Acknowledgments

There is no easy way to tell the story of the Syrian crisis. There is no linear story to be captured or a singular experience that all Syrians can relate to. For Syrians, the experiences of the last six years have been multiple and unique and betray the simple ways in which we regularly choose to speak of what has happened since 2011 when we focus on things like regime and rebel territorial gains, or the question of what went wrong with the revolution. In the course of my research in and on Syria since the early 2000s, I was fortunate to have met and befriended so many people, all of whom I regularly and often think of even if we are not always in touch. I retain the most wonderful memories of my time in Syria and my friendships, especially with Obaida al-Habbal, to whom this book was dedicated, and Zaher al-Sagheer, who is as good a friend as anyone can ask for.

It is these friendships and others that I often think about when my thoughts turn to Syria’s slow descent into this catastrophe. I am neither an impartial nor a dispassionate observer of the conflict but I am also quite removed from the day-to-day experiences and hardships of Syrians. I have spoken at length with others who write and research about Syria; we speak of how the feelings of being both detached and attached often compound the sadness and helplessness one feels in telling stories about the conflict. Without the support of so many, I would not have had the personal or intellectual strength to tell the story that you will read in the coming pages.

My utmost gratitude is reserved for Louise Knight and Nekane Tanaka Galdos at Polity for their patience and commitment to this project and for providing me the opportunity to tell this story. Ann Klefstad was as patient and precise a copy editor as I could have asked for, and her regular words of encouragement as I stumbled to the finish line were always received warmly. My former research assistant, Josephine Lippincott, contributed significant time to the first edition of the book and her imprint is also felt on the second. Since the publication of the first edition, I have been invited to many campuses, radio shows, and classrooms to talk about Syria. These were all wonderful opportunities to meet with people, especially young people, who were interested in deepening their understanding of the conflict. These engagements were also spaces for me to think through some of the ideas that appear in the second edition. I am grateful to all of those who thought I had something to say about Syria and who were willing to listen.

As I completed this edition of the book, I also embarked on a professional transition and a new position at Villanova University’s Global Interdisciplinary Studies program. During the completion of this book, I was fortunate enough to have spent time as a Visiting Scholar at Villanova’s Center for Arab and Islamic Studies. When I initially approached Dr. Hibba Abugideiri and Dr. Catherine Warrick about affiliation with the Center, all I hoped for was a broom closet and a Wi-Fi password. They have given me so much more and have provided a welcoming space for me to read, write, and think as I completed the book. Many others at Villanova, including Dr. Fr. Kail Ellis, Nadia Barsoum, and Jerusha Conner, have made me feel very much at home and a member of their community and have helped ease my transition and make it very exciting for me. My colleagues at Arcadia University where I taught for many years, Kira Baker-Doyle, Kerr Messner, Gregg Moore, Warren Haffar, Jennifer Riggan, and Peter Siskind, are some of the most wonderful people I have ever been around and I am very appreciative for the many ways in which they show care for me, make me laugh, and are always willing to listen to my ideas and occasional complaints.

I am also deeply grateful and indebted to my colleagues in the Beirut Security Studies Collective: Omar Dahi, Nicole Sunday Grove, Waleed Hazbun, Sami Hermez, Coralie Hindawi, Jamil Mouawad, and Seteney Shami, who are some of the most brilliant and interesting people I have had the pleasure of working with. Although we spend more time talking about when to launch our website than we do talking about Syria, the comradery and intellectual engagement that our work together provides energizes and motivates me. For this, I am forever indebted to the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) for providing the support and vision for the Collective and for making our exciting work possible.

I am very fortunate to have friends like Miguel de Larrinaga, Marc Doucet, Benjamin J. Muller, Can Mutlu, and Mark Salter, who sustain me in numerous ways. My admiration for them as scholars and fathers is beyond words. I count myself as very lucky to have friendships that can vacillate between discussions of hockey, academic debates, our family lives, and the latest giggles from the far corners of the Internet. While we are very rarely in the same place, I am grateful for when we are together and the multiple electronic exchanges that fill in the times between. Bob Vitalis never ceases to make me laugh with his jokes or amaze me with his brilliance and insight. As long as we are not stuck in a car together, I always look forward to our conversations. Bassam Haddad, whose sharpness is only matched by his tenacity, has been a constant source of professional support for which I am deeply grateful. Finally, I would be remiss if I ignored Michael Collins, Jim (Doc) Davis, and the many others from hockey whose friendships outside the dressing room are so meaningful and important to me.

My final thanks are reserved for my family. Fred and Rabia Rosen are very supportive in-laws and while I know they are never bothered to be with their grandchildren, it means a great deal that they are always ready to help when needed. My parents, Rabab and Nassif, have always provided me with unconditional love and support in all of my endeavors, and for this I am eternally grateful. The respect and admiration that I have for them is immense and it is on the back of their love and hard work that I am able to live the life that I live. I blame them for my interest in politics and in Syria in particular, as we never went a day in our house—and we still do not—without talking about either. My children, Kalila, Nadim, and Maysa, have brought me immeasurable joy and given so much meaning to my life. Our morning cuddle routines, walks in the woods with our slingshots, regular games of Subway Surfer, and general silliness make the day-to-day so pleasurable. Watching them engage in various activities, develop friendships, and learn how to be themselves in this world is one of the greatest joys of my life. And I am eternally grateful that I get to share all of this with my spouse, Sonia Rosen. From the moment we met, Sonia changed my sense of possibility in this world. I am reminded of this each and every day when I reflect on the wonderful life that we share together and the love that envelops our home.

Introduction

When negotiations between the Syrian regime and some opposition groups began in Geneva in 2016, Mohammed Alloush, a commander of the armed Islamist group Jaysh al-Islam, was designated as lead negotiator for the opposition. Many Syrians and observers of the conflict, especially those who were captivated by the possibilities that the uprising created, would have been excused if they had to rub their eyes to make sure that they were witnessing reality. Alloush, who was told by regime negotiators that they would not talk to him “until he shaved his beard” (Wintour, 2016), was perhaps not the expected, let alone ideal, choice of Syrians who took to the streets en masse in 2011 demanding political change. That a leader of an Islamist armed group would have been the lead negotiator for the Syrian opposition is not an accident, of course; it is the outcome of years of struggle, betrayal, intervention, and profound violence, which shaped the trajectory of the Syrian conflict and its main protagonists. How did the Syrian revolution evolve this way? Why was Alloush chosen to lead peace negotiations? What happened to the revolution? What explains regime survival? The book that follows tries to capture this story and answer these questions about one of the most brutal conflicts in recent memory.

The daily lives of Syrians have changed dramatically since March 2011 when protests against the fifty-year rule of the Ba’ath Party began in the southern city of Dar’a. What began as a movement of sustained protest demanding regime change and political reforms has morphed into one of the most brutal and horrific conflicts in the post–World War II era. The conflict had evolved toward a political and military stalemate as all major domestic and regional subjugating actors aimed toward a decisive military solution—until a decisive military solution arrived in the form of Russian intervention that has moved the conflict from stalemate to what I call later in the book an “authoritarian peace.” In the context of this trajectory, the humanitarian crisis wrought by the conflict is worsening: more than half of the total population killed, maimed, or displaced within only six years. The human tragedy of the Syrian conflict has no current end in sight despite proclamations from regime loyalists and oppositionists that the conflict is nearing its military end. The damage has been wrought, and as we know from most conflicts what appears to be the end may simply be the beginning of something else equally catastrophic and violent. From the Syrian regime itself, which bears ultimate culpability and responsibility for the descent into maddening violence; to the various rebel groups; to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Iran, the inability to end the conflict has ushered in decades of future struggle for Syrians.

Telling the story of the Syrian conflict is a complicated endeavor, especially in a context in which popular understandings of Syria reduce the conflict to simple binaries (Sunni/Shi’a or regime/rebel) that misrepresent both the complexity of Syrian society and the conflict itself. In the pages that follow I attempt to confront these simplistic dichotomies and to introduce instead a broader picture of the Syrian conflict, one that moves back and forth between the meta-issues (such as regional rivalries, international involvement, and ideological and sectarian calculations) and the micro-issues (such as intra-rebel cooperation and conflict, the humanitarian crisis, and the administrative fragmentation of the country) that are shaping and driving the military and political dynamics of the conflict. A major theme throughout the book is how a military and political stalemate emerged and how the Russian intervention broke this, and what it may mean for the future of Syria. This is not to suggest in any way that the post-Russian intervention period is bringing the conflict to an end. I suggest instead that this is the latest stage in an evolving conflict that has many dynamics and subjugating actors. In introducing the dynamics driving the conflict I also answer questions about who the main actors are, including the Islamic State of Iraq and as-Sham (ISIS), whose rise and fall reflects broader trends in the complicated dynamics of the conflict, as well as the impossibilities of reaching a solution in the short term. One of my central goals is not only to trace the rise of groups like ISIS but to give insight into the constantly shifting nature of alliances among rebel groups, the issues driving the political elements of the conflict, and the main actors (both local and international) who are playing key roles in the conflict. The goals for this book are to help the reader understand the broader dynamics driving the conflict, why it has persisted, who the main actors are, and why it has evolved in the way that it has.

In the popular understanding of the Syrian conflict, it has morphed from a revolution into a civil war (see Hughes, 2014), but the conflict is not as linear as this suggests. There remains an active, robust, and committed movement of Syrians trying to rebuild their country, and to lead it free of the regime and the armed groups that now control it. They have become peripheral and rendered invisible by the profound violence inflicted on civilians and by the presence of so many armed groups, but they exist. Thus the Syrian conflict is more than an uprising that morphed into a civil war; it is a conflict with multiple dimensions that include, among other things, a revolutionary project to restructure society; an international effort to destroy Syria; war profiteers and criminals who fuel conflict; and regime loyalists, from within and outside Syria, intent on countering what they perceive as a conspiracy to overthrow the Assad regime.

Thus the Syrian conflict does not have a definitive beginning or a linear trajectory. What is at stake, analytically speaking, is the understanding of the parallel processes of revolution and civil war, as well as the antecedent processes of intervention and criminality, and their short- and long-term effects on Syrian state and society. This requires attentiveness to the nuances and complexities of the Syrian conflict that most popular understandings lack (Rawan and Imran, 2013). From my perspective, such attentiveness requires an examination of the interplay of many factors: historical analysis, political economy, the role of international actors, the structure of networks of violence, and so on. With this in mind, the story I tell in the pages below begins in the Ottoman era with the formation of a landed elite that controlled the political and economic levers of society right through to the Mandate period. In the post-Mandate period of independence, mobilization of the socially disaffected classes overthrew the pre-existing order. Out of the remnants emerged the Ba’ath Party, which has ruled Syria since 1963. The subsequent decades witnessed the consolidation of Ba’athist control of Syria and state institutions and the emergence of an authoritarian regime that ruled Syria through a combination of repression and clientelism. The lack of any sort of political freedoms, and the massive socioeconomic changes wrought in the 2000s by a shift away from socialist-era policies toward market-driven ones, fueled societal grievances that eventually propelled the protests that began in March 2011. The Syrian state and society have undergone three seismic shifts in the last century: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Mandate period, and the era of Ba’athist authoritarianism.

Intersecting with this historical evolution are the social realities consequent on changes in the nature and structure of the Syrian state. The expansion of the state under the Mandate authorities fundamentally changed the relationship between state and citizen and brought the political authorities into the everyday lives of Syrians. Under the Ba’ath, the state was reoriented toward the dual goals of regime preservation and social mobilization through state institutions that would link different segments of Syrian society, especially those on the peripheries of Mandate politics, to the state and regime. The incorporation of new social actors transformed the material and political basis of Syria’s social stratification and brought to political power a regime that was dominated by leaders from Syria’s minority communities and rural areas. Ba’athist rule involved the distribution of social welfare in exchange for political quietism in Syria’s incorporated social forces. By the 1990s this model had exhausted itself, and the regime slowly turned toward the market. By the time the uprising began in 2011, Syria had undergone a decade of dramatic economic transformation that had ruptured the economic links between state and society established from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Syria played a major regional role during this period as well, having fought two wars with Israel (in 1967 and 1973) and then intervening in Lebanon’s civil war later in the 1970s. The Syrian presence in Lebanon lasted until 2005, when a series of protests led to the withdrawal of the Syrian troops and security personnel who had exercised control over the Lebanese political system after the end of the country’s civil war in 1991. The Middle East Peace Process in the early 1990s never realized a return of the occupied Golan Heights from Israel and a cold peace prevailed between the two countries up until today. Syria’s regional alliances shifted considerably in the decades prior to the uprising, with the regime supporting various Palestinian factions against one another, Kurdish separatist groups in Turkey, and the Islamic Republic of Iran in its eight-year war with neighboring Iraq.

The legacies of Syria’s historical evolution as a state, the transformation of its social stratification and political economy, and the changing geopolitical situation in the Middle East have all contributed to shaping the conflict today. The conflict itself has injected its own complexities into the Syrian arena with the arrival of armed groups such as ISIS and the emergence of Syrian Kurdish parties as major actors in the war. The role of regional actors in fomenting violence and supporting regime and rebel forces has internationalized the conflict in ways that de-center local actors from decision-making and power on the ground. Violence, fragmentation, and displacement are radically reshaping Syrian society.

Who are the Syrians?

Syria is an extremely heterogeneous society, with Sunnis, Alawi, Ismailis, Druze, Shi’a, as well as Greek Orthodox, Maronite, and other Christian sects. Population breakdowns by religion are not entirely accurate, but close to 10 percent of the population was Christian and the remaining 90 percent Muslim, the majority of which are Sunni Muslims. In addition to religion or sect, class, ethnicity, and geography are also determinants of Syrian political and social identity. Syria is dominated by Arabs with a sizable Kurdish minority, which is no more than 8 percent of the total population. Prior to the uprising, Syria’s population was around 22 million, with more than half of the population formerly concentrated in urban centers.

Syria shares borders with Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. The Golan Heights has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war but is still home to many Syrian Druze who live under Israeli occupation. In the post-Mandate period, Syria’s economy has been dependent on agriculture and oil production. Agricultural production was central to the nation’s social stratification in the Ba’ath period and oil revenues provided the regime with substantial rents to establish a strong central state and public sector. During the 1990s, there was a slow shift away from dependence on oil revenues and an attempt to diversify the economy. These reforms were accelerated in the 2000s when Syrian planners enacted policies to shift economic activity toward services. The shift in economic policy away from agriculture paralleled severe environmental degradation in the agricultural regions, including drought, which decreased agriculture’s productivity and led to the transformation of the social basis around which agricultural activity occurred.

The social shifts produced during this period have been violently disrupted by the conflict, which has produced a humanitarian crisis that will forever shape Syrian society, and has problematized the question “who are the Syrians?” Today, Syrians and their families have been split, torn apart by war, violence, insecurity, and displacement, in many cases spread around the region and the world, distanced from loved ones and any sense of stability and hope. It is these changes in the individual, familial, and communal life of Syrians that will continue to shape the question of who the Syrians are in the decades to come.

A war of narratives

As war raged on the Syrian battlefield, another war, one of narratives, raged on the Internet and in print. While virtually inconsequential to alleviating the trauma of conflict on Syrians, these narrative wars became very ugly and unproductive, with vitriol tossed back and forth across political lines. These lines, for anyone who followed the narrative wars, were quite clearly demarcated: they separated those who were perceived to be either regime or opposition loyalists. The space for critical thinking, for the grey zone so to speak, shrank, and analysts of Syria were forced into these camps, in which friends and adversaries treated their politics and their assumptions alike as knowable. A common retort about Syrian analysts was whether they were pro-regime, pro-armed groups, pro-intervention, pro-barrel bombs, and, in the worst-case scenarios, pro-ISIS, with the assumption being that analysts wished the horrors brought by ISIS on the Syrian population.

An excellent example of the nastiness of these narrative wars was the reaction to Bassam Haddad’s widely circulated article in The Nation, “The Debate Over Syria Has Reached a Dead End” (Haddad, 2016). The main claim in the article was that pro-regime and pro-opposition supporters had reached maximalist positions in their politics, positions in which any space for compromise and understanding was virtually nil. What amounted to a call for productive dialogue was largely, and wrongly, treated as a blueprint for regime apologists. Pro-opposition supporters decried the perception of a “two sides” argument as tantamount to collaboration with a brutal Assad regime. In many ways the debate over Haddad’s article proved the point of his argument: debate, discussion, and compromise were no longer possible in a context of maximalist political positions.

Unfortunately, the kind of unproductive debates Haddad referred to in his article remain prominent in debates about Syria, even as former supporters of the opposition turn their sights to what horrors and possibilities the reconstruction period may bring, and regime loyalists celebrate the coming of “peace,” no matter how authoritarian and violent it will be. It would thus be misleading and unproductive to begin a book about Syria without acknowledging the dynamics of the narrative wars, no matter how inconsequential I believe them to be to the average Syrian’s life. With that said, I do not intend to stake out some sort of analytical high ground or, even worse, to defend some sort of objectivity toward the conflict. Instead, I want to stress the compatibility of an analysis about Syria that recognizes the horrors of the regime and its allies, as well as of the armed groups that have infiltrated the country. This is no plea for moral equivalency: the regime and its allies bear sole responsibility for the Syrian catastrophe. Rather, this is to say that over the course of the conflict, supporters of the uprising have often tied their politics and the political possibilities of the uprising to unsavory and destructive actors, including reactionary, exclusionary Islamists who served to undermine the revolution and its possibilities as much as anything else that happened after March 2011.

I also hope that such positions will not be misread as optimism for the return of the Syrian revolution or the revival of revolutionary actors as the vanguards of a progressive Syria. I do not believe that the possibilities for a progressive Syria, a progressive postconflict Syria that was envisioned by activists in the early stages of the uprising, is possible today under the current circumstances. Nor do I believe that a progressive politics can emerge out of the coming authoritarian peace. None of these positions are incompatible to me: one can simultaneously oppose the regime and the armed groups its brutality spawned while mourning the vision for Syria that emerged after 2011. The analysis that follows is driven by these commitments.

Unraveling the conflict

The complexity and fluidity of the Syrian conflict does not lend itself to any quick-fix theoretical models. Larger questions about why it has evolved in this particular way, why a stalemate took root, and how the Russian intervention in 2015 decisively shifted the conflict away from stalemate, are not easily answered. Much of the academic literature on wars and conflicts focuses on variables and measurements that do not remotely fit the realities of Syria’s conflict. More nuanced studies have drawn on different approaches to the study of the Syrian conflict (el-Hokayem, 2013; Lesch, 2013a, b; Sahner, 2014). The background of the protests and the early mobilization period encouraged many to draw on Social Movement Theory (SMT) (Durac, 2015) to help understand the organization and strategies of the early protest movement that morphed into the Local Coordination Committees (LCC). This research, which I will deal with substantially below, has been important in helping us understand the main players fueling the protests, what their socioeconomic backgrounds were, how they organized and mobilized protesters, and what their key roles were in the early stages of the uprising.

Other studies of the conflict attempted to explain the causes and background of the uprising by focusing on the long trajectory and exhaustion of Ba’athist politics in Syria (Wieland, 2012). Further research has been conducted into the causes of the uprising, with some arguing that environmental factors such as climate change and drought were major drivers of the protests, or that the mismanagement of resources led to political unrest (De Châtel, 2014). Others point to Syria’s socioeconomic situation on the eve of the uprising, especially the effects of unemployment and declining standards of living, as causes of the protests (Dahi and Munif, 2012) while others argue that the contagion effect of initially successful Arab uprisings in such places as Tunisia and Egypt inspired Syrians to protest (Kahf, 2014; Lynch et al., 2013).

While the study of the causes of the uprising is important, the uprising cannot be reduced to one or two variables. Instead, it is the outcome of the interplay of all of these factors. Some research has focused on explaining the trajectory of the uprising through changes in the regime’s behavior and its subsequent mutations during the conflict (Heydemann, 2013a, b; Seeberg, 2014). The regional geopolitical situation can explain some dynamics of the Syrian conflict, and further studies have focused on the interplay between domestic and regional politics by privileging the penetrative role of regional actors in Syria (Salloukh, 2013; el-Hokayem, 2013). Finally, others, such as Khashanah (2014), have argued that the confluence of ideological and geopolitical interests of outside entities induced the Syrian crisis in an attempt to realign the country’s foreign relations. More explanations for the conflict, especially from Arabic sources, are taken up in the second chapter of the book.

All of these explanations have been substantial and useful interventions into the study of the Syrian conflict and all serve to inform much of the analysis that follows below. The multilayered complexity of the conflict necessarily produces intellectual and analytical blind spots and an exhaustive study of this complexity would be impossible given the rapidly changing dynamics of the conflict. In order to address these larger questions about the Syrian crisis, I have drawn on some of the dominant approaches to the study of the conflict but sought to look beyond them. Rather than focusing exclusively or predominantly on the transformations of the regime or on international roles in the conflict, I have drawn significantly on the idea of wartime political orders to explain the key patterns of the conflict, including cooperation and conflict between different actors, governance, politics, military activity, regional intervention, war economies (Staniland, 2012), and so on. In drawing on this notion of a wartime order, I am trying to explicate some of the more nuanced questions that help parse the conflict: Why do rebels sometimes cooperate and sometimes engage in conflict? What do the political and administrative structures of non-regime areas look like? Who is exercising violence and to what end? How did the Russian intervention break the stalemate?

The study of wartime political orders typically relies on analysis of two variables: territorial control and regime–rebel relations (Staniland, 2012). Most literature on wars tends to ignore how the diverse and contradictory interactions between regimes and rebels serve to construct political authority and control. Regime and rebel actors are not locked in a zero-sum game to control the monopoly of violence; rather, they engage in both cooperative and conflict relationships that shape patterns of violence against civilians, governance, war economies, and, in important ways, postconflict politics. In this study of the Syrian conflict I highlight the diversity of interactions between regime and rebel groups, and also among rebel groups themselves. I look at how these groups control territory, administer that territory, and exercise political power and authority therein. I locate in these dynamics both the causes of a stalemate and the reasons behind the successful Russian intervention to break that stalemate.

From the outset, then, it is important to clarify the meaning of “regime,” “rebel,” and “opposition,” which are often conflated. In the pages that follow, the homogeneity of these categories will be broken down in favor of more pluralistic and heterogeneous explanations of what we call “the regime,” “rebels,” or “the opposition.” In Syria today, there are multiple actors who constitute the parts of what we mean when we refer to these categories. The analysis below highlights the fragmentation of these categories and what that fragmentation means for the conflict.

The Syrian conflict is not simply about military wins and losses or the contraction of regime territorial control. The conflict has produced a political order structured by relations among the different groups that produces patterns of violence, and governance that produced a stalemate. The relations produced by the conflict are themselves shaped by a number of factors, including the role of outside actors, sectarianism, territorial fragmentation, and the humanitarian crisis. In the pages that follow the story of the Syrian conflict is told through these lenses.

Structure of the book

Chapter One begins with a historical overview of Syria’s post-Mandate state up until the period of the Ba’athist coup in 1963. The chapter looks at the rise and consolidation of Ba’athist power from 1963 until the outbreak of the uprising in March 2011. In this period, the social and material basis of Ba’athist power shifted dramatically, especially in the period of Bashar al-Assad’s rule (from 2000 onwards), during which the regime engaged in marketization, which accelerated the Ba’athist shift away from its traditional social support base. The role of the regime’s pillars of power—the Ba’ath Party, the security apparatus, and the state—are discussed throughout. Specific attention is paid to the wide range of social forces in Syria—the peasants, urban bourgeois, workers, and so on—and their differential positioning vis-à-vis the longtime Ba’athist regime. This will provide a substantive background on which to understand the context of the uprising and the social forces driving the movement to topple the regime.

Chapter Two covers the first months of the uprising until the period in which militarization began to take root and an armed opposition emerged. Here we examine the background of the protesters and of the uprising and answer questions about how the protesters organized and mobilized in the context of sustained regime repression. The central role of the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs) is highlighted, as is how the conflict gave rise to civil activity and organization more generally. The regime’s response to the protests was to engage in a dual policy of repression and reform. This reform included substantial constitutional changes but had no immediate effect on the ground.

Continued repression forced the uprising to emerge as a nonhierarchical, decentralized movement loosely linking activists together throughout the country. In addition to the LCCs, a political opposition made up mostly of Syrian exiles formed outside of the country and attempted to generate international support for the overthrow of the regime. As armed groups emerged inside the country within the first year, the movement against the regime suffered from “multiple leaderships” and the lack of a centralized structure that could serve as a serious and legitimate alternative to the regime. The failure of the protests of the first months of the uprising to initiate regime change would propel the conflict toward increasing militarization.

The main violent actors are introduced in Chapter Three. In Syria, violence is highly fragmented and decentralized, and there are two different armed actors: fighting units and brigades. The former are usually small armed groups with limited mobility who usually operate in smaller areas of towns or cities, while brigades have hundreds of members and are active across Syrian governorates. These units and brigades are connected to larger networks of violence that are determined by the interplay of many factors: resource access, control of checkpoints and supply routes, ideology, and so on. These networks of violence are very fluid and there remains mistrust between many of the armed factions. Chapter Three explores the networked structure of violence and how this manifests within the Jabhat an-Nusra, ISIS, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), and regime networks.

How these networks of violence produced both territorial fragmentation and a military and political stalemate is taken up in Chapter Four. Here, I explore two parallel and reinforcing developments: first, the increased intervention of regional states into the conflict, and, second, the territorial fragmentation of the country and the emergence of alternative and competing models of governance that accelerated Syria’s political and social fragmentation. Thus, the chapter aims to bring together analysis of the domestic and regional levels of the Syrian conflict to answer the question of how a stalemate emerged.

The subsequent chapter (Chapter Five) answers how the Russian intervention broke the stalemate and how the intervention made a political process toward peace possible in Syria. The chapter thus reviews the attempts to produce a peace agreement in Syria, why they failed in the context of a military stalemate, and how the Russian intervention produced the momentum toward the design of an “authoritarian peace.” In outlining the failures of previous peace plans and the ways in which the Russian intervention broke the stalemate, the chapter identifies and discusses three major long-term consequences of the Russian intervention: the rise of the PYD and Syrian Kurdish politics as major players in Syria; the rise of Hizbollah; and the regime survival. The final chapter, Chapter Six, is concerned with the humanitarian crisis, specifically the displacement of millions of Syrians and the effect this is having on the health care and education access of Syrians. This discussion opens issues and challenges associated with refugee protection in neighboring countries. Chapter Six concludes with a discussion of the failings of the international community to adequately address the Syrian humanitarian crisis. The book concludes with some reflections on the coming authoritarian peace.

What’s new in this edition

The first edition of this book was primarily concerned with the question of how a military and political stalemate emerged in the Syrian conflict. The second edition remains concerned with this but also with the question of how the stalemate was broken by the Russian intervention and what its consequences may be as an “authoritarian peace” emerges in Syria. The second edition of the book may thus read as a more periodized discussion of Syria, as divided between before and after periods of the intervention. This is intentional insofar as it allows me to identify and answer key questions about the conflict and to identify key moments that shifted the conflict toward its current state. The issues of regime–rebel relations, for example, are significantly different before and after the intervention. Similarly, the possibilities of revolutionary upheaval and overthrow of the regime were much stronger in 2011 than they were in 2017. All this is to say that the second edition attempts to capture the many changes that have happened in Syria since 2011 by structuring them around the question of how a stalemate emerged and was broken. Importantly, armed groups have evolved considerably throughout the conflict. Jabhat an-Nusra, for example, has now morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and ISIS has virtually disappeared from the battlefield. I refer to the groups by their contemporaneous titles and try to identify their antecedents when possible.

Other changes have been made throughout the book that will be of benefit to the second-time reader. In addition to a total restructuring of the later chapters around the before and after of the stalemate, the book provides more analysis of the evolution of Syrian Kurdish politics during the conflict, especially as it relates to the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS), or Rojava, and the prominence of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in a post-intervention Syria. More Arabic sources have been included, especially in Chapters Two and Three, which incorporate material on the early stages of the conflict and different perspectives on social forces in the early stages of the uprising. The changing dynamics of regional intervention and involvement, especially shifting positions from states such as Turkey, are taken into account throughout. The final chapter contains updated material about the humanitarian crisis.

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Hot Spots in Global Politics

Copyright page

Dedication