Rebuilding the State in Post-Assad Syria

Voices in the international community express concerns over the need to protect minority rights in post-Assad Syria. Confessional quotas, ethnosectarian power sharing, and confederal devolution have all been proposed as potential safeguards for liberal freedoms. Syrian responses to these proposals are nevertheless shaped by the country's prior experience of the problems caused by the architectures of both identity-based politics and laissez-faire liberalism. The prospects for democratization after Assad will reflect the long-term trajectory of state-building in Syria, not solutions from outside.

The abrupt collapse of President Bashar al-Assad's regime on 8 December 2024 marked the first moment in more than six decades when Syrians could realistically envisage the possibility of substantive political change. The dominant force in the rebel coalition whose lightning territorial advances caused the regime to fold in less than two weeks, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) became the country's de facto ruler. In late January 2025, HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa (once known by his jihadi nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Jolani) became interim president.

Rather than immediately impose the puritanical vision that outsiders might assume these former fellow travelers of al-Qaeda had in mind, however, HTS hesitated in monopolizing power. Al-Sharaa installed a caretaker government, launched a national dialogue on political transition, and proposed national elections to be held within four years. HTS promptly dissolved itself and al-Sharaa welcomed a slew of diplomats and foreign journalists to help establish his bona fides as a pragmatic political moderate. There is now room for open public debate of such topics as elections, basic principles of governance, and constitutions. Syria has not enjoyed such a state of affairs since the Arab Socialist Baath Party first seized power in 1963.

Questions about the post-Assad transition remain, of course. Western governments and observers wonder if al-Sharaa and his cohort genuinely reject the violence of their al-Qaeda origins, or are tactically dissembling. How will minorities be treated? Alawites comprise perhaps a tenth of the country's roughly twenty-million people (the civil war that began in 2011 has made counting difficult) and are the community from which the Assad regime drew most heavily. Western governments also highlight the situation of several million Christians in Syria. Will a regime of retired jihadis respect the liberal freedoms of Syria's non-Muslim, heterodox, and secular populations? Will women be subjected to strict controls over their dress and social behavior, or even excluded from public life? Will the new government offer an alternative to Baathism's ethnocentric nationalism and its long-term marginalization of Syria's Kurds? Such concerns have revived suggestions that Syria should be carved into regional cantons to protect minority rights from the conservative and Islamist government that seems likely to emerge in Damascus.

Notwithstanding these fears, the international community will have little influence on Syria's political transition. Earlier in the conflict, the failure of UN-sponsored talks to slow the pace of killing delegitimized the diplomatic process in many Syrians' eyes. The sheer speed with which HTS named an interim government left the international community—with its method of trying to convene political talks among numerous interested parties—badly outpaced. The inclusion of HTS on the U.S. list of designated terror organizations initially prohibited supplying the organization with training or expert advice, to include technical support for electoral systems, constitutional design, or institutional reform. Although the organization's dissolution rendered this ban moot, U.S. financial sanctions on Syria are still in force and continue to dissuade international investors. For the moment, Syrians are on their own.

This may not be a bad thing. International experts are often quick to suggest how polities emerging from civil war might usefully adopt lessons from successful political transitions in other countries. Yet Syrians do not necessarily need to look outside for inspiration. Despite the ravages of a brutal thirteen-year civil war that began when the Assad regime brutally suppressed Arab Spring protests, Syrians are not rebuilding from scratch. So far, at least, Syria seems to have avoided the fate of Iraq in 2003, where regime collapse was quickly followed by state collapse. Syria presents no blank slate on which outsiders feel tempted to draw their own political fantasies. On the contrary, Syria has a lengthy and rich national experience of state-building that can provide today's constitutional architects with potential precedents and lessons for political reconstruction. The past also offers a powerful set of symbolic resources with which political leaders can legitimize new outcomes as homegrown products organically rooted in the soil of national experience.

Given these circumstances, a comparative and historical perspective can provide valuable insights regarding how to handle the contentious issues of identity, social injustice, and regional inequality. Post-Assad Syria has entered a critical juncture—a window of indeterminacy—in which lessons from the country's past have the potential to help shape debates about its future.

The Poverty of Identity

The idea of sharing political power along ethnic and sectarian lines is often proposed as a way of avoiding civil unrest. Syria's people are religiously diverse. Most are Sunni Muslims, but there are Shia Muslims, Greek and Syriac Christians (both Catholic and Orthodox), and heterodox branches of Islam followed by Alawites, Druze, and Ismailis, respectively. In ethnic terms, most Syrians identify as Arab, but there is the sizable Kurdish population as well as Turkoman, Circassian, Armenian, and Syriac (Assyrian) communities.

Advocates of power sharing typically seek to accommodate diversity in one of two ways: quotas or devolution. The first, typified by the consociational systems of Lebanon and Iraq, accords preset shares of party nominations, executive-branch posts, and legislative seats to various groups.¹ The second requires devolving political power from the national center "out and down" to regional or local governments, sometimes in a federal or confederal arrangement. The Israeli cabinet, for example, has notably discussed the possibility of dividing Syria into separate "cantons" to safeguard Druze and Kurdish rights under the new government.²

External observers might see ethnosectarian power sharing as a bar to the return of authoritarianism: The Assads reinforced their rule with ethnosectarian loyalties for more than fifty years. Before Baathism, however, Syrians had spent decades wrestling with the negative repercussions of the sect-based quota systems and devolution formulas that foreign powers had imposed across the region in hopes of controlling earlier civil conflicts.

In 1861, for example, France had pushed quotas to balance Christian and Druze interests in Mount Lebanon.³ In 1920, facing local opposition to a new French-installed regime, Syria's colonial rulers divided the country into multiple substates that reflected their own vision of the fragmented "mosaic society" purported to exist in the Levant.⁴ The anti-Assad uprisings of 1979–82 and 2011, as well as the surging territorial ambitions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in the mid-2010s, have each been interpreted as evidence of Sunni revanchism and led to new calls for dividing Syria and its neighbors into quasi-autonomous homelands for their various ethnic and sectarian communities.⁵

Often, such arguments flow from the notion that Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon are not "real" states, but colonialist confections. Each, it is said, traces its origin to British or French plans to divide the former Ottoman Empire into polities that would gather in ethnic, religious, and tribal groups who shared little in common with one another. Held together only by authoritarian rulers such as the Assads, these artificial post-Ottoman states would fall apart into subnational units if and when the regime's iron grip ever weakened. Intercommunal power sharing or a redrawing of the map would have to follow: The subnational identities were too strong to permit any other approach.

Identities and Politics

This way of thinking about identities is wrongheaded and at odds with Syria's own historical experience. Identities are not fixed attributes, constant and unchanging, but the products of specific socioeconomic changes, political projects, and categorization practices enacted by the state and other strategic actors.⁶ The earliest contemporary episodes of intercommunal conflict in the Levant came in the context of modernization—specifically, the rise of citizenship as a category separate from religion and the nineteenth-century global trade dislocations that enhanced the social and economic status of local Christians and Jews relative to their Muslim counterparts. A factor behind the 1860 anti-Christian rioting in Damascus, for example, was the habit that local Christian merchants, enriched by trade with their coreligionists in Europe, had of buying municipal bonds that gave their bearers the right to tax Muslim peasants. Resentment bred by rapid economic change and social upheaval—not ancient religious rivalries—gave rise to these outbreaks of collective violence in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The cases of other groups in Syria, such as the Alawites and Druze, illustrate the extent to which identities emerge as byproducts of political projects, not their cause. Prior to colonial rule, Syria's impoverished Alawites lived in hamlets scattered across rugged, inaccessible coastal mountains. Centuries of relative isolation had led to the accumulation of highly localized forms of social order within a fragmented Alawite populace that lacked any overarching hierarchy. It was only French rule in the 1920s, which renamed the coast "Alawite Country" and granted Alawites as Alawites their first-ever access to political representation, state institutions, and legal standing, that led some Alawite elites to make claims on behalf of a community that they had begun to think of as a coherent, potentially unified whole. During the 1970s, once Alawites had risen through the ranks of the military and the Baath Party, the community began a process of "Shia-fication" that emphasized Alawites' proximity to mainstream Islamic beliefs. This move was in part a response to Islamist complaints that had started to gain steam as Alawites began to be densely represented in the ranks of Baathist officialdom. Historically, then, Alawite identity has been less a basic building block of politics than an element that has itself been shaped by Syria's broader political landscape.

In contrast to the Alawites, Syria's Druze largely avoided criticisms on religious grounds despite their comparably heterodox theology. Concentrated in the more economically viable mountainous terrain southeast of Damascus, Druze landowning elites had longstanding commercial ties to Sunni grain merchants in the capital. A coherent social structure, dominated by different tiers of familial prestige, sustained a fierce desire for local autonomy despite the presence of Ottoman authorities. During the First World War, the budding anti-Ottoman leadership in Damascus not only identified Druze resistance as a sign of solid nationalist credentials but also argued that Druze adherence to older tribal traditions made the Druze exemplars of an authentic Arab culture that had been forgotten in cities tainted by Ottoman decadence. Possessing a social coherence that pre-dated colonialism, the Druze were consequently far less reliant than were the Alawites on French recognition or promises of self-government. The Druze origins of Syria's most far-reaching rebellion against the French, the 1925–27 Great Revolt, further burnished Druze nationalist credentials. Socioeconomic, geographical, and political factors—not identity—account for the varying trajectories of the Alawites and the Druze in Syria.

The apparently enduring relevance of identity over the years in fact masks the quite different uses to which communal belonging can be yoked. After independence in 1946, Syria was wracked by factionalism, polarization, and recurrent power grabs and purges. Shared identity became useful to would-be conspirators building trust-based and necessarily clandestine networks under military rule. Sectarian identities first became salient for political plotting under the authoritarian regime during the years of union with Egypt (1958–61) and later figured in subsequent disputes among high-ranking Baathists after 1963. In a setting of secret maneuverings and zero-sum power struggles, communal ties offered a speedier way to assemble a clique each member could trust. Such forms of sectarianism were strategic; they did not necessarily reflect fundamental fault lines in Syrian society.

If Syria's subnational identities have been historically variable, the same can be said of its national identity. The hoary old story maintains that the carving-up of the Ottoman Empire as laid out in the Sykes-Picot Agreement (a secret 1916 treaty between Great Britain and France) gave rise not to a nation in Syria, but rather to a mere chimera put together during the First World War. Yet in reality, Syria's national identity dates back to at least the 1860s, when the country emerged as changing material infrastructures, communications, and administrative structures gradually knitted together a loose agglomeration of towns and villages into an increasingly coherent region. Arabic-speaking intellectual elites referred to this new sense of regionalism as "Syria." It was an old Greek name that French and British diplomats had revived in the course of nineteenth-century geopolitical rivalries with the Ottoman Empire, whose bureaucracy subsequently adopted the same term for this emerging region.

While the first histories of Syria were written around this time, it was the vibrant new medium of newspaper journalism that disseminated elite notions of regional identity to a broader public. By the 1920s, the new meaning of Syria had successfully bridged local belongings: The anticolonial struggle was primarily an effort to achieve the independence of Syria within its newly drawn boundaries. Naturally, other self-understandings, whether sub- or supranational, were still available and could be mobilized for various political purposes. But there is nothing inherently artificial about "Syria" as an anchor for identity claims, just as there is nothing innate about religious identity.

In the light of this evidence, it becomes clear that historically variable categorizations can offer no sound basis for lasting political arrangements. The systems of quota-based power sharing imposed on Lebanon after 1861, and on Iraq after 2003, have subsequently proven unable to accommodate changing political and social realities in those countries. Instead, these systems have shored up self-serving sectarian elites who divide power and resources among themselves, and who have no interest in reforming their collective "authoritarian pact."⁷ The poverty of power sharing is that it entrenches moments of heightened ethnic and sectarian identification at critical political junctures, only to find itself ill-equipped to quell the social conflicts which those fossilized identifications later produce. In Syria, problems couched in the language of identity politics are better addressed in terms of social inequalities and regional disparities.

The Pitfalls of Liberalism

If liberalism has well-established intellectual roots in Syria, its practical application has left much to be desired. In the nineteenth century, political thinkers such as Butrus al-Bustani, Rashid al-Dahdah, and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi first articulated their critique of Ottoman despotism using classical-liberal terms such as freedom (hurriya) and justice ('adl).⁸ Between the two world wars, anticolonial Syrian nationalists lambasted the French occupation for failing to live up to France's own standards of liberty, equality, and fraternity. When these nationalists came to power following independence in 1946, they implemented a liberal, laissez-faire regime of parliamentary democracy. The abject failure of this episode of liberal democracy effectively discredited liberalism in Syria for generations to come.

Syria's postindependence liberal politicians were largely drawn from the wealthy, landowning families of cities such as Damascus and Aleppo. Much of this wealth originated in nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms that had sought, among other things, to replace informal, collective land ownership with individual property rights. Benefiting from the mistrust of government, indebtedness, and customary social deference, respectable urban families expanded their legal titles in what amounted to a massive land grab from the impoverished peasantry.

These families also reaped social capital from taking part in late-Ottoman modernizing educational, governmental, and political structures, then quickly fitted into the transition to a post-Ottoman order after the First World War. In the 1920s, scions of these families became leaders of both the nationalist elite, which sought to negotiate an "honorable" (i.e., nonviolent) French withdrawal without upsetting the existing social hierarchy, and the nationalist bourgeoisie, which was launching Syria's first modern industrial ventures at around this time.

Understanding the social and economic origins of this elite that inherited power from the French can help us to account for the failures of Syria's first experience with liberal, parliamentary democracy. First, the struggle for independence had primed postcolonial politicians to prioritize national sovereignty, even if their sense of the nation hardly reached beyond their own bubble of social and economic privilege. Syrian liberals asserted the primacy of an urban power center run by a largely Sunni (and Christian) elite over a rural periphery that often featured minorities and was always poor even when replete with Sunnis. Between 1946 and 1949, the liberal government dealt with peripheral unrest by secretly pumping guns and money into internal Druze rivalries while sending gendarmes to put down Alawite rebellions.

Second, the liberals' economic policy focused on supporting the country's nascent light-industrial ventures, which (as it happened) were often owned by liberal politicians themselves. Liberal economic policy featured protectionism, as it was too hard to compete with the cheap French imports that had flooded the region under colonialism. Tariffs and government support shored up national industries. Questions of social reform, such as how to improve life for ordinary rural Syrians, were nowhere on the agenda.

Third, liberal elite privilege also meant using public office for private gain. Cronyism, corruption, and constitutional backsliding were rife. The "violation of the laws was clear to all who could see," noted a contemporary intellectual. "Republican government, which was meant to curb tyranny, became capricious rather than legal rule. The form of government was constitutional, but the actual practice was arbitrary."⁹

Fourth, the elite's liberal orientation gave it little interest in building up the institutional structures of the rudimentary, even skeletal administration that the French had left behind. Disregard for state institutions extended to the poorly trained and equipped armed forces, whose disastrous performance in the 1948 war against the newly declared State of Israel galvanized widespread discontent and a year later prompted a military coup that ended Syria's first experiment with liberal democracy.

The years that followed witnessed a back-and-forth struggle for power between Syria's laissez-faire liberals and a new left-leaning generation from the lower and middle classes that was rising through the military. When the radicals of the Arab Socialist Baath Party came to power in 1963, their sweeping nationalizations and land reforms broke the back of the old liberal bourgeoisie. The more moderate economic stance of President Hafez al-Assad in the 1970s granted the old liberal elite a reprieve, though they had now been permanently dislodged from the commanding heights of the economy by direct state intervention and the "new class" of crony capitalists whom the regime enriched by handing them controlled private-sector opportunities.

Although the late 1980s and 1990s saw a relaxation of state controls on the economy, the new generation around Bashar al-Assad (who succeeded his father as president in 2000) made crony capitalism ride higher than ever. Rami Makhlouf, the president's cousin, reportedly controlled 60 percent of Syria's economy at his peak, symbolizing this Syrian variant of neoliberalism.

The "Assad Shock" and Wariness of Liberalism

In 2005, the Assad regime began a "shock" experiment with economic liberalism that it dubbed the Social Market Economy. Regime reforms prompted rampant real-estate speculation, financed mainly with capital from the oil-rich Gulf states, that dramatically worsened longstanding inequities, both between urban and rural Syria and between the poor and the top 1 percent. Shrinking state food and fuel subsidies, lower capital inflows from the Gulf after the 2008 financial crisis, and government policies that exacerbated the effects of drought raised poverty rates in northern and eastern Syria as well as southern cities such as Damascus and Daraa.¹⁰

In a welcome change, certain restrictions on nongovernmental organizations and autonomous associational life were loosened after decades of prohibition, although ordinary Syrians still lived in fear of the regime's heavy-handed security forces. As it had in the 1940s, Syrian liberalism in the 2000s sat on an underpinning of coercion, violence, and corruption. And as had happened in the nineteenth century, in the first years of the twenty-first a paradigm shift in the political economy, accompanied by worsening hardship, fed episodes of communal conflict and provided the backdrop for the uprising of 2011.¹¹

Given the checkered history of liberalism in Syria, the country's people feel understandably wary when they consider liberal solutions to the challenges of reconstruction. Answers that would separate debates about economics from debates about politics, or that would put identity politics before questions of economic inequality, elicit special suspicion. Today's divisions exist not only between urban and rural Syria, but also within an urban Syria laid waste by more than a decade of warfare; they exist not only between rich and poor, but also within classes differentiated by their relative dependence on earned income versus accumulated wealth—what Wassim Nabulsi has described as the "elephant in the room."¹² If one theme has dominated the national experience of state building in Syria, after all, it is that of the production, reproduction, and mitigation of social inequality.

Today, we may be seeing the onset of a new cycle of Karl Polanyi's "double movement," in which Syria's most recent entanglement with liberalism may be rebalanced by a dramatic shift in the country's political and institutional orientation. The pushback against liberalism will not necessarily follow the same path in Syria as it has in Europe and the United States, however: Right-wing populism is unlikely to appeal to Syrians emerging from fifty years of a regime that legitimized itself precisely on the grounds of populism. What comes next is difficult to predict: After the Assads, Syria is enjoying a rare moment of Knightian uncertainty, when we cannot determine which way things will go based on prior trajectories.

Conceived of in purely procedural terms, as a system for electing representative governments, democracy is commonly associated with political stability. Yet this understanding overlooks the extent to which democracy is not simply the product of a particular political regime, but rather emerges from the nature of the state in which that regime is installed.¹³ Thinking about state power as encapsulating the relationship between social forces reminds us that "regime change" will ultimately prove unsuccessful without simultaneous "state change." Syria's contested state-building experience, moreover, reminds us of the many limitations of formulas for ethnosectarian power sharing and for liberal government.

Whatever the results of Syria's incipient national dialogue, it seems probable that decisions made over the coming months will determine the path of Syria after Assad for years to come. It is grounds for optimism to reflect that, after being abandoned by the international community throughout the long years of brutal and bloody dictatorship, Syrians are finally set to make these crucial political decisions on their own.