This article intends to provide responses to some of the many unanswered questions about the making and the transformation of the uprising in Syria by exploring a new avenue of research: media development aid. Most of the academic interest has been oriented towards the role that the new media played at the time of the uprising, insufficient interest, instead, has been directed to the development of the sector in the years predating it. What emerges from this article is that the Syrian media landscape was strongly supported by international development aid during the years prior the outbreak of the uprising of 2011. By looking at the complex structure of media aid architecture and investigating into the practices and programs implemented by some representative organisations, this article reflects on the field of media development as a new modus operandi of the West (EU and US especially), to promote democracy through alternative and non-collateral bottomup support.

To counter the trend toward mechanization of research and aridity of critical analysis, this article makes a case for an interdisciplinary quest. To borrow Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s phrase, we are convinced that ‘everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.’ With an eye to open-ended research questions, this article attempts to build a body of theoretical, political and anthropological considerations, which, it is hoped, could function as a case of enquiry into the mechanics of power, revolt and revolution. The objective is to draw comparative and phenomenological lines between the events of the 2011 ‘Arab Spring,’ in its local ecologies of protest, with its global reverberations as materialized in the slogans, acts and ideals of Greek and Spanish Indignados and the UK and US occupy movements. In order to do so, it proposes to clarify terminological ambiguities and to bring into the analytical scenario new subjects, new means and new connections. The article resolves to lay the ground for a scholarship of silence, by which the set of unheard voices, hidden actions and defiant tactics of the ordinary, through extraordinary people, find place in the interpretation of phenomena such as revolts and revolutions.

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Chapter in edited book Annemarie Profanter, Elena Maestri, Arab women and media in changing landscapes: realities and changes, Cambridge University Press, December 2015 "... it is only women, women themselves, who can free themselves from all forms of gender oppression and so become a vital dynamic force capable of creating another world." 1 Nawal Sadawi, "Waging War on the Mind" Back in 2008, when Syria was still a relatively stable country, marked by that stagnant though fictitious tranquillity that authoritarian regimes are capable of establishing, no one would have imagined how the course of history would have hit this country so harshly only three years later. 2No one would have predicted that citizens' tolerance towards the Asad regime would have ended and that many men, women and children would have gone into the streets demanding back their freedom and dignity. No one would have expected that those protests would have grown in size and caught on like wild fire through the whole country. And even less one would have imagined that those protests would have turned into a civil war with international backing and lastly become a self-perpetuating conflict, with no apparent solution feasible. Far from this dreadful scenario, the Syrian novelist Zakaria Tamer published a collection of short stories entitled Breaking Knees in 2008, where with a sarcastic language and visionary power, he explores the intricate interplay of human relations, the repression of the individual in the hands of the institutions or religion and the urgent need for change. 3

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