This publication is from the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity
Author: Fatemeh Sadeghi
Description
On December 8, 2024, the Assad government which had ruled Syria since 1971, collapsed unexpectedly during a major offensive campaign. This campaign was led by Hayʾat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a jihadist organization led by Mohammad al-Jolani (Ahmad alSharaa), who declared himself president and established a governing authority.
This paper examines the post-Assad era in Syria, where contradictory inclinations of authoritarian excluding policies conflict with pathways toward a more prosperous and inclusive future for a country torn by decades of violence and authoritarianism. With Assad’s fall, Syria entered another historical juncture. This phase marks an in-between phase that offers the possibility of a new society and new political relations. This is also a founding moment in which the institutional and legal architecture of a future order is conceived, negotiated, and codified. This episode is formative as it reshapes political relationships, establishes future configurations of power, and may even influence trajectories beyond national borders (Albert et al., 2019). It holds the potential for radical transformation as much as it is equally susceptible to reproducing authoritarian and patriarchal restoration in new forms.
Although this paper is about Syria, it addresses a broader concern about the future of political life in the Middle East, where in many cases the old is dying while the new is yet to be born. The concern is the society’s capacity to imagine and create prosperous ways of being.
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