For Refugee Week 2025, we are privileged to share a short talk by Dr Ammar Azzouz on his experience of returning to Syria after 14 years of being displaced by the Civil War.
Dr Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Somerville College. He recently spoke at the In Between Climate Chaos and War event at Somerville College, delivering an talk called ‘Returning to where the world ended, and began again’. Ammar kindly agreed that we could share this talk more widely, in honour of this year’s refugee week.
He reflected that, ‘Returning to my city, Homs, after 14 years of exile, felt like crossing the abyss. I thought I would live and die in exile, like many exiled people who dreamt of return, but never were able to. Returning to Homs felt like arriving to where the world ended, as half of the city is destroyed, but there the world began too. Beauty remains in the kindness of the people who remain, and there is something radiating in the streets; the stories of those who lost their lives but have not been forgotten. In a world of mass displacement, we keep the fight that another tomorrow is possible, and we pray that every human being has the right to come home’.
In Between Climate Chaos and War event was held in Somerville on 6th June as part of the “Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit” hosted by the University of Oxford and United Nations Human Rights. The summit aimed to place climate justice and human rights at the heart of global climate action by engaging activists and youth as pivotal agents of change. As part of this initiative, the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and Somerville College hosted this special event exploring the impact of climate change in conflict zones, with a particular focus on firsthand accounts from South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Alongside Ammar, the speakers were Zodiac Maslin-Hahn, the Director of Programme Development – Impact and Learning at Afghan Aid, and Omnia Ibrahim Hafez El Omrani, Candidate for Master’s in Public Policy, University of Oxford. All three speakers brought their lived experience and expertise in addressing how climate chaos manifests itself in geopolitically fragile regions.
Dr Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Somerville College, and a Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. He is the Principal Investigator of Slow Violence and the City, a research project that examines the impact of violence on the built environment at the time of war and peace. Azzouz studied architecture in the city of Homs, Syria, where he was born and raised. Since the start of the Syrian Revolution, over half of the neighbourhoods of Homs has been destroyed. In 2011, he moved to the UK to complete his postgraduate studies and received his PhD from the University of Bath.
Azzouz’s first book, Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Bloomsbury, 2023), offers fresh insights into the role of the architects during time of war. It explores how architecture is contested and weaponised during years of conflicts, and how the future reconstruction of cities should mirror the wants and needs of local communities. He visited Syria in 2025, after fourteen years and brings a perspective of how the nation recovers from a brutal regime’s rule and a region where world’s most powerful countries fight a proxy war.