Stefan Tarnowski

Stefan Tarnowski is an early-career research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Views of Violence’ project at the University of Copenhagen.

From The Blog
25 November 2023

In the summer of 2019, I took part in an investigation by the Syrian Archive into attacks on medical facilities in Syria, described by the Lancet in 2017 as ‘the most dangerous place on earth for healthcare providers’. The Syrian Archive verified 410 incidents of hospital bombings, and identified with confidence the perpetrators of 252 attacks. Ninety per cent of those were acts of aerial bombardment by Assad’s forces and their allies, in particular the Russian air force. Systematically targeting hospitals was one of their most ruthless tactics, a means to depopulate opposition areas.

From The Blog
3 October 2023

Since 2014, I’ve done fieldwork with Syrians who live in the Beqaa Valley, forcibly displaced by Assad’s forces and their allies. When they describe their experiences at the hands of Hizbullah, it’s as brutal as anything committed by an invading army waging a war of aggression: siege, bombardment, massacre, rape. The continuity of the term ‘resistance’ in the museum display at Baalbek is the record of an old word dying.

From The Blog
8 September 2022

Last month, shooting began in Damascus on a film produced by Jackie Chan, using the destroyed suburb of Hajar al-Aswad as a backdrop. On the first day on set, the director, Song Yinxi, was accompanied by the Chinese ambassador to Syria. Flanked by men in military fatigues and a style of Arab dress that looked ever so slightly out of place, a banner in CCP red and gold was hung from a tank turret. ‘Peace and Love,’ it said.

Diary: In Lebanon

Stefan Tarnowski, 21 October 2021

InJune, there was a debate in our building about whether to rayyih al-moteur (‘rest the generator’) at night or during the day. We had electricity from the national grid for only one hour in 24. In July, the only way to cool down in the afternoon was to strip off and lie sweating on the apartment’s terrazzo floor. By August, diesel shortages meant that not even the rich...

From The Blog
10 February 2021

It was during a visit to UMAM Documentation and Research in 2014 that I found out the truth about my grandmother’s death. My aunt, Rania Stephan, was making a film about a car bomb planted in West Beirut in 1983. An AP report from 1991 states the bare facts: ‘5 February 1983: Palestine Research Centre explosion kills 19, wounds 136.’ UMAM’s holdings were more substantial. With the help of the archive’s founder, Lokman Slim, we looked through magazines, newspaper articles, photographs of the explosion’s aftermath. The leftist magazine al-Shirā‘ carried the story on its cover: ‘Saturday Massacre: Perpetrator Known!’Everyone who lived through the civil war knew the motive: to destroy what could have become the Palestinian national archives. No one doubted it was carried out by the Israelis.

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