Lebanese anti-Government protest in September 2015. Hassan Ammar/ Press Association. All rights reserved.The UN still aims
to facilitate a Syrian agreement for a transitional government by August, envoy
Staffan de Mistura affirmed
at the end of June. Although there are many reasons why a political settlement
is unlikely to be near, recent geopolitical shifts and the upcoming election of
a new US president could mean that a window for effective diplomacy would open
next year.
Many of Syria’s current realities would continue even after such a
settlement, however. Even if power changes hands in Damascus, the provision of
security and services will remain a matter of competition and power-sharing
between elites.
Political and
economic power in Syria have long been concentrated in the hands of a few, and
some of these patterns have continued since the outbreak of conflict. The
coterie of regime-linked elites that dominated the economy in the years before
the war are still in place. In addition, new wartime elites have emerged by
accumulating weapons and the profits of a burgeoning war economy. Some of these
are profiteers who control the movement across internal and external borders of
goods, money, commodities and even basic services like water and electricity.
Both ‘old’ and ‘new’ elites are often linked to armed groups fighting for and
against the regime, which increasingly control their own fiefdoms across the
country. Meanwhile, state institutions have been affected by the dire state of
the economy, the regime’s focus on war aims, and the penetration of foreign actors.
Some of the state’s most basic distributive mechanisms – civil servant salaries
and subsidies on essential goods – are also increasingly being scaled back due
to the regime’s dwindling resources and the devaluation of the Syrian pound.
There are some small
exceptions to this pattern of service provision, but they are not the norm. There
have been attempts at ‘bottom-up’ service delivery in areas no longer
controlled by the regime, in which communities have taken the initiative to
look after their areas or to hold armed groups accountable for delivering
services. However, various obstacles have meant that real decision-making in
those areas has tended to remain in the hands of armed groups.
Local councils
have been largely unable to collect their own revenue, and they receive
insufficient support from external sources. Local institutions also suffer from
the persistence of top-down behaviour and lack of experience among leaders, as
well as infighting and accusations of corruption. External supporters of bottom-up
service delivery initiatives are uncoordinated and also set controversial restrictions
on how funding can be spent.
In addition, institutions like schools and
hospitals are regularly targeted in regime attacks on rebel-held areas. In Kurdish-held
areas, resources, decisions and political expression are also primarily kept
under the Democratic Union Party (PYD)’s strict control, despite the
establishment of local civilian institutions. A number of state services remain
under the control of the Asayish security forces, and the PYD is
criticized for engaging in authoritarian behaviour against opposition in its
areas, Kurdish or otherwise.
De facto rule by armed factions and elites is arguably both a curse and a
necessity in countries at war. Once rule of law and normal economic life have
broken down, these types of actors and networks typically
become the only way to provide security and services. And even when war has
formally ended, this type of political economy usually persists, acting as both
a crutch and a burden.
In Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, the weakness and elite
capture of the state, penetration of foreign interests, and lack of disarmament
of militias have meant that many of the same people involved in the war
continued to call the shots during ‘peacetime’. This is partly because the
bargains, both internal and geopolitical, that were necessary to broker a
settlement then perpetuate wartime power dynamics.
Warring factions have
sometimes been offered control of the rent from certain ministries or have been
allowed to keep their weapons. Militia leaders can retain control of their own
sources of rent and patronage even if they have not been part of the
negotiations. At times this has enabled armed factions to become a challenge to
traditional elites. External actors’ attempts to promote reconstruction,
investment and stabilization then become subject not only to foreign interests
but also to domestic competition for influence and self-serving political
behaviour.
It is very difficult
to measure or generalize what it is that Syrians want from power brokers in
their country, or indeed what they will want from them in the future. However,
the elite arrangement described above inevitably excludes people who would not agree
to this system forever. The most likely post-settlement political and economic order
will therefore contain the seeds of its own destabilization.
If the aim is to
avoid a return to conflict after a political settlement is reached, however, then
the experiences of Syria’s neighbours provide warnings that should not be
ignored.