André Bank, Marc Lynch, and Wendy Perlman
On November 26, 2024, most observers regarded Syria as a “frozen conflict” in which the 54 years of authoritarian rule by the Assad family was poised to continue into the foreseeable future. The next day, the Islamist rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) led a coalition of rebels on a lightning speed military offensive that seized town after town as the government’s military defenses collapsed. On December 8, Bashar al-Assad fled, Syrians near and far went out in celebratory demonstrations, and HTS assumed power in Damascus.
The year since then has been filled with one milestone after another: the caretaker government gave way to a formal transitional government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa. A National Dialogue Conference in late February sparked both praise for bringing hundreds of Syrians together to discuss the most critical issues facing the country, and criticism for being a rushed one-off rather than a sustained reconciliation process. In March, a presidential-appointed committee put form an interim constitution that set forth a state structure for a five-year transition. Indirect parliamentary elections in October selected two-thirds of a new people’s assembly, with another third to be appointed by the president. Nonstop diplomatic work transformed Syria’s foreign relations, including opening a new era of cooperation with the United States culminating in a White House visit in November. And amidst these steps establishing the contours of new political institutions and practices, incidents of violence have ignited new fears about whether the new Syria could become a country protecting the security and rights of all of its citizens. Among the most alarming were sectarian massacres in March and July, which together claimed some 3,500 lives.
These and many other developments during the past year have given rise to a host of crucial questions about the future of Syria and the Syrian people.[1] To explore them, the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) exchanged with the Arab Political Science Network (APSN), launched a call for papers, and selected more than a dozen emerging scholars to participate in an intensive online workshop in mid-September 2025. Based in eight different countries, many of these researchers are Syrian, and most have years of research experience on Syria or Syrian diasporic communities. The papers resulting from the workshop provide fresh insight into a range of critical issues: decentralization and state consolidation, sectarian violence, refugee return, security sector reform, transitional justice, economic reconstruction, and more. This framing introduction summarizes their key contributions and puts their arguments in conversation with each other, organized around some of the most important questions facing Syria today.
How is the new transitional government consolidating authority?
State consolidation is understandably the primary focus of politics for a country emerging from 14 years of multidimensional war and territorial fragmentation followed by the unexpected collapse of the regime that had dominated public life for more than half a century. In this context, the starting place for understanding politics in the new Syria is the new authorities in Damascus. The urgent demands of establishing a new system and legitimate authority inevitably pose the risk of renewing authoritarian patterns of rule or reigniting violence. How is the new regime consolidating power, and with what implications for Syria’s transition moving forward?
This question runs through several essays in the collection and is especially pertinent in two. Ali Hamdan launches this discussion with an exploration of the fundamental challenge facing the Syrian transitional government: the need to convince society that it is not simply a militia or one of many social groups vying for power, but is a distinct, autonomous force whose authority deserves compliance from society. In other words, to transform from a rebel formation into a state-building organization, the new government must successfully perform statecraft. Hamdan traces HTS’s experiences with this performance from its wartime governance in Idlib province starting in 2017 through its creation of a caretaker government in the wake of the Assad regime’s collapse and then in arguably the most profound test of the transitional government’s state-like authority to date: the violence that engulfed the southeastern Suweida province in July 2025. Assessing “soft” performances of symbolic actions and strategically deployed language, Hamden traces how the government framed its role in Suweida and assesses its degree of success in reassuring the Syrian public that the country has entered a genuine transition from war to a post-war phase.
Exploring further complications, and even double-edged swords, in the new authorities’ efforts to consolidate power, Haian Dukhan turns a spotlight on Sunni Arab tribes. He observes that the rupture of the highly centralized security state under Assad has generated space for both local and regional actors to assert themselves. Analysis of the positioning of tribes in the emerging post-Assad order suggests a paradox: On one hand, tribal solidarity has been a resource that the transitional government has employed to extend its influence where state institutions are weak. On the other hand, reliance on tribal networks risks deepening sectarian divisions, reinforcing patronage politics, and even provoking large-scale violence. Upon a brief historical overview providing context for tribal–state relations in Syria, Dukhan also turns to tribal mobilization in the Suweida violence to illustrate this ambivalent duality in tribes’ role. As tribes can be simultaneously stabilizers and spoilers, the government should recognize how privileging tribal solidarity risks empowering autonomous local actors in ways that risk igniting sectarian confrontation and undermining central authority.
Both authors – and, indeed, many others in the collection – highlight the inherent tensions involved in state consolidation and the prevailing potential for it to spin out into violence which implicates the new regime in the eyes of many of its citizens. State-builders must tread carefully as they seek to build capacity and legitimacy.
Can decentralization offer better governance?
Given these and other challenges in consolidating authority, not to mention the harrowing example of Assad’s personalized rule, is centering power in the government in Damascus even a desirable path forward for Syria? Three essays in the collection make powerful cases for decentralized formulas of political organization, provoking further thought about the costs and benefits of this approach to institutional reform and state-society relations.
On the eve of the regime’s collapse, Sean Lee argues, Syria was a patchwork of fiefdoms ruled by various factions, the largest of which was the government of Bashar al-Assad. Syria was thus best conceptualized not as a unified centralized state but as “a collection of loosely connected peripheries.” HTS’s military offensive and assumption of power in late 2024, in turn, can be fruitfully understood as the sudden transformation of one of those peripheral groups into the country’s center. Since then, transitional president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s vision for a new Syria has arguably sought to reproduce the model of concentrated presidentialism that it replaced. Incidents of violence on the periphery can be read as attempts to reconsolidate power in Damascus — through brutal force of arms, if necessary. This is especially fraught and dangerous given the ways that neglected geographic peripheries overlap with minoritized religious and ethnic communities, intertwining geographic and ethno-sectarian dynamics. In this context, Lee concludes that Syria’s best hope to avoid the dangers of either partition or continued massacres is to eschew obsolete models of centralized, authoritarian governance. Rather, it must consider alternative institutional possibilities, and especially varieties of decentralized governance.
Tiina Hyyppä does precisely that. Like Lee, she recognizes that wartime Syria became a patchwork of political orders, with grassroots, fragmented, decentralized, and hybrid forms of governance emerging in opposition-held spaces. Since Assad’s fall, the transitional government has initiated top-down processes to transform local governance. As it does not have sufficient personnel or resources to control local-level affairs, however, Damascus has had to engage intermediaries and thereby generated opportunities for communities to influence how they are governed. Looking forward, she argues, the center can further empower local governance as a way of granting citizens the political agency they were long denied. To do so, however, it must engage in practices that are more democratic than those characterizing its own actions during the war and resist creating patronage networks in which loyalty dictates resource allocation. At the same time, supporters of decentralization might reduce their calls for federalism, lest fears of territorial partition or fragmentation disrupt valuable opportunities for bottom-up governance and rebuilding.
Yasmine Tlass concurs with the benefits of decentralization in governance and argues that decentralization is a beneficial approach to security sector reform, as well. Against those who might think that centralizing control over security forces is necessary for state-building during this transitional phase, she explains how that approach can instead reproduce state fragility. Making the case for an “alternative controlled decentralization model,” the paper suggests how locally grounded initiatives offer a path forward for the post-Assad Syria security landscape. It reviews three cases from three areas, each of which represents a distinct modality of decentralized security governance: in Aleppo, supervised co-production between local Kurdish structures and residual state institutions; in Raqqa, institutionalized subsidiarity through bargains between tribal authorities and security forces; and in Suweida, communal self-administration rooted in customary authority. Together, these examples show how decentralization, coupled with mechanisms of oversight and institutional interfaces linking local authority to state frameworks, can harness the already embedded pluralistic reality in Syria to rebuild the security sector on new foundations of inclusion, legitimacy, and accountability.
None of the authors underplays the challenges of decentralization in the Syrian context, the potential violence and injustices emanating from local dynamics, or the potential risks involved. But their warnings about the risks of a return to an overly centralized model of governance pose a sharp challenge to emerging trends and practices as the new regime takes shape.
What is law and justice in the new Syria?
Among the most important issues facing any transition from authoritarianism is establishing the rule of law and determining the extent of transitional justice. Syria’s transition involves especially extreme challenges in both areas, as it emerges from long decades of a regime defined by systemic violence and fourteen years of brutal war. The transitional authorities have repeatedly pledged to create a “state of law” to replace the endemic corruption of the prior system. Similarly, a call for accountability is one of the most widespread demands emerging from Syrian citizens and civil society. But progress has been uneven and fundamental questions remain unaddressed. How can a new culture of law be built in general, and how can Syria seek justice for war crimes and other atrocities?
Sarah Bassisseh, Ronja Herrschner, Chonlawit Sirikupt, and Marcia Ponzlet examine challenges and choices entailed in pursuit of transitional justice in Syria. They begin from the premise that post-Assad Syria is neither post-authoritarian nor post-conflict, and thus transitional justice efforts today unfold not after but “during transition.” They argue that the starting point for designing and implementing transitional justice mechanisms should be acknowledging and embracing complexity, which they delineate in three core dimensions. First, attention to temporality demands reckoning with the past injustices committed by the Assad regime and all other perpetrators, as well as the present injustices unfolding during the transitional period. Second, attention to spatiality illustrates the need to move away from a state-centered approach towards the space-induced levels of local and also cross-border injustices. Finally, attention to agency and legitimacy warns against domination by the central state and instead calls for inclusive processes that enable civil society organizations, victims, and families to participate in both the design and the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms, including the establishment of independent bodies and truth commissions.
Salma Daoudi also brings justice claims into sharp focus with an examination of Syria’s vast number of war-disabled people – nearly 30% of the population. These persons are too easily forgotten or shunted aside as a humanitarian concern or individual burden. Instead, their demands for accessibility, political participation, and reparative health care should be considered core questions for politics and justice in the post-authoritarian transition. Just as wartime injury is compounded by broader exclusions from health, mobility, representation, and access to decision-making, so must reparation for the war-disabled go beyond material compensation or symbolic gestures, and instead entail inclusive institutional design, structural accessibility, and civic imaginaries that reckon with embodied histories of loss and resistance. Attention to their marginalization challenges us to consider whose suffering is or is not acknowledged, to affirm the agency of those whose bodies were most marked by conflict, and to undertake structural transformation of the political order that enabled mass violence. “To do otherwise,” Daoudi writes, “risks reproducing forms of exclusion that have long defined both war and governance in Syria.”
In their contribution, Rifaie Tammas and Marika Sosnowski center an innovative conversation on the inherent tensions between how the law is codified and practiced under different government constellations and how it is personally experienced by different people. The latter is understood as “legal consciousness” and is examined here in different places: in Syria under Assad, in today’s post-Assad period and in diaspora Australia, past and present. To highlight such contrasts and tensions, the authors choose a new experimental form of two columns that visually put the personal and the academic as well as the private and the public next to each other. In this way, Tammas and Sosnowski also attempt to capture the very fluid and transitory nature of the current post-Assad moment, for Syrians in Syria, for Syrians abroad but also for those who study Syrian political transition with a view to legal systems. At the same time, the partial overlaps and connections between the two columns also highlight “the co-constitutive nature of public debates and private musings, how what is legal and what is illegal is not something fixed or stable … but actually constantly in flux and dependent on the government of the day as well as the slippery nature of knowledge and understanding.”
All of these essays highlight both the necessity of accountability and impartial rule of law and reasons why the new regime might fail this test. The task of crafting a system of transitional justice, truth, and reconciliation to address the atrocities of the prior regime is formidable. Syrians overwhelmingly seek an accounting for the crimes of the previous regime. Furthermore, the winners of war do not typically prioritize investigating their own crimes or those of their allies, even if that would also help establish credibility with certain constituencies. Recent moves to investigate sectarian massacres are tentative steps in that direction, but the new authorities must go much further to establish a state that will deliver both law and justice to citizens yearning for both.
What are paths forward for Syria’s displaced?
No conversation on Syria’s transition can proceed without attending to the fact that more than half the population was forcibly displaced during the course of the uprising and war. Another essential issue today is thus the fate of the estimated 14 million Syrians who were forced from their homes, some half of them as internally displaced people and the other half as refugees in countries around the world. Two essays in this collection take on this topic, both of them centering the reflections, aspirations, and lived experiences of refugees themselves.
Rana Khoury explores the question of return through a painful irony: despite its liberatory potential and most refugees’ sheer joy in celebrating Assad’s fall, the regime’s end also exposes the deep vulnerability of Syrian refugees and the difficulty of the choices that they now face. She traces this newly heightened vulnerability structurally in the loss of solutions to displacement other than return; materially, in the consuming logistical considerations and financial costs entailed in the prospect of returning; and emotionally, in the emergence of existential new questions about identity, home, and belonging. Investigation of how refugees are coping with all three levels of vulnerability reveals how even ostensibly positive political developments can accentuate rather than alleviate the lived hardships of displaced persons.
Sarah al-Saeid also looks at the experience of refugees, challenging both the temporal and spatial conceptions which underly the category of refugee as well as “the pain of “refugehood” under biometric regulation, populist discourse, and state surveillance.” Like Khoury, she amplifies the voices of refugees probing the complicated contradictions of their experiences, “one shaped by the ongoing permanence of exile, the other haunted by the possibility of return.” In Türkiye, where most Syrian refugees reside, Saied traces the uncertainties and hidden brutalities of life at the “empire-state seam” where “imperial notions of hospitality” clash with the modern state’s bureaucratic drive to categorize, contain, and close.”
Both authors force us to engage with the lived realities of Syrians displaced by the war, and what experiences, hopes and fears they would bring back with them should they return.
How can Syria obtain economic recovery?
Underpinning these social, political and security challenges — for the Syrian government and its peoples — is economic catastrophe. Without economic recovery, Syria faces risk of renewed violence, and its citizens face a future of continued suffering. Three papers take on different dimensions of Syria’s profound and urgent economic crisis, all of them offering recommendations for where policy can go from here.
Erin Snider sets the scene with some sobering figures: the economy has contracted by over 64 percent since 2010; reconstruction needs are estimated at $250 billion; more than 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line; and some 13 million Syrians lack sufficient food. Snider reviews comparative research that shows that essential for post-conflict recovery and transition is inclusive economic reform. When economic reform during the early years of a post-conflict transition is not inclusive, it can undermine both economic recovery and the success of the transition itself. Whether economic reform in post-Assad Syria is or is not inclusive depends in part on the aid policies of powerful international and regional donors, such as the European Union, Gulf states, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the United States. Drawing on lessons from transitions elsewhere, Snider sets out a framework that scholars can use to monitor the degree to which Syria is or is not making progress toward building an inclusive economy, with particular attention to the three central areas of aid distribution, institutional rebuilding and reform, and aid coordination and delivery.
Hashem Krayem reminds us that the bedrock of any productive economy is a stable currency. In the Syrian case, war-induced hyperinflation, depleted foreign reserves, and a devastated economy leave the transitional government with both limited options and distinct challenges. These include problems in securing foreign currency that continue from the Assad era, ongoing international scrutiny of commercial banks, and Syria’s international debt. While Syria’s enormous financial needs persist, some monetary developments since the regime’s fall are positive, including the Central Bank of Syria’s control over gold reserves, active pursuit of the recovery of Syrian assets frozen abroad, gradual reintegration into global financial networks, proposed unification of currency, and a proposed shift toward a managed float. To boost demand for and trust in the Syrian pound, and achieve durable economic recovery more broadly, the transitional government must act with accountability and transparency, including in its engagement with Assad-era economic actors.
Another dimension of Syria’s economic crisis is its infrastructural and resource needs. Taking a deep dive into one key sector, Ahmed Haj Asaad focuses in on water. His analysis shows how the challenge of water scarcity is irreducibly political. The Assad regime subordinated water management to political authority and security imperatives, resulting in severe groundwater depletion, river desiccation, and inequitable or non-binding agreements with neighboring countries on common water resources. The current political transition offers an opportunity to shift from the logic of conflict, dependency, and mistrust to one of regional cooperation, with dividends for economic stability and national reconstruction. The essay presents two pathways for water sharing with neighboring countries: technical-economic collaboration, such as the linking of the Syrian plains with Türkiye’s Harran irrigation networks in the Euphrates River Basin; and institutional-legal cooperation, including enhanced regulatory frameworks for the Orontes Basin shared with Lebanon. Both examples provide a blueprint for an integrated economic-social-environmental model that could use equitable sharing of water resources as a springboard for economic recovery, environmental sustainability, and regional stability.
One Year On: Post-Assad, not Post-War
This collection suggests that, one year on, politics in post-Assad Syria continues to generate more questions than answers. Still, the expert analyses in this volume point to some preliminary conclusions.
First, the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad is over and there is no indication that it will be coming back. There is little sign of any viable Assadist insurgency comparable to what emerged in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam in 2003, which some observers feared would pose an immediate challenge to stability and security. One year on, it is fair to say that Syria is indeed “post-Assad,” even if the task of transforming the legacies, mentalities and practices that Assad left behind remain ongoing.
Second, however, it might not yet be fully appropriate to describe Syria as “post-war.” The violence in portions of the country, the limits of the reconsolidation of the new government’s authority, and the military occupation of Syrian territory by Türkiye and Israel suggest that it might be premature to say that “post-Assad” equals “post-war.” Indeed, the authors of this volume take different positions on that question. Furthermore, the degree that “war is over” is felt differently by different Syrians, in part depending on who they are and where they live. For some, violence or the threat thereof very much remains.
Third, the large-scale violence in Suweida in July 2025 can be considered a defining moment in the transitional period, if not the most critical turning point for Syrian politics during the twelve months since Assad’s flight. Many Syrians themselves note it as a turning point in their own feelings about the transition process and thoughts about Syria’s future prospects. That many of the papers in this volume also comment on this event, and several put it at the center of their analysis, is testimony how no understanding of Syria’s domestic politics is complete without reckoning with both its causes and ongoing consequences.
Fourth, Syria’s challenges — and likewise the solutions to them — are fundamentally political. Different authors of this volume, among them Hamdan, Dukhan and Lee, highlight the structural issues that the transitional government faces, including those related to capacity, autonomy, sovereignty, and legitimacy. A common policy advice by a number of the contributors, such as Hyyppä, Tlass and Lee, suggest a relative devolution of powers or forms of decentralization from the national state to the regional and subnational levels, in particular in the fields of security sector reform and local governance.
Fifth, many of the millions of those who fled Syria’s war are not close to an end of their long years of exile. As Khoury and al-Saeid make clear, many refugees — like many who never left — have only begun to process the meaning of Assad’s fall as they balance their hopes and their fears. As many states around the world increasingly block avenues for asylum or temporary protection, and their societies increasingly call for refugees to go home, displaced Syrians face difficult choices about whether to return to their land of origin or continue building their lives in countries near and far.
Sixth, one of the most resounding calls emerging across the 13 papers is for the need for post-Assad Syria to be built on principles of inclusion. Whether in the realms of socio-economic reform writ large (Snider), more specific currency reforms (Krayem), water governance (Asaad), governmental institutions (Lee; Hyyppä; Tlass), transitional justice (Bassisseh et al.; Tammas and Sosnowski), practices toward war-disabled people (Salma Daoudi), or pursuit of truly durable solutions to displacement (Khoury, al-Saied), policies ought not be made and imposed by just one segment of the Syrian people, including the government in Damascus. Rather, if Syria’s transition is to bring about the freedom and dignity for which so many Syrians gave so much, all citizens should see themselves as incorporated in and represented by processes of state decision-making.
The current post-Assad moment is replete with risks and dangers, but it also represents tremendous potential for good for the Syrian people. The papers in this volume point to factors, processes, and players that help us understand the first year after Assad’s fall. They also point to questions that will persist into the next phase, as Syrians — both state and society — continue to forge a new political reality. We hope that the contributions to this collection open up space for continuous and rigorous political science engagement with the Syrian transition while always centering the experience and views of Syrians themselves.
[1] For another excellent symposium, see Rana Khoury and Sefa Secen, eds., “Syria in Transition: Reconstructing State, Society and Sovereignty”, APSA MENA Politics 8, no.2 (2025): 30-63.