A significant share of the political analyses that accompanied and followed the collapse of the Assadist dictatorship, marked by the flight of its leader, his entourage, and the capital they had methodically amassed, proceeded from the assumption that democracy had suddenly become attainable in Syria. According to this reading, efforts to establish it, or at least to lay its initial foundations, could rely on Western powers, in exchange for the lifting of their sanctions, thereby opening the path to reconstruction and to rescuing a shattered economy.
Conversely, other analyses advanced the hypothesis of a Syria condemned to generalized civil war, to the durable tightening of sanctions, and to deepening isolation. They portrayed the new authorities, emerging from a jihadist milieu, as nothing more than an unfinished variant of Assadism and of its totalitarian model patiently constructed over half a century.
In reality, both hypotheses rest on largely unfounded representations, or on interpretations abusively elevated to essentialist characteristics—whether with regard to Syria’s internal dynamics or to the country’s relations with its regional and international environment.
The Democratic Illusion
The first hypothesis that of a democratic horizon anchored in external conditionalities overlooks a major shift: democracy has gradually disappeared from official U.S. discourse since Donald Trump’s first term, an evolution that more openly reflects the effective, so-called “realist” practices of American foreign policy. It also neglects the evident democratic backsliding in Western Europe, driven on the one hand by the rise of the far right, racism, and migration obsessions, and on the other by the hardening of surveillance and repression targeting social protest movements. This repressive dynamic has reached its peak over the past two years, with political, security, and judicial offensives against mobilizations in support of Palestinians—and, more broadly, of international law.
Added to this is a decisive factor: the conditionalities imposed by regional powers on Syria’s new rulers have absolutely nothing to do with democracy or its requirements. Public and private freedoms, constitutional processes, electoral integrity, transitional justice, and judicial independence are nowhere among the objectives promoted or defended in the region. This absence is hardly surprising, given that these demands emerged in the wake of a revolution whose crushing—and deliberate transformation into a war of attrition—was among the scarcely concealed objectives of several states involved in or directly linked to the conflict. The addition of the Israeli factor, whether through military aggression and the occupation of new territories in southern Syria, or through interference in confessional dynamics, to which we shall return—completes the picture: Syria is now embedded in a regional equation dominated by Israel, where normalization constitutes the primary lever of U.S. assistance, largely detached from any other political consideration.
The second hypothesis, for its part, rests on simplification, if not outright misunderstanding. In political science, one cannot reasonably compare a regime that ruled for more than half a century, partially or fully occupied a neighboring country [Lebanon] for twenty-nine years, waged a devastating nine-year war against its own society, and then spent five years managing prisons, security institutions, and narcotics trafficking under Russian and Iranian occupations, Western isolation, territorial fragmentation, and demographic engineering, with a new authority barely one year old and not yet consolidated as a full-fledged regime.
The power structure led by Ahmad al-Charaa remains a hybrid formation, shaped by the war it fought, by its alliances, and by its narrow loyalties. Its capacity to monopolize authority within restricted circles derives at once from the symbolic capital associated with its military victory over the Assad regime, from the absence of credible internal alternatives—stemming from the fragmentation of solidarities (‘asabiyya) capable of federating fighters and bureaucrats, whether loyal or opportunistic, outside its framework—and from external relations that secure, to varying degrees, the support of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and France, as well as Europe more broadly, alongside a normalization with Russia and cautious contacts with Israel. Taken together, these elements gradually consolidate its foundations and may lead to an authoritarian system—without, however, allowing it to be assimilated to the fallen regime, not only for internal reasons linked to confessional or generational configurations, but also for ideological, relational, institutional, and economic reasons.
All of this unfolds within a
historical conjuncture unlike that of the Cold War or its immediate aftermath,
and equally unlike that of 2011, with its hopes, mobilizations, and, in their
wake, organized violence, systematic destruction, deaths under torture, and
mass displacement.
Should one therefore conclude that there is a total rupture between the formative moments of past decades and the current sequence, or between the aspirations for change at the outset of the Arab revolutions and the social realities of 2025? Clearly not. What is unfolding today is, in part, the cumulative outcome of what has transpired in Syria and in its relations with the region and the world over the preceding period. It is also, in part, the product of power relations imposed from outside upon a profoundly dislocated internal space—relations likely to persist or to evolve at the margins, but unlikely to be radically overturned.
At the regional level, political and societal forces that carry the promise of change now occupy a marginal position, owing to the repression they have endured, the exhaustion and sense of powerlessness that surround them, and their misalignment with global priorities that favor stability over reform and “realism” over respect for international law and the demands of justice.
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The Illusion of Civil War
The question of civil war, at the heart of the second hypothesis, and more broadly that of generalized communal violence, nonetheless remains a legitimate concern, regardless of the intentions or projections of those who invoke it. Three months after Assad’s fall, following a waiting period during which violations had remained limited, certain regions experienced a rapid deterioration, culminating in two major massacres, followed by intermittent cycles of violence that continue to this day. The first massacre followed clashes with remnants of the former regime in coastal areas and targeted Alawite civilians in dozens of localities and urban neighborhoods, for confessional, vindictive, and terrorizing purposes. The second occurred after confrontations between tribal armed groups and Druze fighters in Jabal al-Arab, similarly targeting Druze civilians and their villages, causing thousands of deaths, injuries, and displacements.
These acts of violence coincided with the abduction of women—mostly Alawite—amounting to a continuous and systematic crime, alongside practices of torture, the burning of property, and confessional assassinations in the city of Homs and its surroundings, which are still ongoing. The tragic situation in Jabal al-Arab—where separatist tendencies and calls for forms of alliance with Israel had emerged before the massacre, only to be instrumentalized afterward—now constitutes a laboratory for the risks of renewed internal conflicts or for the constrained search for “strictly administrative solutions.” Such solutions could articulate confessional and national dimensions, particularly through the unresolved Kurdish question and its territorial and economic implications, given Kurdish control over more than 20 percent of Syrian territory and over major oil and water resources. Yet such arrangements cannot be envisaged outside a framework of expanded decentralization and a form of “partial justice” which, if adopted, would further distance the current authorities from the former Assadist centralized model.
That said, nothing indicates that Syria is engaged—or on the verge of engaging—in a scenario of total war. Internal and external balances do not permit it, and the new authorities, despite the complicity of their security apparatuses in the two massacres, cannot make war a mode of governance, nor do they need it to secure external legitimacy. On the contrary, what they have obtained or been granted thus far could be seriously jeopardized were they to lose the argument of internal stability. Moreover, no war can be sustained over time without an economy capable of feeding it—a condition that current regional, international, and national configurations simply do not fulfill.
One year after the fall and definitive disappearance of Assadism, Syria thus remains on a trajectory in which the characteristics of power point toward a system combining, in varying and coexisting degrees, authoritarianism, confessionalism, clientelism, and a limited acceptance of political dissent and social pluralism, alongside broad economic liberalization and considerable flexibility in external relations, with the commitments and agreements these entail in order to attract investment and large-scale projects. The most effective margins of action for civil society therefore lie in its ability to influence these different registers—expanding some while constraining others—as well as in sustained internal and international efforts to make all forms of violence more costly, more difficult to carry out, and to durably cut off their moral and financial resources.
Article originally published in Arabic in Megaphone