Have you ever listened to a Syrian refugee talk about home?

What does it mean to lose a home—and to remake one? For millions of Syrians, home is no longer a given but something they must fight for, redefine, and rebuild. What is 'home' for you?

When we talk about Syria these days, we talk about geopolitics. Power plays, elite maneuvering, shifting alliances. We carve out pockets of politics, extrapolate them, and map the trajectory of the country from the top down. I do it too—because understanding the structures of power often tells us how the rest will fall into place.

But sometimes—perhaps more than sometimes—it’s necessary to pause, shift the frame, and change the lens. If understanding is truly the goal, there’s no other way.

Wendy Pearlman’s book, The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, tells a story of today. Not just about Syrian refugees, but about all of us who leave, who try to leave, who stay but feel stuck. Those who find that the home they once knew no longer feels like home. It’s about all of us who become talking points, bargaining chips at the table of elite politics. And it’s about those who never imagined leaving—whose small neighborhoods, extended families, and childhood friends once felt permanent—until they were forced to become nobodies in "someone else’s home."

Pearlman is a rare voice in political science, a professor at Northwestern whose craft resembles that of oral historian and Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. What Alexievich did for the Russian story, Pearlman has done for Syria. But both transcend their subjects. These are human stories—clear-eyed, unclouded by abstraction, heavy with wisdom.

Pearlman has spent years collecting a treasure trove of testimonies—500 interviews with Syrian refugees scattered across the world. Her latest book focuses on 38 of them. Their stories are about leaving home, searching for home, losing the meaning of home, and trying, against all odds, to build it again.

They didn’t know they would have to leave when the protests began in 2011-12. Some of them took to the streets against the Assad regime, an oppressive dynasty first under Hafez, then his son Bashar. This is how they described participating in those first protests:

"The first time I heard my own voice."
"It felt like breathing."
"It was better than my wedding day."

But there was no triumphant revolution. The dictator stayed; the people left—7 million displaced internally, 5 million forced abroad. Of those, 1.5 million live in Europe, 400,000 elsewhere, and the largest number in Turkey. That makes the voices in this book even more pressing for me. Turkey is my "home" country, where anti-Syrian sentiment has exploded in recent years, especially as the economy spirals downward. I come from the country with the highest number of Syrians who are constantly reminded that they do not belong, and yet I have settled in another country, in England, trying to belong.

My thoughts on home are, in essence, not so different from the feelings I read in this book—though I was much luckier than most Syrians.

Pearlman was in Oxford this week to discuss her book at the Middle East Centre. She had just spent a month and a half in Turkey and was appalled by the things she heard. "Where do you get these ideas about Syrians?" she asked Turks who spoke of them with disdain. "Have you ever met or talked to a Syrian?" The answer, unsurprisingly: No, but we know.

This is how anti-refugee, anti-immigrant, anti-anyone-who-is-different-than-me sentiment circulate now—through WhatsApp messages that are forwarded many times, through Facebook groups, through the churn of X posts. With half-truths, outright lies, and a steady drip of fearmongering.

A couple of months ago, I sat among close friends as they complained about Syrian refugees. Not one of them had ever spent more than a minute in a room with a Syrian. I asked: You know I am a migrant, too, trying to belong to another country. Would you want people to talk about me like this? They said, Yes, but your case is different.

Is it, though? Is anyone’s case really so different when we talk about home? Yes, migration has a class dimension, and the situation of refugees a legal one. But the feeling of home—losing it, making it, struggling for it—is a question of identity.

You only truly understand home when you leave and search for another. Because then you start asking yourself: Who am I? What future do I want for myself and my family? Your sense of possibility shifts. And then, home becomes something you work for. You work so hard that you forget to ask yourself what home even is. Because when you are home, you do not question it. You are just home.

Pearlman captures this transformation perfectly:

"Home, for those who do not have the privilege of taking it for granted, is both a struggle and an achievement. Before creating a home in the world, people must define home for themselves. Determining what home means demands discovering who one is and how one finds peace. It entails realizing what matters most and what one ultimately can do without. This is a kind of awareness that does not come without adversity, soul-searching, or even pain. Home, in other words, takes work. And when people arrive at something that they feel is home, it is the home they worked to make."

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What is Home?

Have you ever thought about the words we use to define home?

For me, home is inseparable from language. Turkish offers several words for it: ev, yuva, vatan, memleket. Ev and yuva—home as a shelter, a space shared with family and friends—now mean Oxford more than Istanbul. But has Oxford reached the level of memleket—the place that shapes you from birth, something inherited rather than built? Or is memleket, for migrants in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, just a longing for a time that’s gone—for youth, for a kind of freedom that no place, not even the country of origin, can ever restore? Wallahi, I don’t know.

At the talk, Prof. Eugene Rogan asked Pearlman what Arabic words she used when asking about home. Watan—same as Turkish vatan, meaning homeland—was one of them. She also used more spatial words: bayt, manzil, dar—home, house, dwelling, depending on the context. But she also asked about al-intima’—belonging.

Because ultimately, home is not just about where you live. It is about where you belong.

And these days, it doesn’t take a civil war for people to lose their sense of belonging. Just look around—at the US, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey.

Home is no longer something we inherit. It’s something we fight for. Or, as Pearlman puts it, a home we work to make.

Next time you read a news story about Syria, just think about that.

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**Follow the podcasts of The Middle Centre, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford for more incredible speakers. More information about Wendy Pearlman’s work is here, including this wonderful book.

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