This thesis explores domicide, defined as deliberate home destruction causing suffering, as a recombinant authoritarian strategy that dismantles the social fabric in the countryside through intimate betrayal. It argues that domicide is a necropolitical tool of governmentality that, beyond attacking physical structures, kills social bodies through individuals’ participation. Yet it is a double-edged policy, reinforcing power by deepening fragmentation while engendering resistance. Focusing on Syria (2011–2024), the thesis studies Lataminah and Morek in Hama countryside, subjected to collective violence since 2011, including the Assad regime’s seizure and auctioning of agricultural land in 2019–2024. The thesis adopts an interpretive approach and draws on oral history and ethnographic fieldwork in 2022–2024. Home is approached as a socio-symbolic assemblage and an infrastructure of intimacy shaped by domination, whose everyday dynamics shape politics. The thesis explores home unmaking and remaking, where individuals emerge as subjects and agents of destruction and resistance. The research shows, first, that collective memory is central to domicide by reshaping the meaning of home; second, that the affective and embodied nature of space anchors memory and makes resistance inherent; third, that home unmaking and remaking occur simultaneously, reproducing both attachment to home and the spatial exclusion of perpetrators from collective memory; and fourth, that domicide, as a necropolitical tool of recombinant authoritarianism, ultimately destabilizes both the Syrian regime and society, with effects extending beyond the regime’s existence. By victimizing survivors and antagonizing labelled intimate perpetrators, this collective memory reshapes identities along binary lines and risks further social and political destabilization. The thesis’ focus on embodied collective memory and suffering linked to betrayal by intimate actors offers resonance for understanding other cases of rural domicide and shaping reconciliation processes.
