World War I saw the emergence of the soldier’s camera; the American side of the Vietnam conflict marked the first televised war; the Kuwait War inaugurated the first live-television war; and the civil conflict in Syria, 2011–24 can lay claim to being the first social media war. Indeed, according to the editors, anti-regime “demonstrators, activists and militant fighters have posted several million videos online,” marking a new and different magnitude of information. What are the implications of this phenomenon?

Although the English edition was published in 2025, the original French edition (Syrie, une nouvelle ère des images) came out in 2021, years before the Bashar al-Assad regime’s collapse in late 2024. The book’s twelve contributors hail from varied disciplines (anthropology, history, political science, sociology) and assess the videos very differently. Trying to make sense of their many, many interpretations, the editors observe that “the Internet and social media did not cause the revolts: it’s what was happening in the streets that mattered.” So far, so good. But then they add, “Still, these uprisings were concurrent with the emergence of new forms of protest in particularly authoritarian political contexts where the Internet has also been a site of confrontation and surveillance.”

If that very French statement leaves readers perplexed, the following semi-intelligible conclusion will convince them that Syria, Revolt and War in the Digital Age has little to offer: “Since 2011, the transformation of images, just like the scaling of the affiliations and political agendas of those who produce them, has shed light on the ways the revolt was gradually marginalized, in favor of an internationalization of the conflict that has ended up obscuring the genesis and very existence of that revolt.” If this is true, those millions of videos ended up confusing more than elucidating, thereby undermining the utility of this book.

Daniel Pipes