This paper is based on field research conducted by the leading author during the 2018 local elections in government-controlled areas in Syria. It reveals substantive gaps between legal procedures, their implementation and the way people perceive them. It exposes the level of mistrust people have with the overall system of governance which they believe works only to benefit the corrupt elite inside and outside the government. The paper concludes that constitutional and legal changes are a necessary but insufficient condition for the process of democratic transition in Syria. Any meaningful political transition process will indeed require substantial changes in constitutional and legal frameworks and should be based on electoral processes at several levels. 

But these amendments and procedures alone will remain futile and could end up as a facade for the authoritarian regime if not accompanied by other conditions and measures. Besides legal changes, real change requires actions that restore confidence in the overall system of governance and at all levels. The paper analyses the political economy of the elections and discusses structural changes needed at all levels in the overall political economy in order to aid genuine democratic process.

Research outputs:

• Progress in the Wrong Direction: The 2018 Local Council Elections in Syria, LSE Conflict Research Programme, February 2019. Available to read in English and Arabic.

This paper looks at the question of local representation and decentralisation from a procedural and legal perspective. It analyses the reasons why current administrative and legal frameworks which regulate the electoral processes and the distribution of roles and responsibilities between the Central Government and the Local Administrative Councils have largely failed to deliver actual decentralisation. 

Based on the development of local governance structures in Syria in the last eight years, the paper suggests that the adaptation of a combined top-down and bottom-up approach to the political solution would facilitate the implementation of any political arrangements between the warring parties and would arguably support legitimising such arrangements at the national and sub-national level.

Therefore, the paper presents several recommendations needed to the laws of local elections and the laws of local administration in order for the political solution to have any positive, meaningful impact on ending the Syrian conflict. These suggested changes are essential to enable the local governance structures to play an influential role in rehabilitating the local communities, ensuring a broad public participation, promoting the social cohesion, mitigating the effects of war economy, stabilising the local economies, constructing a sense of ownership and legitimacy form the bottom up and empowering the social harmony at the national and sub-national levels.

Research outputs:

• Local Elections in Post-Conflict Syria: Opportunities and Challenges for Local Representation, LSE Conflict Research Programme, February 2019.

The paper delineates the different factors and structures that played vital roles in the sectarianisation of the conflict in Syria, postulating sectarianisation as a process that should be examined within its own historical, socio-economic, and political particularities in order to fully grasp its complexity and pervasiveness. This is contrary to the common depiction of sectarianism as a form of cultural exceptionalism, often occultly associated with backwardness, mysticism or irrationality, and religiosity.

The paper provides a nuanced and multi-dimensional perspective of sectarianisation and demonstrates how the rhetoric and practices of the Assad regime, GCC states, Turkey and Iran contributed to the articulation and reification of ethno-sectarian rationalities and polarisations, albeit for their own political benefits. 

The paper relies on a constructivist approach to investigate the emergence and reinforcement of exclusive singular identities within the context of Syria’s uprisings and civil war, albeit with a concentration on the use of linguistic and rhetorical devices to consolidate such identities. The research therefore analyses social media content to delineate the different ideological clusters that highlight identity politics in Syria as well as points of intersection and contention between those clusters.

The paper aims to delineate the use of rhetorical and linguistic devices by different individuals and institutions to reflect their understanding of ‘self’ and that of the ‘other’, with an emphasis on the vocabulary and semantics that reify those kinds of singular identities and juxtapose them against an ‘other’. While the paper acknowledges that the root causes of the conflict are structural in nature, it nevertheless argues that institutional political messages have been consequential in triggering or reifying divisive identities and inflammatory discussions. Both the Syrian government and Islamist groups have held relatively clear objectives, with clear ideologies and explicit communication models, in their use and dissemination of identitarian narratives. 

This research focuses on the relation between ethno-sectarian identities, or singular sub-state identities more generally, and urban-spatial topographies in Syria’s Homs, a city that has witnessed sharp social animosities both before and after 2011.

The research seeks to develop a better understanding of the relation between group identities on the one hand and urban design, market dynamics and inter-communal contact (or lack of) with the hope that this would appropriately inform reconstruction efforts in the future. 

The research team is developing two papers on the impact of the ongoing conflict on identity politics and social dynamics in the southern governorates of Syria; the provinces of Dera’a and al-Sweidah.

These papers follow the evolution of the post-uprising sub-national governance structures, the space of civil society and effect of violence on the traditional social structures in these areas. These papers are aiming to shed a light on the emerging conflict-driven social contract and the newly formed local leaders and their relationship with each other and with the different parties of the conflict.  

The research’s main hypotheses is that there is an overwhelming concentration on retributive justice within Syria’s accountability strand. The majority of Syrian human rights organisations and other civil society groups who document atrocities and violations have generally focused on the perpetrator as the point-of-entry for their documentation activities, rather than victims themselves. If a comprehensive transitional justice process were to pave way in Syria, there would be a dire gap in victim-centred documentations which poses significant limitations on mechanisms of restitution, reparation, and recognition.

The research therefore aims to both understand the gaps present in documentation activities as well as the rationale and reasons behind this gap or, in other words, why human rights organisations in Syria have focused more on retributive rather than restorative justice.