The Syrian uprising began with demands for dignity, social justice, and political agency — claims crushed by war, forced flight, and geopolitical instrumentalisation. One year after the fall of the Assad regime, return policies now risk repeating this erasure: treating Syrians as populations to be relocated, reconstruction as a market, and mobility as a problem to control.
Return cannot be discussed without acknowledging displacement. Millions were uprooted, often through politically motivated demographic engineering: some communities were expelled, others contained, many prevented from ever returning. These fractures shape who can go back, who cannot, and who is forced to remain in places of refuge.
Across the region, return debates are driven less by safety than by containment and political bargaining — from Europe’s border deal with Turkey to restrictive refugee governance in Lebanon. Syrians continue to navigate militarised borders, precarious residency, document extraction, legal limbo, and new waves of displacement, while grassroots networks rebuild protection and solidarity from below.
Bringing together voices from Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Europe, this panel asks what justice means when “return” is promoted faster than rights, accountability, or material conditions can be secured. We connect Syria’s unfinished revolutionary question with the legal battlegrounds where Syrians fight for residency and protection, and with Europe’s shift toward externalisation, deterrence, and selective asylum systems.
Migration is not the crisis — war, inequality, and the policing of movement are. The task ahead is not to make Syrians return, but to ensure that return becomes a right and a choice, not a verdict.
Speakers:
- Cahide Sari Okur – Secretary General of Agora Association- Association for Migration Research (Agoraderneği), Turkey
- Mohammad Sablouh – Director of the Legal Program at the Cedar Center for Legal Studies, Lebanon
- Simav Hassan - journalist and the Advocacy and Communications Director at Syrians for Truth and Justice
- Sofian Philip Naceur – German-Algerian journalist working with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation's North Africa office in Tunis and author of “Decrypting ICMPD”
- Moderation: Ansar Jasim (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Beirut Office)
Further information:
🎧 Languages: English–Arabic / Arabic-English (with simultaneous interpretation)
📍 Online, Zoom-Link: eu01web.zoom.us/j/64603911569
⏰ Local Time:
- Germany (CET) 5pm–7pm
- Beirut, Lebanon (EET) 6pm–8pm
- Damascus, Syria (EET) 6pm–8pm
- Turkey (TRT) 7pm–9pm
- Iraq (AST) 7pm–9pm
This event is a cooperation between dis:orient and the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation.
