The Syrian Uprising

Domestic Origins and Early Trajectory

Raymond Hinnebusch, Omar Imady, Raymond Hinnebusch, Omar Imady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351387606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Most observers did not expect the Arab spring to spread to Syria, for a number of seemingly good reasons. Yet, with amazing rapidity, massive and unprecedented anti-regime mobilization took place, which put the regime very much on the defensive; what began as the Syrian Uprising in March 2011 has evolved into one of the world's most damaging and protracted conflicts. Despite over six years having passed since the inception of the Syrian Uprising, this phenomenon remains difficult to fully grasp, both in terms of underlying forces and long-term implications.

This book presents a snapshot of how the Uprising developed in roughly the first two to three years (2011–2013) and addresses key questions regarding the domestic origins of the Uprising and its early trajectory. Firstly, what were the causes of the conflict, both in terms of structure (contradictions and crisis within the pre-Uprising order) and agency (choices of the actors)? Why did the Uprising not lead to democratization and instead descend into violent civil war with a sectarian dimension? With all 19 chapters addressing an aspect of the Uprising, the book focuses on internal dynamics, whilst a subsequent volume will look at the international dimension of the Uprising.

Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that seeks to capture the full complexity of the phenomenon, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the Syrian conflict, and will therefore be a valuable resource for anyone studying Middle Eastern Politics.

1

Introduction

Origins of the Syrian Uprising: From structure to agency

Raymond Hinnebusch, Omar Imady

What began as the Syrian Uprising in March 2011 has evolved into one of the world’s most damaging and protracted conflicts. This volume addresses key questions regarding the domestic origins of the Uprising and its early trajectory: 1) what were the causes of the conflict, both in terms of structure (contradictions and crisis within the pre-Uprising order) and agency (choices of the actors); 2) trajectory: a) why did the Uprising not lead to democratization and instead descend into violent civil war with a sectarian dimension? This volume focuses on internal dynamics and leaves to a subsequent second volume treatment of the international dimension of the Uprising. The volume presents a “snapshot” of how the Uprising had developed in roughly the first two to three years (2011–2013). The later development of the conflict will be treated in at least one more subsequent volume. In important respects this volume carries on from an earlier edited volume which examined the first ten years of Bashar al-Asad’s presidency, treating this period in its own right, but also looking for the “seeds” of the Uprising (Hinnebusch and Zintl 2015).

Understanding of the Syrian Uprising is aided by contextualizing it within many important broader debates in international and Middle East politics on which it has bearing: the authoritarian upgrading and resilience literature; that on democratic transition; on social movement theory; on civil resistance, on “new wars” and civil wars; and the debates over political Islam. There is also a literature on the Uprising itself, including Wieland (2012), Lesch (2012), Abboud (2015), Hokayem (2013), Kerr and Larkin (2015), Ajami (2012), Starr (2012), McHugo (2015), Pierret (2013), Glass (2015), and Matar (2016). This volume builds on the Syria-specific literatures and zooms in, so to speak, on aspects of structure, such as “Sultanism” (Schmidt in this volume) and agency (e.g. Lesch in this volume on Bashar’s choices) in order to address some of the issues raised in the broader literatures – e.g authoritarian resilience. The book includes contributions by veteran scholars of Syria, but also new cutting edge research by junior scholars, most of them originally presented at the periodic conferences on Syria hosted by the Centre for Syrian Studies at St Andrews University, Scotland.

The book consists of 19 chapters, each addressing an aspect of the Uprising. These are framed by this introduction and a conclusion, which together put the chapter cases within a framework that poses a series of key questions or issues raised in the scholarship and debates on the Syrian Uprising and which also summarizes the evidence presented in the chapters.

The introduction will raise the important questions with regard to the origins (causes, grievances, and opportunity structure) of the Uprising and also queries as to how mass protests became possible and why they did not initiate a democratic transition. It takes the view that the structure of the regime goes far to explain the behaviour of the actors – their agency – in the Uprising. The conclusion to the volume summarizes the evidence with regard to the subsequent trajectory of the Uprising that came out of the failure of democratic transition, specifically, why the protests were militarized and sectarianism instrumentalized, resulting in civil war; and how the regime survived despite widespread expectations in 2012 among the Syrian opposition, regional Sunni powers and international powers that it was on its last legs. Specifically, why was it able to keep support of key constituencies, including the military, business, and minorities, in spite of unleashing so much violence against its own citizens? Finally, the impact of civil war on emergent governance in the resulting failed state is summarized, i.e. how the regime adapted itself to civil war and what counter-regime formation took place in opposition-controlled territories. The conclusion elaborates the view that the structures emergent from the Uprising are explained by the agency of the many actors – individuals, groups – discussed in the book chapters.

Why the Asad regime was so vulnerable to the Uprising

When Bashar al-Asad came to power there were widespread hopes for political and economic reform in Syria; yet, not only did reforms not materialize but also in his effort to initiate them, Bashar inadvertently weakened the regime and paved the way for the Uprising. The “reforms” he sought have to be understood as an instance of a region-wide movement from populist (PA) to post-populist (PPA) forms of authoritarianism (or “New Authoritarianism” in King’s (2009) words), widely discussed in MENA literature on the 1990–2000 period. A result of the vulnerabilities of populism, chiefly the exhaustion of statist development, PPA aimed to activate private and foreign investment as alternative engines of growth, a strategy pursued, however, at the cost of regimes’ sacrificing the original popular support on which they had consolidated themselves. This move was accompanied by what was called “authoritarian upgrading” (Heydemann 2007), on which there is also extensive literature, by which regimes supposedly adapted to the global hegemony of neo-liberal capitalism and tried to compensate for the loss of their populist constituencies by co-opting new more privileged constituencies; yet for every vulnerability of the populist period supposedly fixed by this, such “upgrading” had negative side effects and produced new vulnerabilities. It is therefore the political economy literature on post-populism and that on authoritarian upgrading of regimes that provides the essential context for understanding the Syrian Uprising.

The political economy of Ba’thist Syria

As Adham Saouli’s chapter on Ba’thist state-building indicates, Ba’thist populism’s special vulnerability was dominance of the regime by Alawi officers in a Sunni-majority society; this was initially overcome by nationalization and land reform, which broke the dominance of the Sunni oligarchy and gave the regime the means to win over popular constituencies, notably Sunni peasants. Stability, however, was only achieved when Hafiz al-Asad concentrated power in a presidential monarchy, backed by Alawi clients commanding key military and intelligence machinery, which nevertheless shared power with a cross-sectarian elite, and rested on party and bureaucratic institutions which incorporated a cross-sectarian rural-centric constituency. The regime achieved a measure of legitimacy on nationalist grounds, notably from the 1973 war and the on-going struggle with Israel, and also from a “social contract” in which political loyalty was contingent on regime delivery of material benefits to its constituencies. In parallel, though, the regime could never relax its repressive control, particularly over the half of society, initially mostly remnants of the old oligarchy and Islamists, un-reconciled to Alawi-Ba’th rule.

This neo-patrimonial state, mixing traditional practices, notably clientalism, and modern bureaucratic instruments, required significant revenues to sustain itself; but the state, overdeveloped relative to its economic base, generated a permanent fiscal deficit that could only be sustained by external “rent”. Hafiz al-Asad deftly used his nationalist foreign policy, making Syria a front-line state with Israel, to access aid from the Arab Gulf states and Iran and cheap arms from the Soviet Union; however, in the 1990s economic aid declined and while the gap was filled by Syria’s own modest oil revenues these were set to decline in the 2000s. The cumulative economic vulnerabilities of the system were already exposed by the economic slump of the late 1980s which was met by an austerity policy that starved the public sector, froze social benefits and slashed the earning power of the state-employed middle class. In the early 1990s, a new investment law was promulgated to entice private and foreign investment to supplement the declining public sector. Together, these measures revived the private sector, thus appeasing the bourgeoisie, parts of which were incorporated into the regime support base; the regime was thus starting on a post-populist tangent but it did not wholly renege on the social contract and continued, for example, to provide subsidized bread and agricultural inputs. However, in parallel with the fall of Syria’s Soviet patron, external aid declined and the Ba’th’s anti-imperialist nationalist tangent now collided with the imperative to access inward investment from the capitalist world as a substitute for aid; as a possible solution in the 1990s Syria pursued, under US auspices, a peace settlement with Israel that was expected to open the door to foreign aid and investment yet which, in also allowing recovery of Syria’s lost Golan territory, would also sustain nationalist legitimacy.

Bashar al-Asad’s presidency: “authoritarian upgrading” in Syria

According to Volker Perthes (2004), Bashar al-Asad’s project was to “modernize authoritarianism”. Regime survival required preserving the fiscal base of the state, hence reforming the economy by a move toward the market, and integration into the global world of the Internet, cell phones, etc.; but such economic reform required consolidating the power of reformers within the regime and adapting Syria’s nationalist foreign policy and its populist social contract to the requisites of capitalism without de-stabilizing the regime. Bashar al-Asad initially appeared to deftly manage this balancing act, but in the end it proved beyond him.

The contradiction between revenue needs and nationalist legitimacy had sharpened owing to the failure of the 1990s peace process with Israel that led Syria to shift toward a foreign policy of “resistance” (opposing the invasion of Iraq, alignment with Iran), which closed off the initially attempted avenue of reform via integration into the Western market, as symbolized by the nearly signed association agreement with Europe. US-imposed sanctions, aiming to economically isolate Syria, discouraged Western investment and caused difficulties for the financial services and telecommunications industries by which the regime sought to propel the globalization of the Syrian economy. Pre-Iraq war oil deals with Saddam Hussein, which antagonized Washington, were cut off after the US invasion. To counter isolation from the West, trade was switched toward Turkey through which Bashar sought back door access to Western economies; creation of a stock market and private banks were designed to attract expatriate capital and surplus liquidity from the Gulf. In fact, investment inflows drove a boom in trade, housing, banking, construction, and tourism, steadily increasing the proportion of GDP generated in the private sector and solidifying the support of the emerging new capitalist classes. As Lawson (this volume) shows, the Syrian economy preformed relatively well in the 2000s, and even unemployment was below the Arab average. However, the drive to evade isolation and access resources meant that the “social contract” with the regime’s traditional constituency was sacrificed as the priority shifted to capital accumulation and growth to the neglect of equality and distribution. Economic liberalization removed former limits on corruption and the managers of the new banks and businesses earned high salaries, while cuts were made in the subsidies that kept low income citizens from falling into extreme poverty. Public education and services were run down and parallel private ones for the rich sprang up. Agriculture was neglected and despoiled by drought, which propelled urban migration that, together with the influx of Iraqi refugees, exacerbated a housing crisis originating in Syria’s population boom and propelled as well by the increase in real estates prices from the influx of Gulf money. The conspicuous consumption by the new crony capitalists and their foreign partners alienated the regime’s original rural constituency. Studies by Ahmad (2012) and Sudermann (2011) showed how, even as the decline in public spending on education left the poor in informal settlements around Aleppo with reduced opportunities, in Damascus gentrification of the traditional city sparked an explosion in consumerism for the rich; the middle class was pushed out and investors co-opted. The end to tariff protection devastated small manufacturers in the suburbs. Upward social mobility for lower class elements became blocked, causing resentment of the Alawis and crony capitalists who were perceived to corner the new opportunities.

Parallel to this move to post-populism, Bashar al-Asad sought to concentrate power in the presidency in an extended struggle with his rivals among his father’s old guard, using his powers of office to retire the elder generation; inserting his loyalists in the army and security forces; and, in a tug-of-war with the party leadership, appointing reforming technocrats to the council of ministers. In uprooting mostly Sunni regime barons, Asad reduced obstacles to his power and reforms but also weakened powerful interests with clientele networks that incorporated key Sunni segments of society into the regime, making him over-dependent on the presidential family, Alawi security barons and technocrats lacking bases of support. An over-concentration of patronage opportunities in the presidential family came at the expense of other regime clients. At the same time, Asad debilitated the party apparatus and the worker and peasant unions which he saw as obstacles to economic reform, withering the regime’s organized connection to its constituency and its penetration of neighbourhoods and villages. The narrowing of the regime core from the ruling party to the presidential family is a dangerous move for authoritarian regimes but one that was common across the region and a key grievance driving the Arab uprisings.

A main technique of authoritarian upgrading everywhere was the fostering of alternative constituencies that could be balanced against each other. The Syrian regime co-opted a new alliance of reforming technocrats and the business class, a powerful social force that was dependent on the state for opportunities (contracts, licences). The new rich and the urban middle class were encouraged to develop their own civil society organizations, such as junior chambers of commerce. Bashar al-Asad intensified his father’s strategy of fostering moderate (Sufi) Islam as a counter to both radical Islamists and the secular opposition, resulting in the further spread of Islamic schools and charities, conservative attire, and mosque attendance (see Khatib and Imady, both this volume). Efforts were made to off-load welfare responsibilities from the state to private charities (Ruiz de Elivra 2012). The political dimension of authoritarian upgrading chiefly took the form of co-optation, divide and rule and selective political decompression; little movement forward took place in incorporating co-opted social forces through a pluralized party system, which might have compensated for the shrinking of the regime’s traditional populist political base. In summary, authoritarian upgrading’s lag behind post-populist change meant the regime had not sufficiently cultivated new constituencies to compensate for its former support base (Hinnebusch and Zintl 2015). The chapters in this volume by Saouli, Valter and Schmidt document the vulnerabilities of the regime.

Explaining anti-regime mobilization

Most observers did not expect the Arab spring to spread to Syria, for a number of seemingly good reasons (Haddad 2011). Yet, with amazing rapidity, massive and unprecedented anti-regime mobilization took place, which put the regime very much on the defensive. Indeed, mass protests spread to most of Syria’s cities (if much less so in Damascus and Aleppo), with hundreds of thousands mobilizing on successive Fridays. Whole quarters, suburbs and towns fell out of regime control. Social movement theory specializes in understanding such phenomenon and particularly how the collective action problem (by which rational agents would tend to free-ride) is overcome and typically looks at movements’ ability to frame grievances, the opportunity structure for mobilization, including the existence of networks enabling collective action, and the material means to mobilize.

Grievances were significant in Syria but in some respects they may have been lower than in other Uprising states: Syria had, as opposed to Egypt, a young president with a nationalist image (countering this, Bashar had, of course, inherited his post, which, in a republic, must have dubious legitimacy); authoritarian upgrading had co-opted new support to make up for those being excluded, with the inclusion of business actors, returning expatriates, and Sufi clergy; there was an image of modernization and for the upper middle classes a new life of consumption in the big cities; Syria’s economy had done comparatively well in the 2000s and, as Lawson indicates (this volume), although the world financial crisis started to bring Syria’s boom to an end there was no sharp downturn prior to the Uprising resembling the typical revolutionary scenario of boom followed by bust; moreover, neo-liberal exclusion of the lower strata was recent and less advanced than, e.g. in Egypt. The negative demonstration effect of civil war in Iraq and Lebanon, showcases of American democracy export, should have made Syrians cautious about rocking the boat. Importantly, it was understood, notably from the memory of the brutal repression of the Hama Uprising (1982), that the security forces were more cohesive and more loyal to the inner core of the regime than elsewhere and would not hesitate to use unrestrained violence. All these factors would dilute the breadth of anti-regime mobilization compared to cases such as Tunisia and Egypt where the vast majority bandwagoned with the opposition against the ruling elite.

Working in favour of mobilization were grievances from the sectarian cleavage between the regime inner core and the Sunni majority and a perception of sectarian discrimination against the latter. Moreover, as Tamara al-Om (this volume) suggests, the lack of political voice in civil society meant grievances accumulated rather than being addressed. Indeed, as the party and corporatist infrastructure of the regime contracted, the intrusive and arbitrary behaviour of the corrupt security forces that filled the vacuum became more intolerable, hence the ubiquitous demand for “dignity” during the protests (Harken, this volume) and the slogan widely raised at the outset of the protests: “The Syrians won’t be humiliated.” And, decisively, the decision of the regime to use violence against peaceful protestors had the effect of inflaming, not dampening the protests.

Given this relative balance between grievances and stakes in the status quo, what, arguably, ought to have made the difference for outcomes was the “opportunity structure” and this appeared to be sufficiently unfriendly to anti-regime mobilization to tilt the balance against it. Indeed, theories of collective action have a hard time explaining the Uprising. Even compared to other authoritarian Arab states, the opportunity stru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: Origins of the Syrian Uprising: From structure to agency
• 2. The tragedy of Ba’thist state-building
• 3. The power of ‘sultanism’: Why Syria’s non-violent protests did not lead to a democratic transition
• 4. The dynamics of power in Syria: Generalized corruption and sectarianism
• 5. The Uprising and the economic interests of the Syrian military-mercantile complex
• 6. Revisiting the political economy of the Syrian Uprising
• 7. Tutelary authoritarianism and the shifts between secularism and Islam in Syria
• 8. Organizationally secular: Damascene Islamist movements and the Syrian Uprising
• 9. Bashar’s fateful decision
• 10. Syria’s Alawis: Structure, perception and agency in the Syrian security dilemma
• 11. Emergence of the political voice of Syria’s civil society: The non-violent movements of the Syrian Uprising
• 12. Demands for dignity and the Syrian Uprising
• 13. Mediating the Syrian revolt: How new media technologies change the development of social movements and conflicts
• 14. Unblurring ambiguities: Assessing the impact of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian revolution
• 15. Sectarianism and the battle of narratives in the context of the Syrian Uprising
• 16. Sunni/Alawi identity clashes during the Syrian Uprising: A continuous reproduction?
• 17. The rise of Syrian Salafism: From denial to recognition
• 18. From a window in Jaramana: Imperial sectarianism and the impact of war on a Druze neighbourhood in Syria
• 19. The Left in the Syrian Uprising
• 20. Political incongruity between the Kurds and the ‘opposition’ in the Syrian Uprising
• 21. Conclusion: The early trajectory of the Syrian Uprising: From agency to structure
• Index