. Territory is not a backdrop: in Wadi Khaled, in Suwayda, in the Ghuta, geography decides who negotiates with whom.