While the administrations of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad employed torture regularly as a tool of authoritarian governance, this usage changed dramatically in nature as the revolution moved from protests to insurgency, which posed an increasingly significant threat to the regime's survival. In the counterinsurgency literature, torture's function is generally tied to intelligence gathering. In the context of Syria's post-2011 Counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign, torture functioned more as a way to intimidate the population, forcing them to explicitly choose a side-especially in contested zones. The threat posed by the uprising amplified the scale, form, targeting, and purpose of torture, expanding it significantly. This article traces these dynamics, not only to explain the changing logics and practices of torture in Syria, but also to identify key actors, structures, and sites of analysis. It attempts to avoid falling into the normative trap of simply condemning torture, by moving its examination into a more analytical space, thereby demonstrating how torture can perform a critical function beyond intelligence gathering within an authoritarian COIN campaign.

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The regional international organisations of the Middle East clearly work to different traditions than Western International Organisations (IOs) and are comprised of states which are known for their secrecy and hostility to critique. This is methodological challenge enough without taking into account the influences of temporal and spatial practices upon the functioning of these organisations. Using anthropological approaches to time and space an argument is advanced that putting temporal and spatial considerations at the heart of the study of these bodies impacts upon our conceptual, theoretical and methodological outlooksgenerating richer, more nuanced insights. Thus, not only do time and space form an important research agenda in their own right but they also better inform existing theoretical understandings of IOs, particularly the historical and sociological institutionalist traditions. Drawing from direct experience with some of the key difficulties researchers face when engaging with these organisations, the article demonstrates the need for a reflexive and adaptive methodological engagement which can engage with the impacts of place and perceptions of time, examining these bodies less in comparison with the expectations scholars carry for IOs such as the UN and EU and more on their own terms, in their own situational and temporal contexts. Policy Implications• Scholars and policymakers should judge success and failure differently to better take into account differing cultural conceptions of timescales.• Understanding how policy is made in the secretariats of the IOs of the Middle East needs to take into account more variables than simply the directly political. Understanding how ideas of time and the impacts of place shape this, is an important new dimension of study.• For academics, understanding how local dimensions of time and space might reshape existing theoretical approaches which are so firmly based on the study of Western IOs can draw attention to different understandings of time horizons and critical junctures.