This article is interested in the formation of war legacies and how they interact with social identities. It suggests a bottom-up approach towards examining the societal processes in which individuals create a legacy of war. It posits that through their narratives of conflict, by remembering what happened to them as a group, they mould the meaning and boundaries of how the group will be membered post-conflict. The validity of the theorised link between war memory and group membership is then tested in the case of Syria. In 200 interviews, Syrians provided their narratives of the conflict and their vision of a future Syrian state and society. The findings show that most respondents’ narratives follow a civic rationale, forming a society around civil rights and political ideas rather than around ethnic/sectarian divides. With this, the article contributes a new route for international relations scholars to understand the formation of war legacies through individuals’ narratives of conflict and explains their effects on ties of group belonging while also offering a glimpse into the Syrian ‘we’ amid the ongoing war in Syria.

本文感兴趣的是战争遗产的形成以及它们如何与社会身份相互作用。它提出了一种自下而上的方法来检查个人创造战争遗产的社会过程。它假定，通过他们的冲突的叙述，通过记住他们的遭遇作为一个群体，他们塑造的群体将如何含义和边界元冲突后。战争记忆与团体成员之间的理论联系的有效性随后在叙利亚的案例中得到检验。在 200 次采访中，叙利亚人提供了他们对冲突的叙述以及他们对未来叙利亚国家和社会的愿景。调查结果表明，大多数受访者的叙述遵循公民基本原理，围绕公民权利和政治思想而不是围绕种族/宗派分歧形成一个社会。据此，本文为国际关系学者提供了一条新途径，通过个人对冲突的叙述来理解战争遗产的形成，并解释了它们对群体归属关系的影响，同时也提供了对正在进行的战争中叙利亚“我们”的一瞥。在叙利亚。