Socioeconomic rights to trade and urban citizenship or ‘what does it mean to be a citizen in the land we used to call Syria?’

Our team member Paul Anderson, University of Cambridge, discussed trade and citizenship in Aleppo at a Research Symposium for Visiting Scholars at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, 28 September 2015.

Extract from Trade and Citizenship in Pre-Conflict Aleppo.

‘What does it mean to be a citizen in the land we used to call Syria? What are the terms of belonging to society? In the absence of a credible Baathist vision of the nation, what ideologies of collectivity can organise identity and common purpose there? Before these issues came to be contested in the theatres of mass protest and conflict from 2011 onwards, they were also being contested relatively peacefully within urban arenas of Aleppo in 2008-09. One of these arenas for contesting citizenship was commerce: trade
in and around the bazaar markets in the centre of city. My current research explores the way in which economic activity in Aleppo was involved in the negotiation and reformulation of urban citizenship: the terms of belonging to society in the city. 

Citizenship may seem a strange way to talk about social membership in Syria in a country governed (in 2008-09) by an authoritarian regime. After all, the term normally implies the possession of common rights - from political and civil rights to socioeconomic and cultural ones. And many of these, particularly political and civil rights, have been notably absent in Syria. Yet the term citizenship captures the sense of civic life and entitlement, and urban identity, which merchants and traders in Aleppo saw as central to their role in society. More than simply rights, the term implies belonging to society, to an imagined community of commensurable persons. Citizenship
does not just have legal content, it also has "performative and moral dimensions". These are the practices which signal belonging in society, and which, as they are performed, sustain a sense of an imagined community to which all members belong as putative equals or at least as persons who are commensurable with one another (Holston and Appadurai 1999:6).

Under Bashar al-Asad's rule, particularly in its later years, the state was no longer able for bourgeois Aleppines to define credible parameters of national community, or to define the practices that signalled belonging in society. The Syrian state was no longer the only or even the main player in formulating the meaning of citizenship, its moral and performative dimensions, what it meant to belong to society. New social actors were taking on this role. Crucially, they were not doing so at the national level - the regime remained firmly in control of political expression in the national space. Instead, they were doing so at the urban level, the level of the city. Merchants, Aleppo's commercial bourgeoisie, were one such group involved in articulating the terms of belonging to society. Their commercial practices in Aleppo's bazaar can be understood as performative dimensions of citizenship. In saying this, I am thinking of three forms of practice: selling on credit, or entrustment; the processes of accounting involved in
these relationships of entrustment; and forms of mercantile civility, or patterns of polite interaction and particularly dispute resolution. These were performances of urban citizenship in that they were practices which signified and defined the terms of belonging in society, conceived of primarily along urban rather than national lines. 

For many merchants, these practices constituted a certain kind of civic realm. They fashioned a domain of civility, entrustment and knowability - a network in which it was possible to know creditors and debtors - which also defined the limits of the urban, the city proper. The practice of entrustment was for these merchants what constituted real trade, and was the backbone of proper social order. Their "authentically urban" ethos of
entrustment was not limited to the transmission of commodities, but also encompassed marriage and the entrustment of women. Both kinds of entrustment - of credit, and of women - were underpinned by networks of talk and the accounting of reputation - the practices of "asking around about" (sa'l 'an) and "speaking against" (haki 'ala) other people which served to establish a person's reputation and suitability for either form of entrustment.  

Tribal and rural persons were often said to be outside these embedded networks, of trade, marriage, and social accounting. Because they were outside of the grid of entrustment and social evaluation, they could be deemed out of place in the city, and potentially disruptive. So on the one hand, we might think of these practices of entrustment and reputational accounting as fashioning a space of economic agency. After all, they created a social space in which it was possible to access credit, to assess
reputations, to buy and to sell. But on the other hand, they can also be understood as the performative and moral dimensions of citizenship because they defined the meanings and practices of belonging in mercantile society. Those who were seen not to entrust, those who were deemed outside the mechanisms of reputational accounting, those who were seen not to practice the same kinds of civility in disputes - the tribal and the rural - were said to be out of place in the city. 

Wholesale trade, then, was a site of social differentiation, where some were deemed properly urban and others not, some were admitted to and others were excluded from the benefits of urban citizenship: socioeconomic rights to trade, to use and appropriate space in market alleyways just outside shops, to enter certain shops and cafes, to access credit, to enter marriage alliances, and to access informal justice mechanisms. These are all rights pertaining to urban citizenship. Mercantile discourses and practices of entrustment, accounting and accountability, and civility, did not only structure their economic agency, creating the market as a place where it was possible to buy and sell. They were also central to the contestation of urban citizenship: who had the right to take up social space in the city.’