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.

Keywords

Labor Syria mobility militarism war

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