Editorial Foreword

Editorial Foreword Samer Abboud-Guest Editor More than seven years of extreme violence, human displacement, and economic suffocation in Syria have produced one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent memory. By any measure the figures of human and physical loss are devastating: around 500 000 killed, more than half of the population displaced, approximately 1.2 million homes destroyed, and close to half of all medical facilities partially or severely destroyed. When the protest movement began in 2011 the political stakes were clear and distinguishable : Protestors sought radical reform of the political system beginning with regime change. Today, the aspirations of that period of a transition in power are even further away than they have ever been. As the conflict evolved, the casus belli of regime change was eventually displaced by a range of intersecting conflicts created and accelerated by the growth and spread of radical armed groups, various regional states’ violent interventions into the conflict, and the rise of the administrative project in Northern Syrian Kurdish areas, first as Rojava then rechristened as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS). The drivers of the conflict today are radically different than they were in 2011, 2013, or even 2015. Rather than moving us closer to peace and reconciliation, the evolution of the crisis has produced intersecting conflicts that make their unraveling virtually impossible. Turkey has sought to advance a regional consensus on Syria through active participation in the Astana and Sochi peace negotiations alongside Iran and Russia. At the same time, however, Turkey has broken with this regional consensus and initiated a large-scale assault of Afrin to destroy the Kurdish political and military presence there. How did the Syrian’s conflict evolve in this way? How can we begin to understand the many entanglement that make-up the Syrian conflict landscape today? Most serious scholars of Syria agree that this outcome was not pathdependent . As the trajectories of other Arab countries that experienced protests demonstrate, there was nothing pre-ordained about Syria’s trajectory. The evolution of the conflict can be attributed to the rise, empowerment, and often time fall of various actors whose political and military decisions vis-à-vis other actors shaped the conflict landscape. This special issue provides an attempt to engage with the question of how actors shaped the trajectory of the Syrian conflict, and, in turn, how the conflict itself shaped their agency, decision-making, and political and economic opportunities. Contrary to popular narratives about Syria, the 1 2 conflict is not simply one between monoliths we capture under the labels “regime” and “opposition”. The people, organizations, and movements that make up those labels are complex and diverse and deserve more sophisticated interrogation of their roles in the conflict than popular narratives are often willing to give them. Angela Joya’s article reminds us that the ‘old’ Syrian opposition still has a prominent role to play in the conflict. Joya asks how the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood contested the negative economic effects of economic liberalization in the decade preceding the uprisings and how this shaped the Brotherhood’s vision for a post-conflict Syria. In doing so, Joya encourages us to think beyond the political and military lenses through which we view the conflict and ask how socio-economic factors—in both their consequences and how they form visions of new possibilities—are important in understanding how Syrian opposition actors relate to the conflict. Ching-an Chang’s article explores the often neglected role that the Syrian business community has placed in opposition politics since 2011. Drawing on almost 200 interviews with Syrian businessmen in Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt who left after 2011, the paper argues that many businessmen were motivated to engage in opposition politics were driven by the increasing levels of violence and repression, the perceived political and physical security of engaging in politics, and their lack of previous political participation . In other words, many of these businessmen were motivated to engage in opposition politics by the evolution of the conflict, increasing repression, and their perceived ability to do so free of regime violence and repression. Contrary to many assumptions that the Syrian opposition in exile is made up of the pre-Ba...