Abstract

COUTINHO, Suzana Ramos  and  SANTOS, Jesner Esequiel. Migration and Syrian Conflict: The Narrative Behind the Image. Vista [online]. 2022, n.9, e022002.  Epub May 01, 2023. ISSN 2184-1284.  https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.3650.

This article aims to reflect on migratory flows and the political role of the image using the war in Syria as a reference. Hamza Al-Ajweh's photograph titled "A Syrian child walks down a street past the rubble of destroyed buildings in the rebel-controlled city of Douma in the Eastern Ghouta enclave outside Damascus", taken on March 8, 2018, and published for the first time at the Los Angeles Times, will be used as a point of reference for the discussion and analysis proposed here. The complexity of displacements in this specific context of war leads us to design Syrian mobility after the beginning of the war in 2011, understanding that this complexity goes far beyond the formal definitions used by international agencies. For a closer understanding of the debate, we designed the discussion in three parts: a brief contextualization of the conflict in Syria, which began with the Arab Spring and continues until today. This socio-political contextualization serves here as a backdrop for discussing not only generic migratory categories but to help better understand people, movements and the demand for new categories and visual reflections that go beyond current perspectives. And in the last part, we will discuss how the image of the photographer Hamza Al-Ajweh helps us think about multiple political and transformative aspects of the picture.

Keywords : migration; Syria; war; policy; photography.

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