The review examines the book “Reconstruction as Violence in Assad’s Syria” as a critical intervention that reframes reconstruction not as a pathway to recovery, but as a continuation of war through spatial, legal, and institutional means. Rather than treating rebuilding as a neutral, post-conflict process, the volume shows how reconstruction under Assad functioned as an instrument of urbicide, dispossession, demographic engineering, and political consolidation, challenging linear notions of transition from war to peace .

The reviewer highlights the book’s central conceptual contribution: the argument that declaring the onset of reconstruction is itself a political act. Authority over when and how “recovery” begins becomes a tool to reinterpret destruction, reorder social geographies, and legitimize exclusion. Through concepts such as urbicide, domicide, and “civilian crisis architecture,” the chapters foreground space as a primary arena of power, where violence is embedded not only in large-scale planning schemes and legal instruments, but also in everyday practices of survival and adaptation.

Large cities like Aleppo occupy a pivotal place in the volume, emerging as both symbols and laboratories of reconstruction politics. The review traces authors’ emphasis on how heritage, return, exclusion, and civilian agency intersect in the city’s post-war landscape. The book chapters underscore how reconstruction redistributed “victory dividends” while deepening social and spatial inequalities. However, the reviewer argues that the case studies were not diversified to show the full range of local and international involvement in urbicide. Also by focusing on three main urban cases, it failed to pay enough attention to the urban-rural divide that was at the core of the conflict dynamics and contestation.

The review offers a measured critique. It notes that the book’s long production timeline and reliance on external scholarship led to analytical flattening of Syrian governance, legal practice, and political economy. By treating the regime as a unified actor, the authors failed to reveal tensions between various state-led visions, the agency of different bureaucratic and political actors, and elite competition that hampered progress of reconstruction projects. Combined with some shortfalls in reading legal statues and the blurring of lines between formal policy and its implementation, the book  shows the limitation of conducting research from afar.

Despite these limitations, the review concludes that the book remains a powerful cautionary text. Published after Assad’s fall, its core insight—that reconstruction can reproduce and reframe violence rather than resolve it—retains urgent relevance as new authorities and investors seek to declare Syria’s war over while its structural and social fractures persist.