Introduction
One afternoon in the winter of 2014, I was at home in Sweden and I received a message written in Arabic:
“Thank you very much for everything you did for us, Joshka. All my gratitude and appreciation, Mohammed Hariri”.
The message contained a Dutch phone number to call. The name Hariri was very familiar to me and reminded me of Syria. Hariri was the tribal name of the community in northern Syria where I had spent my time as a young anthropologist doing fieldwork between 1999 and 2002. I was ........