In the last days of the Cold War, trauma studies—a then upcoming strand of literary studies and literary theory—and its approach to historical and personal suffering worked hand in glove with popular trauma culture as promoted by Oprah Winfrey to remake the bourgeois subject as an ideal ethical actor and a political force for good. Societies in denial of traumas past and present were deemed authoritarian and needed to be reformed or taken over and remade in the image of the liberal democracies. Trauma studies took on an aesthetic quality that was very attractive to liberals who had lost confidence in a narrative of social progress, but who saw themselves as purveyors of individual virtues. In fact, the self-effacing, trauma-identified scholar could remake herself as the best witness to history.

A trauma culture/trauma studies approach to war and recovery has had direct consequences for the reconfiguration of the Syrian polity after the fall of the Assad regime. According to sociologists Zeina Al Azmeh and Patrick Baert, the failure of nerve displayed by leftist Syrian intellectuals exiled in Western Europe could be described as a consequence of their adoption of “trauma work” as a paradigm through which to understand what the Syrian people were going through under the Assad regime. Paralyzed by guilt at having failed to stand up to the forces of Islamic fundamentalism that dominated anti-Assadism in Syria, these “intellectuals quickly diverted their efforts toward trauma narration as a means for expressing solidarity and alleviating guilt … This role of trauma narration, sometimes funded by European academic institutions or NGOs, called for identification with the suffering masses.”

In adopting trauma culture and trauma narration, they tried to win Western support for the struggle against Assad. Al Azmeh and Baert argue that “the extreme form of solidarity from below and associated epistemic hyper-egalitarianism were aligned with intellectuals’ new role as trauma narrators and their related quest to establish a Syrian cause on the global political arena.” But what trauma culture produced at home was a “discursive vacuum” rather than “a persuasive emancipatory discourse congruent with the people’s lived reality.” Syrian intellectuals were unable to articulate a coherent case against religious extremism and foreign intervention. According to Al Azmeh and Baert, by engaging in trauma work’s anti-intellectual liberal project, intellectuals neutralized themselves as leaders and as leftists who could lead Syria to socialism. While what happened to the Syrian left unfolded under the shadow of forced exile and state violence on a horrific level, the abdication of responsibility to reason, to an objectively shared material reality and history, happened on the academic left in the Anglo-American world in much less violent circumstances.