International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 53

International Journal on Criminology
With this in mind, philosopher Bernard Stiegler defines disruption as “a
phenomenon of accelerated innovation that forms the basis of the strategy developed
in Silicon Valley: it involves moving faster than society in order to impose
upon it models that destroy social structures and render the public authorities
powerless. It is a strategy of incapacitating the adversary.” 1
Disruption thus imposes new normative constraints on the majority of social
practices, including those relating to the most private spheres of the connected
individual. Greater understanding of the irruption of this disruptive reality into
the heart of the Syrian war requires—first of all—establishing a phenomenology
of the dominant representations of this civil-global conflict so as to—secondly—
examine how and why this connects with, condenses into, and manufactures an
“epistemological obstacle” that prevents the causes of its development, expansion,
and globalization from being retraced.
Consideration will—thirdly—be given to how this obstacle can be overcome
in order to draw lessons, if not concepts, enabling readoption of a rational
and improvable reality capable of transformation in order to lay the foundations
for new stabilities, or even sustainable mechanisms of peace in the various regions
of the Middle East.
A BRIEF PHENOMENOLOGY OF WAR DISCOURSE
The final phase of the Battle of Aleppo was accompanied by a surge of “fake
news.” 2 During fall 2016, radio, television, and newspapers from the major
national and international press rallied to try and “save” Aleppo from the
horror: recapture by the Syrian government army. Our ears, eyes, and collective
intelligence were bombarded by a daily deluge of propaganda. The primary device
of this collective Orwellization consisted of inverting the operational military situation:
Aleppo was not occupied by Salafist jihadi groups (the same as those behind
the attacks in Paris and elsewhere), but was “under siege” by the national forces
of the “Bashar al-Assad regime”! A second distortion of reality: the “moderate,” or
even “secular” and “democratic” rebels—i.e. Al-Qaeda’s butchers in Syria—were
valiantly resisting Genghis Khan and his Syrian, Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah
1 Bernard Stiegler, Dans la Disruption: Comment ne pas Devenir Fou? (Paris: Editions Les Liens qui
Libèrent, 2016).
2 The Battle of Aleppo took place from 2012 to 2016 in Syria’s former economic capital and second
city. It began on July 19, 2012 with a rebel offensive that quickly took control of eastern areas but
failed to take the whole city. For four years, Aleppo found itself divided between its western zone,
held by the government army, and the eastern zone, controlled by the jihadi rebels. Toward the
end of 2015, military intervention from Russia eventually tipped the balance in favor of the loyalist
camp. Eastern Aleppo was finally surrounded in September 2016 and in November 2016 the jihadi
defenses collapsed. Driven into a final pocket of resistance, the rebels surrendered on December
13, 2016. Under the terms of an agreement, the remaining insurgents and besieged civilians were
evacuated to Idlib Governorate between December 15 and 22, 2016.
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