Syria after the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience by Joseph Daher, and: Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria by Sam Dagher (review)

Initial studies of the uprising in Syria consisted largely of background material, with no more than a chapter or two devoted to events after 2010.¹ Book-length narratives written by journalists showed up somewhat later and offered sobering and, at times, horrific reports of the uprising’s transformation into civil war.² Only now are more comprehensive analyses beginning to appear, mostly in the form of edited volumes.³ Joseph Daher’s extensively documented contribution thus represents a welcome attempt by a single author to compose a synthesis of existing scholarship and journalistic reporting, which might indicate what we now know about the conflict and where future research should head.

As do almost all others, Daher’s account ignores manifestations of popular mobilization prior to the outburst in Dar‘a that occurred at the end of February 2011 (p. 40). Overlooking the first protests in Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia, and Dayr al-Zawr obscures the ways in which the country’s diverse ethno-sectarian communities interacted with the authorities — and with one another — as the uprising started, and Daher’s garbled remarks on the topic are more confusing than enlightening (pp. 42–43). Similarly sketchy is the discussion of the Local Coordination Committees; Daher observes that these committees shifted tactics as the uprising proceeded (pp. 45, 63), but why the changes took place as and when they did is left unaddressed. The more important matter of why the uprising became sectarian gets mentioned only in passing (pp. 46–48). Furthermore, Daher asserts vaguely that the “fighters [who emerged during the late summer and autumn of 2011] tended to be conservative and practicing Sunni Muslims from popular neighborhoods in rural and urban areas” (p. 61). Syria after the Uprisings consequently comes up short as an adequate synthesis of existing writings that deal with the opening months of the conflict.

How the authorities responded to the challenges they faced in 2011/12 is detailed in a more compelling fashion (Chapter 3). Here the sectarianization of the conflict is mostly credited to deliberate actions on the part of the regime and its sponsored militias known as shabiha, although Daher points out that “the development of the Shabiha phenomenon in Homs can be attributed more to the Alawi community’s militarization than to any planned strategy to defeat the uprising, at least initially” (p. 92). The turn to sectarian violence is linked to what Daher calls “the failure of the opposition” in Chapter 4. The challengers’ evident lack of success resulted from rivalries inside the Syrian Nation al Council, splits among the components of the Free Syrian Army, the inability of the leaderships of these two organizations to forge effective connections with each other and the nefarious influence of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Taken together, such fissures enabled Islamist militants to derail the uprising, thereby diminishing women’s participation in the opposition (pp. 137–39) and demolishing amicable relations among ethno-sectarian communities (pp. 139–45). One wonders whether it is really fair to the opposition to pronounce that it failed, given the obstacles and contradictions it confronted.

Most intriguing is Daher’s overview of Syria’s wartime economy in Chapter 7. There is no question that a decade of intense combat has devastated large parts of the country and wiped out much of its industry and infrastructure. Still, some sectors have managed to survive, and a few companies have actually prospered. Daher lists among the latter the state-affiliated hotel chain, the container port at Latakia, the warehouse complex adjacent to Damascus airport, and the private Al Badia Cement company (p. 238). Labor and investment capital flowed into areas that escaped the fighting, most notably Suwayda...