Conference Program

This paper examines education as a site of harm regulation, political control, and legitimacy-making under shifting systems of governance, drawing on an in-depth life-history interview with a senior educator and school director in Afrin, a district in northwest Syria that has experienced successive regimes of authority from Syrian state institutions, to Kurdish self-administration, and, since 2018, Turkish-backed armed factions. These transitions profoundly restructured the local school system, transforming education into a frontline arena of governance rather than a stable public service (Mampilly 2011; Arjona 2016).

Anchored in the analytical framework of the Beyond Compliance Consortium (BCC), the paper analyzes educational practices through four interlinked lenses: harm, need, restraint, and legitimacy, developed to explain civilian protection and governance in contexts where legal enforcement is fragmented or absent (Kemp et al. 2023). This framework allows education to be examined not as a neutral service, but as a regulatory space in which violence, protection, and authority are negotiated.

Empirically, the paper shows how schooling in Afrin became a mechanism through which harm was both produced and contested. Forced curricular changes, language segregation, loss of recognized certification, and the intrusion of armed actors into schools generated educational harm that translated into displacement, family flight, and long-term erosion of trust. At the same time, schools emerged as spaces of acute need, particularly for children exposed to forced recruitment, ethnic discrimination, and the collapse of institutional protection (Novelli, Lopes Cardozo & Smith 2017).

The analysis highlights the role of educators as de facto harm regulators. Through informal negotiation, selective compliance, and refusal, such as resisting the removal of students for military purposes or contesting arbitrary administrative orders, school leaders enacted forms of restraint grounded in moral authority rather than institutional power. In this context, legitimacy did not derive from armed control or formal governance structures, but from the perceived capacity to protect children and preserve educational continuity amid political volatility (Suchman 1995; Hoffmann & Kirk 2013).

By centering an educator’s trajectory across changing regimes, the paper demonstrates that education in Afrin functions as a semi-autonomous field in which governance is enacted through everyday decisions about access, language, discipline, and certification (Moore 1973). These micro-practices expose the limits of policy-driven compliance models and show how harm prevention and restraint emerge from localized moral authority rather than centralized control. The paper contributes to debates on democracy and learning by reframing education in conflict settings as a core site of political regulation, legitimacy production, and civilian protection