1. Introduction
The Syrian conflict has evolved over the past few years in favour of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The regime is making military gains while various opposition groups, both armed and political, are weakening. At the same time, a wide variety of regime-aligned non-state actors, including paramilitary groups and profiteers, have gained in influence. The situation has given rise to a number of interpretations, none of which entirely captures the complexity of the dynamics on the ground and the relationships between multiple domestic and external actors.
At one end of the spectrum, some Syria analysts identify fragmentation of the country as the main feature of the conflict. Scholars such as Raymond Hinnebusch have characterized Syria today as a failed state – citing the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and external interventions as both causes and consequences of a power vacuum that exists despite Assad remaining president.1 Although these readings of the conflict cite the regime’s behaviour as the cause of the Syrian revolt, they largely avoid attributing aspects of state failure specifically to the regime. Where analysts have accorded some responsibility to the Assad regime, they have characterized Syria as ‘a broken, fragmented, divided state’.2 This judgment is derived from observing how different parts of Syria have come to be ruled by competing entities, including the regime itself, ISIS, Kurdish forces and anti-regime armed groups.3 In these readings, the regime is only one component of state weakness, not its main driver.
At the other end of the spectrum, Assad’s military wins have led to a perception in some quarters that the Syrian regime is ‘winning’ the war.4 Some have seen in the resilience of Assad proof that the state model set by his late father, Hafez al-Assad, is indeed ‘coup-proof’.5 This perception indirectly conflates the regime with the state. It implies that the way in which the state exercises power in Syria, including in regime-held areas, has largely remained as it was before the conflict started in 2011.6 This ignores important aspects of the conflict’s dynamics. If Assad is seemingly winning the war militarily, it is only because of the assistance to the regime that Russia and Iran have provided. Meanwhile, the key pillars of state control have been significantly weakened.
In the context of these contrasting accounts of state power, this paper seeks to address a gap in the analysis of the situation in Syria: it explores how the conflict has affected the functions, capacity and agency of the institutions through which the state controls Syria; and how the hostilities have transformed the nature of the state’s exercise of power. Whereas previously the country operated as what can be termed a ‘shadow state’ – in which the institutions nominally associated with governance were subordinate to the security apparatus, and to a related network of power brokers, interest groups and cronies – it is now better described as a ‘transactional state’. This characterization is based on the analysis that Syria as a state was captured by the regime before 2011, but that its situation now goes beyond state capture.
It should be noted from the outset that the regime’s ascendancy in the war does not mean that the state will be able to sustain peace and stability once major hostilities cease (assuming that the current regime remains in power). Even if the main institutions of state control have survived in form during the conflict, their function, capacity and agency have changed. In some cases, their structure has adapted to the circumstances of conflict. These institutions have also been joined – and sometimes undermined – by new actors that have entered the economic and security scene as conflict profiteers.
Comparison with the historical experience underlines the point. Since the 1970s, when Hafez al-Assad came to power, the levers nominally associated with state power have been subordinated to a security apparatus that – at least, until recently – has provided the main mechanism of real control. By comparison, the judiciary, army, police and other public institutions had relatively limited authority. However, since 2011, the centrality of the shadow state in Syrian politics has increasingly been challenged. The rise of opportunistic actors with a transactional relationship with the authorities has rendered the security apparatus less dominant, reducing the state’s direct control in Syria. At the same time, Russia’s growing hold over the country and Iran’s efforts at influence – both through the Syrian state and outside it – have further eroded Syrian sovereignty.
This paper explores the drivers and dynamics of this shift to a ‘transactional state’. It argues that the conflict has weakened the Syrian unitary state. It examines how the functions, capacity and agency of different elements of the state have been disrupted by conflict, with a particular focus on changes affecting the power and influence of the security apparatus. An understanding of these dynamics, and how they have been shaped by the conflict, is important for any post-conflict plans for reconstruction and stabilization.
With the Assad regime seemingly closing in on military ‘victory’, Western policymakers are beginning to seek ways to achieve post-conflict stabilization in Syria. Prospects for a durable settlement are complicated by several factors. The literature shows that negotiated peace settlements are more successful at resolving civil wars where politics and economics are the driving factors. Where conflict has been driven primarily by identity-based factors, negotiated settlements have been less effective. Moreover, military victories in identity-based civil wars are often followed by genocide.7 The more pertinent stabilization dilemma presented by the Syrian conflict is that it does not fall neatly into either category. Not only is it more than a civil war – and thus arguably too wide in scope to fit common analytical narratives – but it is also about both politics and identity. An additional complication is that the military victory of the regime is unlikely to be absolute. All this presents challenges in terms of how the West might approach the conflict under the current circumstances. At the same time, the conflict’s distinctive features may present opportunities for policy solutions, which this paper explores.
Considerable policy attention today is devoted to the role of ‘elite bargaining’ – how different elite actors compete for and negotiate influence – in conflict settlement and stabilization. This is evident, for instance, in a recent report published by the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s Stabilisation Unit. The report argues that it is important to lay out the patterns of development of elites, the regional influences on those patterns, and the way in which conflict transforms their structure and processes of formation. In the case of Syria, all these factors have had a significant impact on the state, and demand careful consideration by Western policymakers interested in achieving stabilization in the country.8 Yet a pragmatic accommodation of transactional actors carries risks of its own: Western policymakers must guard against empowering war profiteers, be these external actors, regime-affiliated actors or non-state actors.
This paper is based on fieldwork in Syria and interviews with a wide range of actors – including regime-affiliated figures, armed groups and civilians – between the start of the Syrian conflict and September 2018. The fieldwork and interviews have been supplemented by secondary sources. For the sake of security, all interviews have been anonymized.
1 Hinnebusch, R. (2016), ‘State De-Construction in Iraq and Syria’, PVS Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Vol. 57, No. 4 , pp. 560–85.
2 Shaikh, S. (2015), ‘Syria is a Fragmented, Broken, Divided Country’, Salman Shaikh interview with Katarina Montgomery, Syria Deeply, 6 January 2015, https://www.newsdeeply.com/syria/articles/2015/01/06/salman-shaikh-syria-is-a-broken-fragmented-divided-state (accessed 27 Aug. 2018).
3 Cahl, C. H., Goldenberg, I. and Heras, N. (2017), ‘A Strategy for Ending the Syrian Civil War’, Center for a New American Security, 7 June 2017, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/a-strategy-for-ending-the-syrian-civil-war (accessed 27 Aug. 2018).
4 For example, see Karlin, M. (2018), ‘Order From Chaos: After 7 Years of War, Assad Has Won in Syria. What’s Next for Washington?’, Brookings Institution, 13 February 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/02/13/after-7-years-of-war-assad-has-won-in-syria-whats-next-for-washington/ (accessed 27 Aug. 2018).
5 Quinlivan, J. T. (1999), ‘Coup-Proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East’, International Security, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 131–65.
6 Heydemann, S. (2018), Beyond Fragility: Syria and the Challenge of Reconstruction in Fierce States, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, June 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/FP_20180626_beyond_fragility.pdf (accessed 29 Jul. 2018).
7 Licklider, R. (1995), ‘The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993’, The American Political Science Review, 89(3), pp. 681–90.
8 Stabilisation Unit (2018), ‘Elite Bargains and Political Deals’, UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, June 2018, http://www.sclr.stabilisationunit.gov.uk/publications/elite-bargains-and-political-deals (accessed 31 Jul. 2018).