Surviving the Syrian Civil War, with Justin Schon

Scope Conditions Podcast

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we talk about how civilians seek to survive civil war. Our guest is Dr. Justin Schon, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Virginia’s Democratic Statecraft Lab. In his new book, Surviving the War in Syria, Justin examines the repertoires of strategies that civilians choose from as they seek to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe.
In the West, we often think of migration as the key survival strategy for those threatened by civil violence, probably because migration as the strategy we in the West most readily observe. However, Justin argues that migration, while a common response, is only one of the multiple ways in which civilians seek to survive civil war. Moreover, it is a response that requires money, social connections, and other resources that not all civilians have. Justin highlights an alternative survival strategy, which he calls “community support”: staying in the conflict zone to help friends, family, and neighbors survive.
In this episode, we talk with Justin about how civilians choose among survival strategies. We discuss the nature of the risks that civilians face during civil war; how they seek to manage those risks; and the experiences that shape their choices. More broadly, this is a conversation about how our perspective on conflict and migration shifts as we come to think of civilians in civil war as agents -- making difficult, high-stakes decisions under constraints -- rather than as passive victims of circumstance. We also talk with Justin about his fieldwork, asking him about the practical, inferential, and ethical complexities of the 10 months of interviews that he conducted with refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Kenya, and the U.S.
You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.