Five Thoughts on Syria's Unfrozen Conflict

Plus say farewell, or good riddance, to 2024 with our final MENA Academy roundup

The sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Asad has once again upended the politics of a region which has been fraying at the seams all year. It happened while I was in the middle of an intense travel schedule and unable to write anything immediately, which frankly may have been for the best given how fast everything has been moving. In this final blog post of 2024, I just want to offer a few quick thoughts on some aspects of the transition which most directly relate to my past and ongoing research; I’ll have more to say about the broader regional landscape and policy implications after the New Year.

First, Asad’s sudden fall was indeed shocking, but the broad contours of his collapse fall quite comfortably into the “warscapes” approach and other literature on civil wars. On the latter, I would just flag our 2013 publication “The Political Science of Syria’s War”, based on a workshop with some two dozen leading civil war scholars and Syria experts, which clearly laid out exactly why Syria’s war was so difficult to resolve. Competitive multipolar international interventions, including both Iranian-Russian-Hezbollah support for Asad and the various US-Saudi-Qatar-Turkish-etc backers of the insurgency, playing a key role in the story by making it difficult for either side to lose but not offering enough support to win (Russia’s 2015 intervention in Aleppo did not, it turns out, actually win the war on Asad’s behalf). Many analysts scoffed at my assessment at the time (2013) that based on the type of conflict which Syria presented (not nearly as unique as many regional experts believed) the war would likely continue for over ten years; it ultimately lasted over thirteen.

Second, the way the war ended (to the extent that it has actually ended) very much falls in line with the “warscapes” approach I’ve been working with for a few years now, in that the war never really ended even when violence declined and the threat to overthrow Asad by force seemed to have ended. In particular, that literature points to the ways that the seemingly frozen, or even terminated, conflict only masked the ongoing struggled between competing political orders on the ground — both Asad’s regime reconfigurations (mostly for the worse) and HTS’s consolidation of power and effective order building in Idlib. That tracks with our 2020 publication on MENA’s frozen conflicts: “Long running conflicts create new institutional realities which create new elites, new economies, and new incentives. Frozen conflicts, then, are generative of new realities on the ground, warscapes characterized by fragmented authority, mixed governance, and deep social transformation. Their longevity allows time for these new social, political and economic realities to take deep root.” That’s very much what happened.

Third, while Asad’s fall is very much part of the ongoing unfolding of the Arab uprisings — which never ended, as I keep trying to remind people — the literature for understanding the fall of Asad is very different from that which was relevant during the uprisings. This was not a story of mass, peaceful mobilization overwhelming a brittle authoritarian regime. Contrary to my long-ago prediction, his end was not like that of Milosevic, brought down after the war had passed by protests among his own constituents over the economy and corruption (though Syria’s disastrous economic conditions, and the rampant corruption among new elites no doubt contributed to the hollowing out of his support). Instead, Asad fell through a military offensive by an Islamist/jihadist insurgency which had spent years consolidating its control in the northwest, eliminating its rivals, developing institutional capacity, and building military strength through its alliances abroad. The appropriate literature here is civil wars, warscapes, rebel governance, and what Paul Staniland calls competitive political order building.

That’s not to diminish the immense, profound and radiant joy of ordinary Syrians liberated from Asad’s brutality who continue to gather to celebrate nearly every day across the country, or to downplay the work by principled, brilliant and brave activists, writers and civil society figures over the years to keep the focus on Asad’s brutality and sustain the isolation and sanctioning of the regime. But those activists had very little to do with the series of events which suddenly toppled Asad. Their joyful mobilization, if sustained and channeled into a political agenda, could well shape HTS’s calculations about what kind of political order to build and how far to go in its ambitions, but it seems likely that activists will struggle to find purchase with the new regime.

Fourth, it would be nice if Syria were given the space to undergo a transition towards democracy and rebuild the foundations of a state. But that’s highly unlikely. Regional and international interventions have done grave harm to Syria since 2011, and that is only going to get worse now that the Syrian military has been destroyed, the state collapsed, and both influence and territory up for grabs. Most Arab states, as well as the US, have quickly sent representatives, many have reopened embassies, and almost all are signaling that they will work with the new Syrian reality (whether HTS or other Syrians actually want US involvement is another question, of course). Israel has already moved to destroy unprecedented quantities of Syrian military stocks, ostensibly to prevent them falling into the hand of a new government, and has been grabbing territory as buffer zones, which based on Israeli history will be anything but temporary. Turkey will continue to push its advantage in the new Syria by supporting HTS in the new government (though HTS is far from a Turkish proxy), but it’s primary obsession as always will remain the Kurds. This will put them into immediate and violent conflict with the Kurdish forces backed by the United States, and put the entire Kurdish enclave in Syria at serious risk. Iran is unlikely to simply walk away from Syria, even if it gave up on Asad, and various Iraqi movements and forces (including both Sunni jihadists perhaps curious as to what an ideologically similar regime might do for them and Shi’a parties and militias worried about the same) will be very interested in how Syria develops.

And, of course, regional regimes obsessed with the threat posed by Islamism are not only going to be suspicious of the new Syrian leadership, but are likely to actively work to prevent it from consolidating authority. The UAE, Egypt, and other regional powers which had been actively pushing to rehabilitate Asad within the Arab order for several years (which should itself prompt some rethinking about how well those regimes have been reading regional political trends) are unlikely to tolerate the consolidation of a Islamic regime backed by Qatar and Turkey in Syria. The US and Europe will have to grapple with the reality that Syria is currently governed by an organization and individuals which many of them have designated as terrorists.

Fifth, there’s the question of HTS itself. HTS has excellent public public relations, a great communication strategy, charismatic leader, and a keen interest in presenting themselves as a viable, rational, and pragmatic movement. Jolani/Shara’a has been saying many of the “right” things, from that perspective, though many Syrians and others remain doubtful. I certainly think that HTS should be given the chance to govern, subject to all the sorts of human rights and democratic standards we should look for in any regime (but don’t get in virtually any in the region). I thought, and argued repeatedly, that the Muslim Brotherhood should have been given a real chance to govern Egypt after winning its elections, a view only reinforced by Egypt’s devastating trajectory since the 2013 military coup.

But HTS is not a Muslim Brotherhood organization of the type that had a long history of participating in elections, theorizing, religion, and democracy, and finding ways to work with non-Islamist trends at various junctures. HTS emerges very much out of the universe of jihadism, which spans what used to be Al-Qaeda through the Islamic State and has, shall we say, very strong views about the role of religion in politics and society. To be sure, HTS is a uniquely grounded Syrian evolution of that worldview, has ostentatiously abandoned transnational terrorism, and is deeply embedded in its local Syrian context rather than being staffed by foreign fighters indifferent to local realities. But it is jihadist nonetheless. It is very possible that HTS will moderate under the realities of wielding power, bringing us back to the long-running academic arguments about the Muslim Brotherhood’s inclusion and moderation (Drevon and others have made a compelling case that pragmatism dominates ideology in HTS decisionmaking). But it’s also possible that upon consolidating power and building up state capacity, HTS and its allies will seek to eliminate potential rivals and work to implement their ideological ambitions. And while some have argued that the plethora of competing power centers will prevent HTS from consolidating power (presumably with support for those competing power centers from various regional and international actors), that sounds more like a recipe for long-term state failure and fragmentation than for pluralist compromise and coexistence.

As food for thought on what the success of HTS might mean for Islamist politics at a broader level - in the context of the comprehensive setbacks of many Muslim Brotherhood-type Islamist movements over the last decade, the decimation of the material capabilities (but not popularity) of Hamas after October 7, and the receding profile of both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, I’ll just leave here something I wrote a couple of years ago on the future of Islamism:

“As civil wars die down, but resilient jihadist insurgencies remain in control of territory, they may evolve in a direction more open to collaboration with the remnants of Islamism. The attempts at governance by the former al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the Idlib Province of Syria offers one example of such evolution (Drevon 2021; Drevon and Haenni 2021). To the extent that this happens, it could drive a convergence between Islamist models typically viewed as rivals—one that could offer a contrast with the more extreme jihadists consumed by internal ideological infighting. They may also be less clearly divided from their Salafi counterparts….

“The shift from deterritorialized transnational terrorism to territorial insurgency is an epochal one for jihadism. Ideologically and strategically, it charts a trajectory from the national jihadist campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s through Bin Laden’s and ISIS’s global terrorist campaigns back to localized jihadist insurgency. These localized campaigns are identifiably jihadist of the IS variant, involving a particular ideological rhetoric and media production, governance of territories under their control, varying degrees of attraction of foreign fighters, and distinctive modes of warfare (Ashour 2021; Hashim 2018), but they also have pushed them in the direction of providing governance and, in a sense, their normalization within those spaces (Adraoui 2019). Syria, of course, has been the key incubator and laboratory for the evolution of these new jihadist formations (Abboud 2017; Baczko et al. 2018). Where this intersects with political Islam’s trajectory comprises the critical question of whether jihadists absorb and benefit from defections from political Islam or whether political Islam absorbs and benefits from the domestication of jihadist insurgencies.”

So many questions. Anyone who claims to know with confidence what’s going to happen in Syria over the next year really isn’t serious.

And now, stick around for the final MENA Academy Roundup for 2024!

First up: a few weeks ago, I blogged about a new publication I edited on decolonization and decoloniality in Africa, noting in part how different the African debates felt from those in the Middle East. Right on cue, Comparative Studies in South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Studies has published a dynamite symposium on decolonizing research and research ethics in MENA studies. The whole collection belongs on a lot of syllabi starting this spring.

The introduction, by Mayssoun Sukarieh and Lila Abu-Lughod, frames the problematics of the imperative to decolonization and profound questions of research ethics. Articles include Abu-Lughod’s essay on what MENA Studies can learn from Indigenous Studies in terms of research practice, Ali Abdullatif Ahmida’s searing reflections on the academic silence over the Italian colonial genocide in Libya, Nadia Fadil on challenges of ethnography, Yara Sa'di-Ibraheem on the challenges facing Palestinians in Israeli universities, Zakia Salime’s fascinating piece on decolonizing the race debate in the Maghreb, Zahra Ali on research in Iraq, Sara Ababneh on research in Jordan and the ownership of data, and Mayssoun Sukarieh on ownership of social science data. For political scientists, perhaps the most important and challenging contribution is Rabab el-Mahdi’s critique of political science since the Arab uprisings which argues that “the interplay between a limited disciplinary research agenda in political science and an overemphasis on quantitative methods has left a whole range of important untapped questions regarding the Middle East and North Africa.”

Next up, there’s a fantastic short symposium in Mediterranean Politics full of timely research on regional responses to the war on Gaza. Jerome Drevon’s “Syrian Jihadis’ reaction to the Gaza conflict” will be perhaps of the most interest at the moment. Other important contributions include Aurélie Daher’s “Militant Islamism in Lebanon and the War on Gaza”, Curtis Ryan on Jordanian Islamists, and Inna Rudolf on Iraqi Shi’a Islamist responses (I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that there are more contributions being rolled out so check the main website for more).

Finally, some standalone articles of note:

Walid Ali, “How security shaped Libya’s transition,” Democratization (December 2024). ABSTRACT: The divergent transition trajectories on which some countries in the MENA region embarked after the 2011 uprisings sparked extensive scholarly attention. While the state remained largely intact in Egypt or Tunisia, the violent revolt in Libya led to civil conflicts and the collapse of governmental institutions. However, there is limited research examining the consequences of such collapse in the post-conflict scenario. This article aims to fill this void in the literature and analyses what shaped the transition path in Libya after regime change focusing on the security factors. It uses qualitative content analysis of official documents and media reports, and 26 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2023 with key Libyan respondents including a former deputy prime minister, former ministers, current and former MPs, a former secretary general of a political party, a former director of a Libyan TV channel, radio broadcasters, NGOs leaders, human rights activists, and others. The data analysis is done with the help of process tracing. The main results indicate that several domestic and international security factors such as, the type of military response to the uprising, non-state armed groups, and external intervention shaped the country’s transition.

Andrew Leber, “Personalization and domestic policy outcomes: evidence from Saudi Arabia,” Democratization (December 2024). What effect does power personalization have on authoritarian policy outcomes? While existing literature expects personalist rulers to substitute private handouts or personal whims for coherent policymaking, I identify two mechanisms – elimination of veto players and establishing institutional control over the bureaucracy – through which personalization can serve as a permissive condition for autocracies adopting public policies that benefit mass constituencies within society. Focusing on a clear case of personalization in Saudi Arabia, I demonstrate that these proposed mechanisms have contributed to the policy achievements of the Vision 2030 reform programme. Policy outcomes under de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman thus point to a more complicated relationship between personalization and policymaking under authoritarianism than predicted by existing literature. This article has implications for how we study authoritarian policymaking and the research questions we ask about personalization.

Hania Sobhy, “Campaigning for the revolution: Freedom, social justice and citizenship imaginaries in the Egyptian Uprising,” Mediterranian Politics (December 2024). ABSTRACT: The limited electoral success of pro-Revolution forces during the Arab uprisings is often attributed to their weak political and organizational resources. Yet, in the first round of Egypt’s historic 2012 presidential elections, pro-Revolution candidates Hamdin Sabahi and Abdel-Monim Abul-Futuh jointly outperformed both the ‘old regime’ and Muslim Brotherhood contenders, with Sabahi nearly reaching the runoff. Drawing on extensive fieldwork across Egypt between 2012 and 2013, this article examines how the campaigners of these two candidates translated the Revolution’s core ideals of freedom and social justice. It introduces the notion of citizenship imaginaries to capture how campaigners communicated these ideals across divergent experiences and narratives of relating to the state. It argues that the two campaigns—differently—compensated for their weaknesses by aligning their messaging with dominant imaginaries in three important ways: downplaying appeals to democracy and radical change except when engaging “cultured voters”; advancing a vague but credible pro-poor stance; and adapting appeals traditionally tied to the two more powerful political forces: stability, Islamism and patronage. By linking resources, imaginaries and the agency of social movement actors, the article offers new perspectives on electoral dynamics and the strategic communication of mobilization frames, especially in transitional and global South contexts.

Joseph Hellou and Marcello Mollico, “Hezbollah’s Mobilization Strategy: How Hassan Nasrallah Instrumentalized Communal Fear, Shia Narratives and Incentives to Foster Support for Intervention in Syria.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (December 2024). ABSTRACT: This article analyzes Hezbollah’s mobilization strategy for the participation in the Syrian conflict. It rests on a thematic analysis of 52 speeches of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in the period 2011 to 2023 to uncover political patterns in the group’s mobilization strategy. It argues that Hezbollah exploited people’s fears, important Shia narratives and symbols to foster an incentive structure to step up mobilization for the war in Syria. This mobilization was instrumentally connected to Hezbollah’s previous experiences, e.g., conflict against Israel, to highlight continuities in the struggle against the enemy, broadly construed. The article shows that these patterns ensured continuous mobilization to fight “takfiri” groups in Syria, but could also provide avenues for mobilization to future causes. Critical in this process was the credibility of Hassan Nasrallah whose speeches concentrated on the existential risks and threats posed by “takfiri” groups by highlighting problems, suggesting solutions and calling members to action.