This case study was prepared as part of the Invisible Violence Forum During the Syrian Conflict, held in Berlin on January 22–23, 2025. The forum was organized by a number of Syrian organizations working in the public sphere, with the aim of shedding light on the manifestations of structural and symbolic violence in the Syrian context and analyzing their expressions and impacts from an intersectional perspective.

The Invisible Violence Forum in Berlin brought together the following organizations: Ettijahat – Independent Culture,
Al-Jumhuriya, Syrian Center for Policy Research, Syria Untold, Dawlaty, Syrian Female Journalists Network, Women for Common Spaces.

Categories: Blog, Human Empowerment, Publication, Research Papers, Research Reports

Tags: Invisible Violence Forum, SCPR, Syria

The views expressed in this case study are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of the institutions that organized this forum.

All intellectual property rights are reserved to the institutions leading this initiative and to the contributors to this paper. This content may be reused or reproduced in whole or in part under the Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND), provided that the source is properly cited, the material is not used for commercial purposes, and no modifications are made.
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Introduction

This paper examines poverty in Syria during the conflict period from an intersectional perspective and presents it as a form of invisible violence. The main problem with poverty lies in the fact that it is not perceived as a form of violence, but rather as a social phenomenon that should merely be alleviated. The invisibility of poverty is linked to existing socio-economic and political structures that produce structural violence and systematic exploitation. This is reflected in restricted participation in economic activity, the unequal distribution of returns, neoliberal economic policies, weak social protection policies, and the normalization of poverty by portraying it as a natural phenomenon related to individual effort and the course of life.

The normalization of human suffering and class disparities within societal narratives contributes to rendering poverty invisible as a form of violence and frames it as a normal condition and part of everyday reality. This makes the harm caused by poverty less visible and less likely to provoke anger or intervention. Poverty and its associated values thus become an accepted and socially internalized reality, similar to how historical wealth is attributed to certain geographic regions or population groups but not others, or how civilization and culture are associated with certain groups while denied to others, who are instead stigmatized as ignorant, backward, or lazy.

Poverty is a silent violence exercised against the poor, and it appears across multiple measures and dimensions. These include monetary poverty, which measures poverty based on income or expenditure; multidimensional poverty, based on the concept of capabilities and functions that individuals are able to perform; poverty as deprivation of basic, economic, social, political, and legal rights; poverty entrenched in laws and policies through the absence of legislative frameworks and protective policies; poverty as an individual’s perception of their own condition and how they feel about their living situation compared to others; and the representation of poverty in media and social media, which often focuses on critical images of poverty and on the politicization of poverty by conflicting parties.

This paper seeks to examine poverty in Syria as a form of invisible violence by analyzing it through different methodologies and approaches in order to reach an intersectional understanding of poverty from multiple perspectives.