Rana B. Khoury, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [1]
For more than a decade, most Syrian refugees have not reached a “durable solution” to their displacement: neither resettlement in a third country, nor local integration in the first country of asylum, nor return (i.e., repatriation) to the country of origin. Instead, the majority that resides in neighboring countries have fallen into “protracted displacement,” living in exile for years without achieving permanent rights. Yet durable solutions—especially return—have frequently framed the discourse around Syrian refugees, even before the fall of the Assad regime. That is because through 2024, hostility, nativist politics, and asylee-repulsion mechanisms have increased in host states, while humanitarian aid declined and the conflict in Syria simmered to a stalemate. Amid these highly dynamic developments, Syrian refugees appeared static: their displacement held the potential for reversal, through return. Yet the protracted nature of Syrians’ displacement does not mean stasis (Khoury, 2025).
Most Syrians did not conceive of return as a viable option before the fall of the regime. Instead, they were managing day-to-day life in displacement in a continuous state of uncertainty. Did they become resilient to difficult conditions due to their cumulated experiences of survival, or did protractedness actually deepen their vulnerability? In this essay, I take the fall of the regime as an opportunity to answer these questions. The regime’s persecution and violence had been the primary causes of Syrians’ displacement and impediments to their return home. I find that, despite its liberatory potential, the opportunity opened by Assad’s fall exposes the deep vulnerability of Syrian refugees in protracted displacement and the difficulty of the choices they face after many years of hardship and displacement.
For this essay, I draw upon two dozen interviews conducted with Syrians in Türkiye, Jordan, and Syria (those in the latter were returnees) in summer 2025, and another three dozen that preceded the fall of the regime which relate to refugees’ sense of (un)belonging. I describe their reaction to the aftermath of the fall of the regime in which they sensed joy yet also deep uncertainty about their presents and futures. They also told of experiencing new financial and other livelihood insecurities. I propose that their vulnerability manifests in structural, material, and emotional forms: structurally, the fall of the regime nullifies solutions to displacement other than return; materially, it grounds their day-to-day lives and mental energy in the logistics of surviving; and emotionally, it challenges how they conceive of their home or place in the world. Their ambivalent response reveals a troubling dilemma, as the structural conditions of protracted displacement may be such that even ostensibly positive political developments deepen their vulnerability.
Protracted Displacement in Neighboring Countries
During Syria’s civil war, more than 6 million people fled the country, the majority to neighboring countries—namely Türkiye, Lebanon, and Jordan. Türkiye alone hosted 3.6 million, while at the peak of displacement Syrians constituted around a quarter of Lebanon’s population and Jordan estimated the actual number of Syrians in the country to be twice the registered refugee population of 650,000. The pace of Syrian displacement was relatively slow in 2011 and 2012, then increased dramatically between 2013 and 2015. In 2015 and 2016, hundreds of thousands sought asylum beyond the neighboring countries; many found refuge in Germany, some elsewhere in Europe. A few hundred thousand also returned to Syia from 2016 to 2024. Yet most, millions, remained next door to Syria and entered a decade of displacement.[2] In this essay, I focus mostly on those in Türkiye and Jordan.
Most Syrians in neighboring countries have not formally achieved “local integration,” one of three durable solutions promoted by the international refugee regime that refers to the acquisition of rights and permanent protections—even citizenship—in the first country of asylum. In Türkiye nearly a quarter million Syrians have been naturalized through an exceptional citizenship mechanism—a large number but only about 7 percent of the Syrian refugee population in Türkiye. Jordan has refrained from offering citizenship.[3] Thus, most Syrians in both countries remain under temporary protection status. As one Syrian in Amman put it to me: “I could live in this country for a hundred years and never gain rights.”
Nevertheless, forced migration scholarship has recognized that “de facto integration and settlement are an inevitable consequence of protracted displacement despite the official, legal, or political tactics designed to prevent this” (Zetter & Long, 2012). Indeed, Syrians in Türkiye and Jordan have integrated in important if incomplete ways over the years. Most rent homes in urban areas, work formally or informally, enroll their children in public schools, participate in community associations, attend local mosques, seek healthcare in local and public clinics and hospitals, receive no or negligible humanitarian assistance, and abide by local norms—including learning the Turkish language in that case. In our conversations, Syrians with school-age children recognized the next generation was particularly integrated in the country of refuge.
These imperfect integration developments have been uneasy. In Türkiye, anti-refugee elite rhetoric and public sentiment are amplified during recurrent electoral cycles. In Jordan, persistent tensions around the economic impact of refugees affect their ability to acquire and retain work permits. Yet both governments have balanced the burden of refugee hosting with large amounts of foreign aid for so doing—aid often directed at host country institutions and development (Arar, 2017; Tsourapas, 2019). More importantly, and despite the insistence on maintaining the “temporary” status of Syrian refugees, with each passing year of what became a protracted displacement, there were diminishing prospects that Syrians refugees would return home or obtain resettlement in a third country. From 2016, Bashar al-Assad’s regime had been regaining territory from rebels, and global North countries had been erecting formidable barriers to asylum seekers. Return and resettlement, the other two durable solutions pursued by the international refugee regime, became unlikely and unviable for most before 2025.
Then, on December 8, 2024, the Syrian regime dissolved. President Bashar al-Assad, who in 2000 inherited the country from his father who had ruled since 1970, fled the country in the face of a surprise and decisive rebel offensive that lasted a mere eleven days. Since 2020, the fault lines of the Syrian civil war had been frozen. Imperfect ceasefires had maintained rebel control in the corners of the country, but the regime had seemed to emerge triumphant from a brutal war. Generalized violence and strategic displacement, largely perpetrated by the regime, had created the largest refugee population in the world (Lichtenheld, 2024); the regime’s practices of punishment and distrust had kept them out, even when violence decreased (Abboud, 2023).
The fall of the regime signaled the end of more than half a century of the Assad dynasty’s authoritarian rule through physical, psychological, structural, and hegemonic coercion and control (Aldoughli, 2024; Ismail, 2018; Munif, 2020; Wedeen, 1999). Two sentiments in particular prevailed among my research participants: shock and joy. Despite this event’s positive valence, it did not take long for uncertainty and insecurity to reshape understandings and expectations for ordinary Syrian refugees who were living in a condition of protracted displacement.
Three Forms of Heightened Vulnerability
The fall of the regime, I argue, heightened vulnerability among Syrians in protracted displacement along three lines: through structural closings, material burdens, and existential emotions. Attention to these processes demonstrates how protracted displacement constrains refugees’ agency even in a moment of political opportunity. It also illuminates the limits of past framings around durable solutions, including survey research about return intentions. Previously, humanitarian and scholarly surveys consistently found startingly low return intentions over the short-term, even as they reported far higher proportions over the long run. For example, intentions to return to Syria within one year of the survey have been less than 5% while intentions to return “ever” have been greater than 60% (Alrababah et al., 2023; UNHCR, 2024). The negligible levels of short-term intent and massive gap with long-run aspirations suggest that return was such an unrealistic prospect it was unworthy of serious consideration among survey respondents. Now that refugees are considering it (less than 2% jumped to 27% after the fall of the regime in a UNHCR flash survey (2025)), we may learn that even aspirations are insufficient to overcome vulnerability.
Structural Closings
Despite the shrinking prospects of achieving resettlement in a third country, many Syrians had, through 2024, still been clinging to the idea that their time in a neighboring country was transitory—a temporary stop on the way to a more durable outcome. Since 2023 especially, Syrians in Türkiye had become fearful of deportation and so-called “voluntary” returns and a generally and increasingly hostile environment. This was leading some, particularly young men, to reconsider ways out, including through smuggling routes that had become far more dangerous over the years, or through deeper immersion in informal markets. In Jordan, open hostility to Syrians’ presence was limited, but the open-endedness of their temporary status offered little hope for long-run prospects and protection. Through 2024 many families were busy in their efforts to meet the requirements for a U.S. refugee sponsorship program that had been introduced by the Biden administration in 2023 in response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis.
They sought these passages despite knowing that resettlement had become very unlikely. Many expressed regrets for not having gone in the early years of displacement. A man in Türkiye avowed to me he would have survived the Mediterranean passage—he shouldn’t have been scared. People scarcely anticipated that the displacement would last as long as it did; some even passed up early resettlement opportunities because they thought home was on the horizon. A woman in Jordan shared with me such an experience:
You know we were among the first people they called to go to America! We weren’t thinking to leave; it was impossible to think of then! We didn’t think it would go on like this. We thought a year, maybe two at most. We didn’t think it’d be like this. Now we are eating our fingers with regret. We are so regretful.
With the fall of the regime, both third country resettlement and local integration became dead ends. Several global North countries moved to end consideration of Syrian asylum applications; some even moved to return Syrians already present in their countries and ended their temporary protection status. Now, neighboring countries were stops on the road back to Syria. The duration of the transit is unclear: Syria needs time to recover, and the host states have taken differing approaches to how quickly or forcefully to push Syrians home. Lebanon has initiated a program in cooperation with the UN Refugee Agency to facilitate regular return convoys. Türkiye has facilitated “go and see” visits to encourage informed return and boasts of the numbers that have already left. And Jordan has gently conveyed that return is, eventually and inevitably, the destination; Syrians have perceived amplified enforcement of employment regulations and are acutely aware of the policy that forbids their re-entry into Jordan once they go to Syria. As of October 2025, about 1 million Syrian refugees have returned overall.
Material Burdens
Refugees, Barbara Harrell-Bond has contended, are not mere victims; they are “survivors of adversity—who often demonstrate unimaginable strength and dignity in the most adverse circumstances” (2002, p. 52). My own research, too, has found that the displaced can be remarkably agential (e.g., Khoury & Siegel, 2024). During the initial escape from violence—and the how, where, and when involved therein—individuals and families make a series of calculated decisions to survive. After arrival in refuge, the struggle for shelter and sustenance begins anew. But as days turn into months turn into years, the displaced settle into a rhythm of daily life—even if a difficult one. The fall of the regime disrupted this rhythm. After conveying the shock and joy of the fall itself, my interviewees expressed that thinking immediately followed.
Prior to December 2024, the idea of return to Syria was hypothetical and aspirational at best. The logistics of what would be entailed with return were not considered. After the fall, these logistics bore down heavily on Syrians. These included repaying debts owed to landlords, employers, and even local shop owners. The costs of return itself—transporting furniture and belongings, paying for the journey of each family member across the border—could amount to hundreds of dollars. Those who have no home to return to face perhaps the most significant material burden of all, as they calculate high rental prices and low job prospects inside.
The protracted nature of displacement shapes these logistical concerns. Basic goods including electricity and water are scarce in Syria, and educational and medical sectors are run down. Refugees have become accustomed to the goods and services associated with functioning governmental systems. As well, family structures have changed. People who left Syria as teenagers or in early adulthood with their parents, for example, now have their own spouses and children—as do their siblings. That is, one family that left Syria may have become three families in refuge. One house to stay in, even if one remains, is insufficient; they need multiple.
These logistical considerations create intense mental pressures. One woman in Amman described to me an anxiety attack experienced by her husband “from all the thinking and thinking!” that landed him in the hospital. Another confided her suicidal ideation as her family just could not figure out how to make the ends meet to return and survive. I apologized and expressed regret for the distress our conversation caused; she assured me that the challenges of return are all she thinks and talks about.
All of this thinking about the material ability to return is altogether distinct from the political cause of displacement—now removed. And yet it is a result of the protracted nature of that displacement. Indeed, my research participants sense that it is their very first-hand knowledge of what it means to lose everything and restart that has led to careful, and even overwhelming, thinking about the logistics of return.
Existential self-assessment
Returning to square one (or to “zero,” in the Arabic phrasing), is a sensation not limited to logistics. It is also an emotional experience wherein one questions one’s self, place in the world, obligations, and sense of belonging—or lack thereof (Pearlman, 2024). With the initial displacement, a linkage broke with what and who they knew. Atomized and detached in displacement, Syrians continuously long for the large families, owned properties, pace of life, and social relations back home. As refugees, they work long hours, tire out, go home, sleep, and repeat. “We are tired,” “we are bored,” and “we are exhausted” were common refrains in these conversations.
In the years of protraction, they may have grown more resilient in some ways, but they lost in others—notably in people, including those dying of war-related or natural causes back home, and in displacement as family members dispersed throughout exile. Among them, conservative women may find themselves especially isolated—not even leaving the house to work, study, or shop. Now with the fall of the regime, loved ones are leaving again. Interviewees expressed pain that a close relative could return because they had a house to return to, but they themselves cannot, because they do not.
And yet even return to Syria does not necessarily hold the promise of recreating social relations or “home.” Besides that loved ones are lost or themselves displaced, the people who have remained inside have changed. The hometowns from whence people escaped have changed. Some spoke of resentments between returnees and stayees. Others spoke of envies. If one had nothing to return to in Syria, would it even be a return home? Or would they be refugees in their own homeland?
As well, those in protracted displacement themselves have changed. From deprivation, many have grown their understandings of rights and social contracts. Young adults who became refugees as children noted they had “become conscious” in the country of refuge whereas they barely remember Syria. Parents reflected on how little their children know of Syria at all. Atomized existence enabled some to enjoy certain personal liberties, such as living alone as unmarried adults, divorcing abusive husbands without fear of societal stigma, and taking comfort in the anonymity of an urban setting compared to rural hometowns.
And yet there are clear limits against developing a sense of belonging to the host country. Scholars of forced migration frequently refer to the “liminality” of forced migration, a state of transition, waiting, and in-betweenness. The fall of the regime has amplified the discomfort of permanent liminality. “What should we do?” “Where should we go?” “How does this end?”
Implications
Syrian refugees in neighboring countries today are qualitatively different people than they were when they fled Syria. Even an ostensibly positive political development like the fall of the regime that caused their displacement has laid bare the vulnerabilities of their condition. Despite the desire among most observers to see Syrian refugees achieve a durable solution—particularly return—protracted displacement does not lend itself to simple reversal. As one 35-year-old Syrian woman in Amman put it when recounting the fall of the regime:
We were really happy! So happy! Really it was like nothing else. We said: he should have fallen a long time ago! Not now. Now after he destroyed the country and left nothing. I wished that he would have fallen like a year after we left. It’s okay, we can deal with a year. But not now after 14 years! We get a little happy, then we get a little upset. Then we get a little happy, then we get a little upset.
References
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[1] Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
[2] https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria
[3] Conditions in Lebanon were even more precarious than in the two cases on which I focus (Janmyr & Mourad, 2018).