Dr Ammar Azzouz

About

Ammar Azzouz is a is Lecturer in Human Geography, and a British Academy Research Fellow at University of Oxford. He founded the course Slow Violence and the City: From Destruction to Reconstruction, which he teaches at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University. His research focuses on destruction and reconstruction of cities, cultural heritage and art in exile. He is the author of Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria, published by Bloomsbury in 2023.  He has written for a wide range of platforms including the New York Times, Financial Times and the Guardian. He has been invited to speak in over 200 events globally; such as Mexico, Malaysia, France, the US, Germany, The Netherlands, Morocco and Qatar.

Teaching

My research on human geography and urban studies has been translated into teaching and tutorials. At the Oxford Department of International Development, I established the Violence and Cities: From Destruction to Reconstruction option course, as part of the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. I lead lectures and seminars on a wide range of subjects, such as community engagement, sustainable urban development, destruction of architecture, politics of memory, refugees and exile, and post war reconstruction. At the School of Geography and the Environment, I co-led the Heritage Geographies course with Prof. Heather Viles (2025) which we delivered to undergraduate students. This included both lectures and tutorials for small group of students.

Since joining Oxford, I have supervised several exchange students from the US, working with them on one-to-one capacity on their tutorials. I provide week by week feedback for students whom I supervise for tutorials, and for my MSc students, I mark and provide feedback on students’ essays.

Research

My research brings to the forced migration research a unique spatial perspective that does not only examine why people move from their homelands, but what moves them. To do so, I investigate the relationship between architecture and war, and how cities have become sites of urban violence, collective punishment and mass destruction.

My first book, Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. The book is based on interviews with Syrians inside and outside the country, including architects, urban planners, academics and displaced residents. The book focuses on my city, Homs, the third largest city in Syria, and a city that stood against the Assad Regime, so it became known as The Capital of the Revolution. But for its rebellion, the city was heavily destroyed as over half of Homs’s neighbourhoods have been damaged and around a quarter of the city has been partially destroyed. The book utilises the concept domicide, as a reference to the deliberate destruction of homes and the campaign of violence against people which we, unfortunately, see in many countries around the world.

Furthermore, I have written a wide range of articles in Arabic and English. For instance, together with Dr Joanna Kusiak (Department of Geography, University of Cambridge), we wrote a paper on comparative urbanism for hope and healing and unpacked the dilemmas of reconstruction in Syria (post-2011) and Poland (after World War II). The paper has been published by Urban Studies. With Wael Rihani (an independent journalist from Syria), we wrote in Arabic about intangible heritage and the destruction of memory in Homs. I have also published an article titled Writing The Everyday (IJURR) about Mona Rafea’s articles. Rafea (pseudonym) is a Syrian writer who wrote from inside the siege of Homs and her accounts of the everyday life inside the city at the time of war have been some of the rarest narratives of life under siege.

Books

Azzouz, A (2023). Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria. Bloomsbury.

Special Issue

Azzouz, A. (2026). Construction, Destruction, Reconstruction: Radical Hope, Where are you? Change Over Time. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cot.0.a984622.

Peer-reviewed papers and book chapters

Azzouz, A. (2025). "Domicide: Reconstruction as Re-Destruction of Home." In Reconstruction as Violence in Syria, edited by Nasser Rabbat and Deen Sharp. American University in Cairo Press.

Azzouz, A. (2025). Playing Bach After Killing Syrians. In: Saloul, I., Baillie, B. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61493-5_88-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61493-5_88-1

Stevens, E., Khlusova, A., Fine, S., Azzouz, A., & Ansems de Vries, L. (2023). Together We Prepare a Feast, Each Person Stirring Up Memory. Humanities, 12(5), 98.

Kusiak, J., & Azzouz, A. (2023). Comparative urbanism for hope and healing: Urbicide and the dilemmas of reconstruction in post-war Syria and Poland. Urban Studies, 00420980231163978.

Azzouz, A. (2022). Our Pain, their Heritage Project: From the Palmyra Moment to Violence and the City. Change Over Time 11(2), 162-180. https://doi.org/10.1353/cot.2022.0005

Azzouz, A (2020) Re-imagining Syria: Destructive reconstruction and the exclusive rebuilding of cities, City, 24:5-6, 721-740, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1833536

Azzouz, A. (2020). 2011: Reflections on a ruined homeland. City, 24:1-2, 178-194, DOI:10.1080/13604813.2020.1739414

Azzouz, A. (2020). ‘I can smell Aleppo’: Waad Al-Kateab shows us a city under siege. City. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1719762

Azzouz, A. (2019). A tale of a Syrian city at war: destruction, resilience and memory in Homs. City. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2019.1575605