As part of its long-form interview series, The Syria Dispatch speaks with scholars, writers, thinkers, and practitioners whose ideas help illuminate Syria’s future. These conversations look beyond the news cycle to the deeper intellectual, historical, and moral questions raised by the country’s ongoing transition.

Few contemporary Syrian thinkers have shaped that conversation more than Yassin al-Haj Saleh. A writer and public intellectual, he spent sixteen years in Assad’s prisons before becoming one of the Syrian revolution’s most influential voices. Over four decades, his work has examined authoritarianism, political imprisonment, revolution, memory, sectarianism, Islamism, and the difficult work of building a democratic political community in Syria. Since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, he has continued to write extensively on the possibilities and dangers facing the country.

In this conversation, he explains what he means by “political poverty” and why he believes agency must come before institutions; how religion came to occupy the political space Assadism emptied; why decentralization needs a strong center and fair representation within it; how victimhood can produce a sense of entitlement; what the disappearance of his wife, Samira Khalil, and their friends reveals about justice in the new Syria; why he sees the evil Syrians endured as radical rather than banal; and what it might mean to love Syria without nationalism.

(Please note that Substack allows readers to listen to articles by clicking the “play” button in the top-right corner of the article.)

What Political Poverty Means

The Syria Dispatch: You have described Assadism as producing “political poverty”: depriving people not only of rights, but of the capacity to associate, act collectively, and speak in their own names. This recalls Hannah Arendt’s understanding of politics as the creation of a shared world through speech and action. After decades in which Syrians were denied that experience, how can political poverty be overcome? Can institutions alone produce citizens, and if so, who builds them? Or must political agency be relearned first? Put differently: is it democracy that produces democrats, or democrats who produce democracy?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: Let me first say what I mean by political poverty. I first used the notion in 2003, based on my experience of the Damascus Spring and some of the political developments that followed.

Political poverty is the condition of people who are denied the right to gather or associate and to speak freely. When you are denied these fundamental things, you are below the political poverty line. I developed the notion as a parallel to economic poverty, which is the condition of people who lack the income they need to live. A growing percentage of Syrian society was suffering from income-related deprivation (37% in 2007), and everyone was suffering from political poverty. Even in private homes, you were not allowed to associate freely with others or talk about politics and public affairs. This is precisely why religion came to play such a large role in Syria, but we will come back to that. [See “The One Gathering That Could Not Be Disbanded” below.]

The Damascus Spring was about overcoming political poverty and taking ownership of politics. This primarily took the form of forums: gatherings in private homes, with dozens or sometimes a few hundred people, to talk about politics.

In 2011, the revolution carried that urge to own politics into much wider circles: from elites and private spaces to ordinary people and public spaces. It was also about re-owning the country itself. The idea of political poverty later led me to the idea of a privatized state, in which those in power owned the state as their main asset and used it to control the country itself.

Now that the Assad regime is gone, there is a new opportunity to overcome political poverty. But how do we do this? I would prioritize people’s agency—their capacity to gather and talk freely—over institutions, because we do not have real political institutions. We did not have them under a regime that lasted fifty-four years, a very long time in a society where some 96% of people are under sixty. The main political institutions of that period were the security apparatuses, which prevented people from assembling and expressing themselves, and the National Progressive Front, a façade whose assembly and speech were politically irrelevant.

So we have no tradition of strong and inclusive political institutions. That is why the focus should be on the agency of the people, on the democrats, as you say.

Of course, this will be very difficult. Close to 90% of people are below the poverty line, according to UN figures, and at least half need humanitarian support. So, simply put, a sustainable democracy in Syria is still distant. Still, this is the direction Syrians should be moving in, and what gives meaning to the work of people like us is pushing things in that direction.

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“We Never Wanted Them to Solve Our Problems”

The Syria Dispatch: If agency should come before institutions, how can people exercise that agency when there are no institutions? Is the public space, the space for civil society, wide enough today for people to express themselves?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: No, it is not. But our problem was never that we wanted those in power to solve our problems, or to offer us spaces to meet and talk. What we need is for them not to prevent people from meeting, from talking, and from developing our own forms of political expression and political activism. The issue with the Assad regime—and I think it is still the same—was never that we were asking them to solve our problems. The issue is that they will not let people solve what we can of our country’s problems.

For example, during the Damascus Spring and shortly after, people tried to clean the Barada River. It was voluntary, a civil society activity, and they were not allowed to do it. In Darayya in 2003, a group of young people organized a reading club guided by Sheikh Abd al-Akram al-Saqqa, but authorities quickly banned it, and al-Saqqa and his students were arrested for a few years. Sheikh Abd al-Akram al-Saqqa was again arrested at the start of the revolution and died in prison. And we are seeing similar things today. Recently, Dr. Fida’ al-Hourani, a highly respectable political figure from Hama, was supposed to give a lecture at the cultural center in Salamiyah, but she was not allowed to.

I cannot think of another way for people to build a society than owning politics, meeting, organizing, talking, and protesting. Right now, we are not a society, we are not a nation, and we have not had a state for a long time. We still do not have one, and it is unclear that we will have a public state—the overarching institutions that citizens have access to and through which political and social problems are dealt with. We are a deeply divided society. To move forward, to develop into an interactive society, we need to meet, talk, perhaps protest, and discuss things. That is why it is important to insist on political freedoms: on building parties, organizations, unions, whatever. These are the venues through which people train themselves to become citizens and to build their society.

The One Gathering That Could Not Be Disbanded

The Syria Dispatch: You have argued that Assadism destroyed almost every autonomous space for collective organization, while mosques and religious networks proved harder to eradicate. Did religion, therefore, become one of the few remaining ways for Syrians to act collectively and, in a sense, to reclaim politics? And to what extent did the regime’s destruction of political life help produce the opposition that eventually defeated it?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: My analysis is that Islam, and religion more broadly, acted as a limit to political poverty. There was one gathering that no regime, however tyrannical, could disband: the gathering of believers in mosques—or, for that matter, in churches. And there was one opinion that could not be silenced: that of the sacred text, the prayers, these things. People were owning politics through religion.

But I wouldn’t say the regime manufactured the opposition that defeated it. It wasn’t intended, and the regime wasn’t that smart. But this is what happened, in fact.

Several things are relatively unique about Islam in Syria. The first is what I just said: through religion, people tried to own politics. This is unfortunate because we are talking about a rather outdated worldview on the one hand, and when you politicize it, it loses its spiritual and ethical components while failing to become a unifying principle. In fact, owning politics through religion means sectarianism: a divisive and irrational form of power that has afflicted our societies in the Middle East for decades.

In Syria, one can understand this version of Islamism by deconstructing the notion of the objective opposition. By objective opposition, I mean the opposition that the country’s conditions themselves produce and push forward. It responds to political poverty and answers the question of how to react to an extremely violent regime. Its answer is: through extreme violence.

People like us were a subjective opposition. Our opposition to the regime was based on values and ideology rather than on social structure. It has emancipatory potential because it comes from outside the existing political constellation. But for precisely this reason, it cannot easily articulate itself socially under conditions of political poverty and extreme violence.

Another distinctive feature of Islamism in Syria is that what we now have in power are Islamists who were nihilists and Salafi-jihadists. No longer, perhaps, but for sure, a team of Sunni supremacists who are quite sectarian.

They want power, and they want to stay in power—though not ila al-abad (إلى الأبد), forever, as the Assadists used to say. Just after the transition, when Ahmad al-Sharaa was made president, there was even talk of giving him the title of king.

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An Artificial Country and a Question Never Answered

The Syria Dispatch: You have distinguished between the religious ummah and the political community of equal citizens. Today, religion is again becoming a claim to own the state and to define the nation, which is ultimately a question about who belongs to the political community and who does not. Is this a new problem, or a recurring one in Syria’s history? And has the country ever managed to constitute itself as a single people?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: We are in the middle of this challenge today, and it will be a matter of struggle—a full political and social struggle.

Syria’s history has shown a kind of tempo: we have a major crisis every generation, every twenty-five or thirty years. Partly, this is because the country is very new in history, was mustana’ (مصطنع), artificial, as the Arab nationalists used to say. Egypt is far less artificial than Syria. Syria and Jordan are quite new, and before that, they were not centers of stable power. On the other hand, the Syrian elites, notoriously divided as they have always been, failed in the task of nation- and state-building. And I do not see this new team doing better.

Their political imaginary is haunted by the specters of the religious ummah rather than that of a community of citizens. This will only deepen the polarization that runs on many levels: ethnic, religious, sectarian, urban versus rural. All have been worsened in the long Assadist era, which represents more than half of the country’s entire existence in history. So we have it now. All these polarizations have come together at once.

Recognition Without Permanent Categories

The Syria Dispatch: You argue that Syria must become a public state belonging to equal citizens rather than a collection of inherited communities. At the same time, you recognize that many Syrians are seeking political guarantees because they fear erasure, domination, or renewed violence. We see this tension today: the SDF negotiates as a Kurdish-led actor, while negotiations over Suweida are likely to involve Druze political representatives.

Can Syria recognize these historical wounds and provide meaningful guarantees without turning Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, or Druze into permanent political categories? And what happens if it fails to do so?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: The next crisis is coming. I do not know when. It is still very early: the regime fell less than two years ago, after a very long period, and the country’s contradictions and tensions have already begun to surface. Maybe the conditions for political contention and struggle are not yet there, but they are coming. One of my most recent articles was about the four major national crises we have witnessed in a century of Syria’s history.

The next crisis could come within the next decade because so much about the country’s future remains uncertain.

I hope, of course, that we can avoid it. Up to 3% of Syrians were already killed—between half a million and 700,000 people—by all sides during the war. Hopefully, this experience will change the tempo of the country’s history. But I do not see signs of awareness of the need to avoid another crisis, or of a serious effort to build a more inclusive political system.

Before the revolution, we had already faced three major national crises. The first came when Syria appeared in history, and the French occupation “solved” it. The second came shortly after independence and manifested itself in coups and instability; it was not solved. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was “solved” with the Hama Massacre, by destroying what remained of the independent political organizations of that generation.

Then came the revolution. And we still do not see that the problem of nation- and state-building has been addressed.

If we do not move in this direction during what remains of the transitional period—a little more than three years—we will not simply see another major crisis. We may see the country crumbling. You do not have infinite opportunities to survive big crises. And with each generational cycle, the cost in human lives and resources has grown exponentially. When I was young, tens of thousands of people were killed. By the time I was fifty, it was hundreds of thousands.

Today, two complementary challenges remain. The first is representing Syria’s diversity and plurality at the level of state power. The second is decentralizing the political system so that the Druze, the Alawites, the Kurds, or whoever can govern themselves in certain fields—lamarkaziyya idariyya (لامركزية إدارية), administrative decentralization.

This is urgently needed if Syria is to avoid falling into crisis again.

Decentralization Needs a Strong Center

The Syria Dispatch: I would like to continue on the idea of decentralization. When we hear it discussed in relation to Syria, it is usually framed around communities: the Kurds have their aspirations, the Druze theirs, the Alawites theirs. But that raises problems. The Kurds live in different places, so which part of the country would it be? What about non-Kurds in those regions, who would become minorities in their own decentralized part of the country? The same applies in Suweida, where there are many Druze but also other sects and ethnicities. Wouldn’t decentralization across the whole country make more sense?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: Apart from Suweida, you do not have a contiguous area with a very large majority of one element of the Syrian people.

Christians are spread all over the country—their percentage is diminishing, but they are everywhere, from close to the Iraqi border to Suweida itself, to Daraa. Alawites are spread across cities where Sunnis are probably still a majority, and they are, of course, in the countryside of Latakia and Tartus, where they can be a majority, but also in the countryside of Homs and parts of Hama. Only in Suweida are the Druze a large majority. Most communities do not have distinct aqalim (أقاليم), regions.

What is needed is a combination of arrangements: positive discrimination for the Druze in Suweida, balanced representation, respect for the customs and traditions of these communities, and good representation of Alawites in the areas where they live. I think it is doable.

Two things have corrupted the debate about lamarkaziyya (لامركزية), decentralization, in Syria. First, many who talked about decentralization at certain times were talking in the same breath about separating from the country, so the talk wasn’t entirely honest or motivated by genuinely democratic demands. Second, decentralization requires a strong center, not a weak one. The more powerful the center, the more opportunities there are for idara mahalliyya (إدارة محلية), local administration.

You know that in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the idara dhatiyya (إدارة ذاتية) in Arabic, the self-administration, which was really the PKK, was by no means democratic or even minimally representative. It was a “self-administration” on paper. It does not work this way. You need a bigger share in central power at the same time as a decisive share of power locally.

You have to deal with it case by case. For Suweida, I would say the governor should be from the governorate, and so should the head of security, along with a respectable share in the central power. It can be done, and it shouldn’t be a big deal.

The principle is always the same: autonomy at the local level and fair representation in central power.

Victimhood That Deadens the Heart

The Syria Dispatch: You have written that suffering does not confer moral innocence: victims can become perpetrators, and memories of persecution can become claims to entitlement. Your analysis of the massacres of Alawites and of the history weighing on the new Syria warns, in particular, against turning Sunni victimhood under Assad into moral authorization for domination or revenge.

After preparing these questions, I was watching a program on Al-Ikhbariya in which a guest said that Sunnis had suffered the most, that a million of them had been killed, and that it was therefore their turn to decide and to rule the country. The host confronted him, saying he could not say such a thing and that it was sectarian.

In such a context, how can Syrians build a shared collective memory that does not erase competing experiences, but brings them into a common historical narrative?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: This feeling is quite widespread. And that is why we have all these problems. There is this sense of entitlement. We were victims—and as we say, al-mazlumiyya tumit al-qalb (المظلومية تميت القلب), victimhood deadens the heart (of the victim). Because I am a victim, whatever I do is right. I am oppressed; therefore, I am right.

At some point, people will have to realize that yes, they have lived different experiences and suffered differently, but at the end of the day, everyone suffered. What that man said is exactly the opposite of what is needed. He could have said, instead: yes, it is true that there was discrimination and that there were these problems, but it is over, and now we have to move forward into an era of equality, of respect, of plurality, of freedom of speech and assembly, and we have to cooperate for a better future for all. Nothing determines that things must go from bad to worse. It is not a natural law. Nor is it the logic of asabiyya as Ibn Khaldun described it, where a dynasty dies out over three generations—first asabiyya, then luxury, then decay and decline.

It certainly does not work that way today, for two reasons. Sects themselves are politically manufactured. And the international system is a deciding actor in Syria (and the region): the United States, Türkiye, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc. So it is no longer about asabiyya. It is no longer just Sunnis and Alawites and Druze, and Kurds and Arabs. It is about how you deal with all these tensions and all these actors. I am not a politician, but I do not think it should be that difficult.

“I Do Not Want Them to Be Santa Claus”

The Syria Dispatch: A collective narrative is also built out of individual stories. I wanted to ask about the disappearance of Samira Khalil, Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamada, and Nazem Hammadi, which is at once a national crime and an intimate wound for you. In “Between Amjad Youssef and Samir Kaakeh,” you argue that the real test of transitional justice is not whether the new government prosecutes the defeated regime’s crimes, but whether it is willing to investigate crimes committed by its own allies. Yet politics imposes constraints that moral principles do not: Ahmad al-Sharaa depends, at least in part, on the networks and armed groups that brought him to power, and prosecuting those closest to him could destabilize the transition.

How should we think about that tension between justice and political survival? Must we pursue equal justice immediately, even at the risk of destabilizing the transition, or is some sequencing unavoidable?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: It is not about them. Our people were abducted and disappeared. We have rights.

Again, we don’t want them to solve our problems. We just want them not to prevent us from investigating, building the story, and bringing the criminals to justice. I understand the difficulties they may face in dealing with this inheritance—the past fifteen years, the past fifty-four years, the past sixty years. It is huge, and they cannot solve it. But do not prevent us from trying to develop solutions.

I do not want Ahmad al-Sharaa to arrest Samir Kaakeh—although he could, in fact. But this is not my problem. I do not want those in power to act like Santa Claus, while I sit and wait for them to tell me what happened to my wife and my friends and to deliver justice. That is not the way, I think, and I do not expect that of them. What I expect is at least respect for people’s rights, and that they deal with those who suffered according to consistent rules. Today, you arrest Amjad Youssef; the next day, you are in Douma, hand in hand with Samir Kaakeh, who is really a symbol of evil.

They are trying some of the big criminals of the regime, but I have never been approached by the National Commission for Missing Persons, and there is no mechanism through which to raise the issue of my disappeared wife and friends.

Radical Evil, Not Banal Evil

The Syria Dispatch: After prison, disappearance, massacre, and dictatorship, how do you understand evil today? Does the Syrian experience bring you closer to Arendt’s idea of radical evil, or to her later notion of the banality of evil? And does emphasizing the structures that produce violence risk obscuring the responsibility of those who choose to torture, betray, or kill?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: Arendt used both formulas: radical evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and banal evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

I tend to think that banal evil is more related to bureaucratized forms of governance. Bureaucracy is the rule of nobody, according to Arendt herself, and it divides criminal action into small parts that many people carry out. Eichmann said that he never killed anyone, which is most probably true, and Bashar al-Assad could claim something similar.

But Syria is far less bureaucratic. One of the features of the Assad regime was to demolish the state bureaucracy itself through clientelism, nepotism, and the deregulation of public services.

So I think the evil we witnessed in Syria is closer to radical evil than to banal evil. Banal evil is evil without evildoers. Radical evil is evil with evildoers.

This is also related to what we were talking about—sectarianism. In Syria, we speak of al-mujtama’ al-ahli (المجتمع الأهلي): sects, tribes, and similar groups, which were consolidated over two generations. I don’t think anything about them is primordial or deterministic. They were consolidated because they became essential mechanisms of political power.

Evil with evildoers, I think, correlates with these consolidated social formations. So we cannot apply the notion of banal evil everywhere.

Maybe we need something a bit different. But this takes us to something I have described in relation to the Assad regime, and which still applies to those in power now: al-hukm al-yadawi (الحكم اليدوي), rule by the hand.

It is not the biopolitics of a disciplinary society. You rule through torture and by instilling fear in people in order to stay in power forever. There is a whole set of notions and practices there, and it can be quite complex.

The evil we have seen in Syria is related to these structures of power.

The Syria Dispatch: And those structures may be being replicated today?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: Most probably, of course. I’d say it is not inevitable that they will be replicated, but most likely this is what is already happening.

Shortly before our conversation, there was the case of a young man who died after being beaten. This falls within the category of al-hukm al-yadawi (الحكم اليدوي): you rule by the hand; you beat, you torture. You do not rule by the mind, as in a disciplinary society.

This coarse form of power remains dominant in our society. It is not power as influence; it is power as coercion. You have to force people, to beat them, to instill fear in them, to kill some of them.

We are still within this paradigm.

Loving Syria Without Nationalism

The Syria Dispatch: You have often written about the weakness of Syrian national attachment, and about a country subordinated to dynasty, sect, religious community, ideology, or a larger imagined nation. In “The Ordeal of the Syrian Nation-State Today,” you argue that both the sectarianization of the state and the preference for the religious ummah over the national community have undermined the formation of a Syrian people.

Since Assad’s fall, there appears to be a renewed search for a common political identity. Does Syria need a stronger sense of national attachment? And what would that look like without turning nationalism into another form of exclusion?

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: I have observed that the way we Syrians do politics is dominated by antagonistic politics. It is usually: who is the enemy, and how do I mobilize against them? We Syrians love to hate—our enemies, those in power, the other community, the other group—rather than being positive and loving our country, or even our own community.

Charles de Gaulle said that nationalism is about hating other nations, while patriotism is about loving your own country. Sectarianism is like that. Sectarianism is not about being an Alawite, Sunni, or Christian and loving your community. It is not about your childhood, your parents, your family, your early years. The problem with sectarianism is not that people love their community or want their religion and beliefs to be respected. It is that sectarianism is about hating others.

At the national level, the dominant emotion has been hatred of those in power, or of this or that community, rather than love of our country.

Loving one’s country can indeed be suspect because it can also mean: my nation is the best. It can open the door to fanaticism or chauvinism. But in Syria, we face the opposite threat. You barely have Syrians who define themselves as Syrians rather than as Sunni or Alawite, Arab or Kurd, Christian or Muslim, Druze or Ismaili.

That is what I meant in that article: that we should be a bit more positive, care about our country, and calm the violent emotions that were always there but erupted even more violently after the fall of the regime.

I like to address questions of emotion and our collective psychological condition. It is an important and neglected topic. You cannot do politics without caring about emotions, about collective psychology. Those who are interested in politics should care about this.

The Syria Dispatch: I would tend to think that the lack of love for Syria was caused by over sixty years of dictatorship and the regime giving Syrians very little to love about the country. And you see it in small things: the pollution, the rubbish thrown on the ground, a general indifference toward public space. Many people don’t seem to feel they really belong to the country.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: My brother arrived in Syria recently for the first time in fourteen or fifteen years, and he observed exactly this carelessness about public space. You visit friends, and their apartments and houses are very clean. One meter outside, garbage.

But to be honest, I am not sure it is only because we were alienated from our country, disowned when the country was appropriated by the Assad regime—although that is an important thing. I would say we never developed a sense of the public interest. We do not have an educational system. Part of my recent work is about the fact that we did not have a state for a long time, which means no bureaucracy, no justice, no education. European big cities were dirty in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. They are cleaner now because states and nations developed a faculty of cleanliness, so to speak. This has not happened in Syria.

The term I use to describe Syrian society is al-mujtama’ al-barri (المجتمع البري), which can be translated as a savage or wild society. It is like a piece of land that relies on rain rather than being watered. Rain may or may not come, and only small plants can grow. So we have a whole delinquent generation, people who became teenagers and then young men without education, with poverty, with high levels of testosterone, and with weapons available. Three delinquent generations.

The Syria Dispatch: The plants that survive in the desert are also the thorny, spiky ones.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: Exactly. I am from a rural area, and when I was a child I would take our diminishing number of sheep to graze. But there was grass only when it rained well, which was not always. In the bad seasons, only a few plants can live there, but they are the most stubborn ones—thorny and small, as you say.

We are these plants. We are these herbs.

We are deeply grateful to Yassin al-Haj Saleh for his time, openness, and generosity throughout this conversation.

• Readers new to his work in English can begin with The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Hurst, 2017; Haymarket in the US), a collection of essays written between 2011 and 2016 from Damascus, Douma, Raqqa, and Istanbul. He has written nine books in Arabic on Syria, prison, contemporary Islam, and the experience of atrocity.

• The themes of this interview are developed at greater length in “The Ordeal of the Syrian Nation-State Today,” “The Alawite Massacres and the Future of Syria,” “The Unruly History That Weighs on the New Syria,” and “A History of Violence.”

• On justice and the disappeared, see his writing on the contrasting cases of Amjad Youssef and Samir Kaakeh, published in Arabic in Al-Jumhuriya, the platform he co-founded and where he writes regularly.

• Among his recent conversations in English is “Genocide in Syria, Gaza, and Beyond: An Interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh,” conducted by Wendy Pearlman for the Journal of Genocide Research.

• A collection of his work in English—articles, interviews, and recorded discussions—is gathered at yassinhs.com, and the full archive of his Arabic writing, more than 1,500 pieces, is available on al-Hiwar al-Mutamaddin.

Dr. Rahaf Aldoughli is an award-winning academic, a lecturer at Lancaster University, and a senior editor at Cogent Social Sciences, published by Taylor & Francis. Her book Romanticizing Masculinity in Baathist Syria was published almost exactly as the regime it analyzed collapsed. It argued that masculinity in Syria was not a byproduct of authoritarian rule but one of its instruments: a configuration of manhood enforced from above and eventually internalized, which supplied the terms of loyalty, belonging, and national identity.

Since December 2024, she has continued interviewing fighters and commanders across Syria and the region, work that will feed a forthcoming book on fighters’ motivations before and after the fall of Assad, alongside a second forthcoming book, Who Owns Sunnism.

In this conversation with The Syria Dispatch, she discusses what she would revise eighteen months on, the competing forms of manhood she calls transitional masculinities, the shift from institutional repression to character assassination, the women contesting rules at the door rather than in public, and why she reads the new order as saturation without consolidation.

(Please note that Substack allows readers to listen to articles by clicking the “play” button in the top-right corner of the article.)

What the Fall of Assad Did Not Undo

The Syria Dispatch: Your book was published right as the regime fell, and you’ve said you couldn’t celebrate holding it in person. Looking back at the thesis now, with eighteen months of post-Assad material to test it against, is there anything in Romanticizing Masculinity in Baathist Syria you would revise, or has the transition mostly confirmed what you argued?

Rahaf Aldoughli: The central argument of the book was that masculinity in Baathist Syria was not a byproduct of authoritarian rule but one of its instruments. For more than five decades, a particular configuration of manhood was enforced from above and eventually internalized by loyalists. It was a state masculinity that supplied the terms of national identity, of belonging, and of loyalty; crucially, loyalty to Assad rather than to Syria. Manhood was the currency used to pay for political legitimacy.

That was the claim: masculinity as an authoritarian tool used to upgrade and sustain the regime’s authority, not merely masculinity as an outcome of authoritarianism.

What I would not revise is the claim that none of this ended with the regime. The book was entirely about the form of masculinity manufactured under Assad, not about the opposition masculinity that was also being generated over the long war since 2011. But the fall of one authority does not dissolve a fusion of gendered identity, survival, and authority built over fifty years. Removing the man who sat at the top of it does not remove a gendered identity that has been manifesting and being internalized.

Syrians are not now facing the residue of a regime. They are facing a whole political culture in which masculinity operated simultaneously as a source of legitimacy and as a strategy of survival. And it is that culture, more than any particular institution, that will hinder the prospects for civic building.

What I would extend is the assumption that this repertoire was Baathist in any deep sense. I treated it in the book as a specifically Baathist formation, tied to the party, the army, the cult of the leader. Eighteen months later, what strikes me is its portability. The fighters I have interviewed were not regime men. They were fighting the regime. And yet they articulated honor, moral injury, protection, and the obligation to die for the collective in an idiom the Baathist state had spent fifty years institutionalizing. The opposition inherited the political culture it was fighting.

So if I were writing the book now, I would frame it less as a Baathist pathology than as a technology of rule, a way of ruling.

The second extension is mechanism rather than scope. The book gives you masculinity as a structure: a configuration of practice, in Raewyn Connell’s sense, sustained institutionally and from above. What it underspecifies is how a norm becomes an obligation that a man experiences as his own. That requires attention to the affective and moral processes—humiliation, moral injury, shame, the desire for repair—through which a structural condition is converted into a felt duty. That is what I have been working on since, and it is what the book’s image of a reservoir was gesturing at without fully specifying.

The Syria Dispatch: Your mention of ‘portability’ echoes what I have heard about the many areas of continuity between the previous and current administrations. We usually expect revolutions to produce a total break with what came before. Yet in many areas we see continuities: the use of the penal code, the cybersecurity law, documented cases of torture under the new authority. Does the same hold for broader social and societal dynamics imposed and exploited by the state, such as masculinity?

Rahaf Aldoughli: Definitely. There has been a rupture in terms of political structure. The structure is completely different from the one Assad ruled through. But that does not mean we have a different political culture. The culture that cultivated this form of masculinity is still operating, only under different attire, under a different suit.

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Was the Baathist State Ever Secular?

The Syria Dispatch: In your book, you write that religious tradition “never appeared to be the main problem” (p.8) for women under Baathism, because the state was officially non-religious and restricted public religious expression. Under the new authorities, religion is actively promoted, from the Ministry of Endowments’ daʿwa campaigns to restrictions on gender-mixing and makeup. Has the main problem genuinely shifted from secular-nationalist militarism to religious authority, or is religion supplying new packaging for the same underlying masculinist logic?

Rahaf Aldoughli: I am always cautious when I get this question, because it can be answered in a way that flatters a secular-versus-religious framing that I do not think holds.

Two things need separating: whether Syrians are culturally religious, and whether the Assad state could tolerate free religious expression. The answer to the first has always been yes for the majority. The answer to the second is no.

Baathism was never indifferent to religion. It managed it. It co-opted particular currents, especially the Damascene Sufi traditionalist networks, of which Ahmad Kuftaro is the obvious case in the early 2000s. But after 2011, it did far more than manage it; it manufactured loyal Sunni constituencies to rally for its survival, producing a fissure between the loyal Sunni and the opponent who could be filed under takfiri or terrorist. It built an institutional architecture to make that permanent: Decree No. 16 of 2018 subjected every imam and religious teacher to state accountability, and the Mufti’s office was folded into the state apparatus, which converted political dissent into doctrinal defiance. Assad claimed, in his own words, to be correcting fourteen centuries of false interpretation of Islam.

That is not a secular state. That is a state asserting what I call doctrinal sovereignty: the claim that it decides what legitimate Sunni belief is.

It also left Personal Status Law—the single most consequential body of law for women’s lives—under religious jurisdiction, and essentially unreformed since 1953. Baathist secularism was public, and it was thin. Inside the family, it never arrived. So when I wrote that religious tradition was not the main problem for women under Baathism, I was writing about the axis of public conflict. I was not claiming that the legal order was secular.

The regime could not allow free religious expression because it always felt insecure as a state ruling a Sunni majority it could not credibly claim to speak for. That is precisely why it co-opted a particular Sufi Sunni current with no political ambition that could threaten Assad’s rule.

The Syria Dispatch: And what changed after the fall?

Rahaf Aldoughli: There was a euphoric feeling among the majority. Sunnis long attached to their religious practice, and to an activism against the regime that had been conducted in a religious idiom, felt they had finally been recognized. The new authority played a significant role in cultivating that feeling. We saw public displays of prayer on a scale Syria had never seen.

My reading is not that Syrians suddenly became more religious. In a survey of a thousand Sunni respondents living in regime-controlled areas, conducted between 2022 and 2024, before the regime fell, respondents did not express any substantive trust in the regime’s fatwa council, and nearly two-thirds preferred a plural religious authority to a single state-appointed one.

What has changed, in my opinion, is that religion has become available to the new authority as an instrument of recognition and legitimation. The packaging has changed, and the mechanism has changed. The logic has not. Both orders assert custody over the criteria of belonging. What differs is the idiom and the instrument.

The instrument is the interesting part. The Baathist project was legislated: decrees, curricula, codified doctrine. Which meant it could be contested, precisely because it had been articulated. The present configuration proceeds through circulars, governing directives, sermonic guidance, and daʿwa campaigns run by actors the state neither endorses nor suppresses. Under Assad, the state declared itself secular in explicit terms. Al-Sharaa has never said in an official statement that Syria is a Sunni state.

The new authority does not face the threat to its representation of the Sunni majority that the old one faced. Think of the early 1970s, when Hafez Assad needed Moussa Al-Sadr’s ruling that the Alawites belonged to Shiism and Shiism to Islam, so that he could be a legitimate ruler of Syria. The current authority has no equivalent problem.

But it remains chaotic. The state has not yet built its ideology, or its national narrative. That is still ambiguous, not transparent, not clear—perhaps because, given where the current authority comes from, it needs to show the West, the regional powers, and the public that it has divorced itself from its past. It may simply be too early to see what the new authority’s project is.

So, is religion playing a greater role than before? Yes, definitely. We see it in the Ministry of Endowments. Under Assad, the ministry was focused on producing a Sunni loyal to the state, to the Syria Assad was manufacturing, but it never intervened in the private sphere, in what people wear and do not wear. Now we see the ministry giving lectures on what a good or pious woman should wear.

I had a personal experience of this. When I visited the Ministry of Endowments, I was required to wear a hijab before meeting the minister. I was visiting a state institution, not a mosque, and my body was policed by that institution.

At the same time, I cannot say that this is only top-down. There is also a bottom-up dimension: Syrians wanting to express themselves as Sunnis who won the revolution. The two now work and interact together. So under Assad, certain forms of Sunnism were permitted in the public sphere. Under the current Ministry of Endowments, we see more pressure on what a good Sunni should be in the private sphere, which we didn’t see before.

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Transitional Masculinities

The Syria Dispatch: So would you say the key shift is not from a secular state to a religious one, but from one form of state-controlled authority to another, with religion providing a new language for the same underlying structures?

Rahaf Aldoughli: Definitely, yes. I have started calling what is emerging ‘transitional masculinities’, because I am seeing several forms at once, not only a state masculinity.

We see the polished, presentable image of a former Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) commander who is now very well dressed, in an expensive suit, attentive to his appearance. His masculinity has shifted from the fighter who wanted to win the revolution to the state-builder. These are men who are welcomed not only by Western media but by Western policymakers and diplomats, and who make their own visits to Western capitals.

Then we see another form: fighters, revolutionary fighters, who fought against Assad and still do not feel they have been recognized. That relates directly to what has happened over the last eighteen months. Take the SDF integration agreement between Mazloum Abdi and Al-Sharaa. Tribal Arab fighters look at that elite bargaining at the top and see that their grievances have not been met. Their integration into the Ministry of Defense or the Ministry of Interior remains incomplete. Loyalty over competence remains in both ministries. Fighters who came from HTS receive their salaries regularly; fighters from the SNA or other factions do not.

So we are talking about revolutionary fighters, Sunni fighters, who feel that what has been achieved in Syria has not brought them the recognition they expected. The moral injury is still there. That is what I call ‘grievous masculinity’ and ‘combat-driven masculinity’. Grievous masculinity is about a fighter feeling that everything he paid, all he sacrificed, has not come to fruition with what he wanted to achieve.

Most of these men were not fighting for money. They were fighting for a moral cause. In the years when it was a stalemate, and Syria had disappeared from the news feed, I would ask them why they were still fighting, and the answer was moral.

Because the two ministries are not structured properly, and because the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) process is not being handled well, this form of transitional masculinity could undermine Syria’s stability. The masculinity we might see under the new authority is still taking shape. It depends on which trajectory Syria heads towards: an inclusive, plural Syria, or a state that recognizes only HTS cadres.

What Does This Mean for Women?

The Syria Dispatch: With women making up around 20 percent of National Dialogue participants, one woman among 23 ministers, and 22 of 210 MPs, should transitional masculinities be understood as fundamentally man-centric: men working out what they are and what they will become, with women disregarded? Or is there something in it for women?

Rahaf Aldoughli: There are two things to say.

First, I regret not researching Kurdish female fighters, because this is an important component. The Women’s Protection Units are being integrated into the Ministry of Interior, and I have seen women training there. A whole security unit for women is being built. That is good news.

But I worry that it comes as an accessory: something that pleases Western criteria. And it is still early days to know whether this is an empowerment of women, or whether these women will be used to police women even further. Without oversight from the government or the parliament, without independent institutions and an independent judiciary, women’s security units can be used against women.

That is at the state level. When it comes to what transitional masculinity means for women in the private sphere, I am also guilty of not having expanded my work into what it means for women to live in a society of militarised masculinity. There is research in other contexts — Colombia, India, Ghana — asking what the emergence of armed groups means for women’s lives, for women in the private sphere, for the wives of fighters and commanders. There is definitely an outcome. Women face extra subordination when they live in a highly militarised society.

And we have already seen it in official statements. When spokespeople were asked why there are so few women in the Parliament and in state institutions, most of the answers came in sarcasm. One said that men now need their own feminism, because Syrian men still do not feel recognized.

This is exactly what happens after long years of armed conflict. Armed men come and sit around the negotiating table, each one gets his position, and women are left at the sidelines. Hundreds of armed factions have been dissolved and absorbed into state institutions, and the incentive given to those men is to stay silent, because if they were not absorbed into the two ministries, they might endanger Syria’s stability.

Women will not have an armed group and rally for their rights using guns.

I am not saying that Europeans or Western stakeholders should come and campaign for Syrian women’s rights. But without that pressure, women would be left out entirely, as in other examples around the world.

A Meal in the Northeast

The Syria Dispatch: Based on the information you have gathered during your fieldwork interview with a large number of male fighters, do you think Kurdish women can actually be accepted into the Ministry of Interior? These female fighters seem to represent a double clash: these are women disrupting what these men see as the natural order, but these are also women they were fighting until recently.

Rahaf Aldoughli: I heard a funny story from a man who is now in the Ministry of Interior. It was during the early days after Ministry of Defense forces were allowed into the north-east, in the first stage of meeting female Kurdish fighters.

Days before that, on social media, men were saying that it was shameful for men to accept these female fighters telling them what to do. The masculinity was running very high: we will kill them, we will not allow them; who do these heval (female comrade, in this context), think they are?

And then he told me: I was sitting with a heval, and I was very hungry, and she made me zaatar with oil, and we ate together.

I am not giving you a policy analysis. But that small incident tells you something. Men whose masculinity has come full circle into recognition—men who feel they fought for a long time and are now in a good position—are more able to accept this. A man whose masculinity is frustrated is not. A fighter from the SNA might still say he would rather shoot her.

I do want to add that international pressure played a very positive role here. In the mediation between European stakeholders and actors on the ground, the Europeans worked hard to prevent a military confrontation. They were not neutral, but they pushed both parties to sit around the negotiating table. Difficulties lie ahead, but this is a milestone.

Why Speaking Out Feels Different Now

The Syria Dispatch: You’ve previously mentioned to me that you have become far more cautious about what you post now than you were under Assad, when you were more outspoken. Can you say more about that shift?

Rahaf Aldoughli: Under Assad, the risk was legible. You knew who your adversary was, you had a reasonable sense of where the lines fell, and the cost was borne largely by you and was knowable in advance. Speaking out also had a community attached to it. Criticizing the regime placed you within a shared moral position, so it conferred standing rather than costing it.

We knew what the price was. In 2020, they held my father for eight hours, and he told them he did not know where I was, that I had left the family completely, that he had disowned me. For those of us speaking from the diaspora, the highest price was not being able to visit Syria.

What has changed is not that the risk is greater because it is, in some respects, smaller, but that it has become diffuse and social rather than centralized and political. Since Assad’s fall, outspoken criticism does not make you institutionally liable in the same way. Instead, public figures face character assassination. It started the minute Assad fell, with social media figures close to the authority, people with millions of followers, beginning to target critics.

The instrument now operates through networks rather than institutions: coordinated online campaigns, questions about who funds you, whether you are really Syrian, whether you spent the war comfortably abroad, and what your morals are. There is no institution to appeal to and nothing that can be formally answered. You are no longer fighting a political regime; you are placed in front of society and culture.

The charge has changed, too. Under Assad, the accusation was treason against the nation, and that you were a terrorist, an Islamist, an agent of Israel or America. Among the opposition, that functioned almost as a credential. Now the accusation is betrayal of the revolution, or betrayal of a fragile hope; the argument being that criticism at this moment serves Syria’s enemies and that one ought to wait. That lands differently, because it comes from people whose politics you share and whose losses you respect, and because it fractures the community that dissent used to create. I would say that it is this, rather than fear, that has changed how much I post.

The old regime also never said anything about our reputation as women, about my private life or my morals. Now the attack is on your reputation, your cultural background, and your work. Character assassination has become a form in itself for silencing women, men, and activists.

There is also a fear I cannot always rationalize, and a tangible one alongside it. Many of us do not want to be barred from going to Syria again, and I have seen several friends, women, targeted in exactly this way. So I am always cautious about writing criticism in Arabic now. If I write it in English, a specific audience will read it, and it becomes less applicable. I have had many invitations to comment on events in Arabic on Syrian channels, and I say no, because during the interview, I would be watching what I say. I don’t think it is just me. Many Syrian women are doing the same.

The Women You Do Not See

The Syria Dispatch: You also said that less publicly visible Syrian women may be navigating power on the ground with more resilience and courage than academics or public figures. What have you observed there?

Rahaf Aldoughli: The first point is structural. Those women are less exposed, and visibility is what makes character assassination efficient. A woman without a public profile has less to lose in that particular currency, which paradoxically gives her more room to act.

What I have found more striking, from my communications with women navigating this daily, is that their resistance is not declarative. It takes place at the point of enforcement. Segregation at the Umayyad Mosque, segregation in the judicial system, and dress requirements introduced in offices and institutions. These are contested at the door, in the corridor, at the desk, by individual women who argue, negotiate, delay, comply selectively, or persuade the man in front of them not to apply the rule that day. Some of the most effective work I have heard described consists of women talking to security men and convincing them.

I would not treat that as a lesser form of politics. It is the form that actually changes what happens, precisely because these restrictions are administrative and discretionary rather than legislated. They depend on individual enforcement, which means they can also be undone individually.

There is a body of theory that describes this. Deniz Kandiyoti’s account of the patriarchal bargain captures the negotiation-within-constraint quite precisely, and Asef Bayat’s work on social non-movements and the quiet encroachment of the ordinary describes dispersed, uncoordinated, cumulative action of exactly this kind.

Who Gets Access

The Syria Dispatch: Does that mean foreign researchers and activists have more freedom to work on Syria than Syrians do?

Rahaf Aldoughli: Of course. Take the early welcoming of scholars with certain Western affiliations, because the authority wanted to send a message through those affiliations. It was not keen to meet independent Syrians.

We have seen Western academics visit Syria and be welcomed, and even hailed and celebrated for writing on Syria. I have heard from them that they feel they can pass messages without being investigated. The assumption seems to be that a Western scholar will know less than a Syrian scholar and can be more easily managed. My Western colleagues and friends know very well that some of this amounts to whitewashing and legitimizing the authorities. But it gives them access, a good reputation in their policy work, and access not only to the current authority but to Europeans as well. It runs both ways.

For me, this goes back to my fieldwork. In the early days, when I first got access to fighters and commanders, a Western scholar would be asked which university they came from, where they would publish, and whether they would end up portraying their interviewees as terrorists or jihadis. With me, they asked whether I was Sunni or not. It was surveillance over what I believe, treating me not as a scholar but as a person who might get emotional in interpreting. They were working out which side I was on.

And a Syrian cannot be told that we cannot have inclusivity because Syria is a masculine society. I know Syria has been a masculine society for millennia. That is not something new. You may convince someone else with that narrative. You will not convince me.

Who Hardens, and Who Defects

The Syria Dispatch: Your forthcoming book tracks fighters’ motivations before and after Assad’s fall, including follow-up interviews after the coastal massacres and Suweida. Can you say more about the typology you are building? What made some fighters harden, and others defect?

Rahaf Aldoughli: The starting point is the distinction between the two formations. Grievous masculinity is organized around an injury, which means it requires an object. Combat-driven masculinity is organized around a practice, which means it requires an arena.

That distinction does a good deal of work after December 2024. Men in whom the grievous formation dominated tended to re-target: the regime disappeared, but the injury did not, and it migrated onto whoever could be made to stand in for the old order. Men in whom the combat formation dominated were less ideologically fixed but more easily reactivated, and their loyalty followed the unit and the commander rather than the cause, which is one reason they can be led out of an institution and then led back into it.

But the variable that actually sorts hardening from defection, on my material, is recognition. The transitional period produced a very specific situation. Men whose entire biography had been organized around a costly past arrived at the moment when that past was supposed to be honored, only to find the honor distributed to a narrower group. The message of man yuharrir yuqarrir (من يحرر يقرر)—‘he who liberates decides’—was effectively conveyed to a fighter who had served since 2014, been displaced repeatedly, and lost family members: he belonged among the liberated rather than the liberators because he had not taken part in the final operation. Add the age criteria that disqualified men over thirty from enrolment, and recruitment that ran on factional loyalty rather than qualification, and you have recognition withheld at scale.

What that produces is not the adaptive recalibration the reintegration literature would predict. It produces defensive intensification. The identity sharpens rather than dissolves, and it reaches for whatever materials the war years made emotionally available, which in this case means a specifically Sunni vocabulary of sacrifice and vindication.

The second axis, and the one I would still want to test properly, concerns whether a man has an alternative masculine biography available to him, because that is what makes exit possible. A man with a profession, an education, a trade, a standing in his community that predates the war can leave the institution and still be a man. A man for whom fighting constituted the whole of his adult selfhood cannot, because leaving would dissolve the self. One fighter from Douma put this to me directly: after all those years, he had known nothing in life other than belonging to the revolution, and if he could not be in the army, where could he be? He also said the marginalization felt harsher than Assad’s violence, because it came from the comrades of pain. That is not a man weighing options. That is a man with nowhere to stand.

The Wardrobe Changes, the Claim Does Not

The Syria Dispatch: In your MERIP piece, you compared Al-Sharaa’s staged persona to the Cuban hombre nuevo archetype. Has that self-fashioning changed as he has spent more time performing statesmanship internationally, or has it stayed remarkably constant?

Rahaf Aldoughli: My reading is that it has not changed so much as stratified, which is a different process.

When I wrote the MERIP piece, I described a deliberately hybrid form of self-fashioning: militant and diplomatic at once, pious and modern, Sunni but not Salafi. We saw Al-Sharaa enter the Aleppo Citadel in military dress, drawing on the iconography of the conquering man and adopting the name Al-Fatih (الفاتح), the Conqueror. We then saw him appear before the armed factions in January to announce their dissolution, relocating legitimacy away from party or ideology and concentrating it in a single male body: the ruler presented as the man capable of disarming other men and absorbing their political and military standing. Alongside this was another Al-Sharaa: suited, clean-shaven and composed, performing the language and demeanor of the technocratic statesman in international interviews.

What the past eighteen months have done is not replace the martial register with the statesman’s register, but allocate these registers to different audiences and political spaces. The suit belongs increasingly to foreign capitals and international broadcasters. The mosque, Eid prayer, and post-dawn address speak more directly to the domestic constituency. And then there are moments such as the December 8, 2025, parade, with its Umayyad symbolism, when the martial register is deliberately reactivated, reassuring the base that the revolutionary and conquering figure has not disappeared beneath the suit.

The wardrobe changes, but the underlying claim remains remarkably consistent: authority is embodied in a singular masculine figure capable of containing, disciplining, and ultimately absorbing the standing of other men.

Who Owns Sunnism?

The Syria Dispatch: Your forthcoming book Who Owns Sunnism is where the concepts of sectism and hyper-Sunnism come from. Can you walk me through how you arrived at that distinction?

Rahaf Aldoughli: What I am really trying to understand in this book is how sectarian identities in Syria have been produced, governed, and contested: by whom, through what institutions and mechanisms, and with what political consequences. I deliberately do not ask whether Syria is a sectarian society, because that question already presupposes what we need to explain.

I also do not start from the assumption that there is something called “the Sunni community” that behaves as a coherent political actor. Syrian Sunnis are Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens and Circassians; they are rural and urban, religious and secular, regime loyalists and opposition supporters. So, following Rogers Brubaker’s critique of groupism, I treat Sunnism less as a bounded group than as a site of contestation: a category through which religious identity has been governed and mobilized, but also one through which different actors have competed to define authority, authenticity and belonging.

What I found, looking at state–religion relations under Assad, is that the regime was doing something much more ambitious than simply controlling religion. It was trying to intervene inside the Sunni religious field and establish the authority to determine what legitimate Sunnism looked like. I call the outcome of this project ‘Conformist Sunnism’. The regime cultivated particular religious authorities, institutionalized particular forms of religious practice, and marginalized others. It was not simply a secular authoritarian state confronting religion from outside. It became an actor within the religious field itself.

But the book’s bottom-up material (interviews, surveys, and other primary research) shows the limits of that project. The state could regulate institutions and reward particular religious actors, but that did not mean it had acquired the religious legitimacy or consent it sought. That distinction between institutional control and religious authority became very important to me.

This is what led me to develop the concept of ‘sectism’. By sectism, I mean the persistent struggle within the Sunni field over who has the authority to define authoritative Sunnism: who is a proper Sunni, who can speak in its name, and how theology, political power, and political interest interact in producing claims to religious authenticity.

I draw here on Talal Asad’s understanding of Islam as a discursive tradition, constituted through arguments about the proper form of its own practice, and on Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the religious field as structured by competition over the authority to consecrate orthodoxy. Where I depart from much of the sectarianism literature is that it explains boundary-making between communities—Sunni and Alawi, Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Christian—but offers fewer tools for understanding the struggle inside one religious field.

And sectism did not begin with the Syrian conflict or with HTS. I see it as constitutive of the Sunni field itself. Conflict changes the intensity of the competition, the actors involved, and, crucially, the resources available to them. But it does not create the contest.

One argument I would most strongly defend in the book is that these two levels depend on each other. You cannot credibly mobilize Sunnis against an external communal threat until you have established some authority to say who “the Sunnis” are and what their interests are. Inter-communal mobilization depends upon prior intra-communal authorization. And what is fascinating about Syria is that nobody ever fully achieved that authorization.

You can see this very clearly in the opposition. The moderate-nationalist current produced documents such as the Aleppo Petition, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Covenant, the Islamic Council’s Five Principles and the Social Contract, which spoke overwhelmingly through the language of citizenship rather than Sunnism. But I argue that this was itself a sectist position. They were effectively saying: this is what proper Sunni politics should look like; authentic Sunnism is compatible with equal citizenship for all Syrians.

The hardline current offered a competing definition in which Sunnism becomes constitutive of the state. But I am very careful in the book about saying that this current won. It did not necessarily win the ideological argument. It won the court buildings. Where armed factions possessed coercive power, they established parallel courts, and people used those courts partly because their decisions could actually be enforced. That tells us something very important about state–religion relations: institutional dominance should not automatically be read as ideological consent.

The Syria Dispatch: And after December 2024? Is hyper-Sunnism moving towards consolidation into something more like an actual Islamist state project, or is “saturation without consolidation“ a stable equilibrium the authorities could maintain indefinitely?

Rahaf Aldoughli: What I am seeing is not straightforward Islamisation, and I do not think the evidence supports describing the new state simply as a Salafi project. “Hyper-” does not mean more Sunni or more religious. It describes a structural condition.

Sunni reference now saturates public life in ways that were impossible under Assad. We see it in sovereign performance, political language, public symbolism, institutional appointments, and the grammar through which authority presents itself. But no consolidated ideological or institutional program explains what all of this means for the state. That is why I describe hyper-Sunnism as saturation without consolidation.

And the absence of articulation is not incidental. It is part of the phenomenon itself. We do not yet have a coherent doctrine saying: this is the relationship between Islam and citizenship; this is where religious authority resides; this is the relationship between Sunni reference and the law; this is what the religious identity of the state institutionally entails.

That is the sharpest contrast with the Assad period. The Baathist project was extraordinarily interventionist. It operated through decrees, ministries, recognized religious authorities, institutional practices and publicly articulated claims. You could identify what the state was doing, and precisely because it was articulated, people could negotiate with it, resist it, or contest it.

What I am observing now is much more dispersed. Individual ministries, local authorities, religious actors, and political figures make interventions that accumulate without necessarily forming part of a single, centrally articulated religious program. No authority has yet established an uncontested capacity to regulate the Sunni field as the previous state attempted to do.

This is why I resist interpreting everything we are seeing as evidence of a coherent Islamist transformation. The absence of regulation is politically productive in itself. It allows multiple actors to invoke Sunnism, compete over its meaning and embed Sunni references across public life without resolving what an officially Sunni political order would actually mean.

So in a sense the book begins with the Assad state’s extraordinary attempt to govern Sunnism and ends with almost the inverse problem: what happens when the architecture that governed the religious field disappears, but the struggle over who has the authority to define Sunnism remains? For me, that is the central continuity across the regime’s fall. The actors have changed, the institutions have changed, and the distribution of power has changed dramatically. But the contest over who owns the authority to define Sunnism has not disappeared. It has become more visible.

Saddam in Old Damascus

The Syria Dispatch: You draw on an analogy some Sunni Syrians reportedly make between Al-Sharaa and Saddam Hussein’s model of masculine authority. Is that something you have heard directly and repeatedly, and is it made approvingly, critically, or both?

Rahaf Aldoughli: On my visits to Syria after the fall of the regime, photographs of Saddam Hussein were on display across old Damascus, which under Assad would have been unthinkable. That imagery was taboo, and its sudden visibility is itself the datum.

What it registers is not a governance preference but a symbolic attachment held in reserve for a long time. Saddam carries a particular charge in the imagination of many Syrian Sunnis, and what it condenses is a set of perceived grievances against Shia political and religious power.

A specific, local injury also lies beneath it. Under the previous regime, families were forced out of their homes in old Damascus, and those properties were transferred to Shia shrine complexes. That is not an abstract sectarian resentment. It is a dispossession with an address, and the people who experienced it are still there. So when the photographs appear in those quarters in particular, they are doing commemorative work about property and displacement as much as anything else.

And the timing is important. The rise of Saddam symbolism resonates with shifting regional dynamics, and I read its visibility as tracking that shift rather than expressing a considered political program.

Why Masculinity, and Not Feminism

The Syria Dispatch: You interview mostly men, and you work on masculinity rather than on women or feminism. Why?

Rahaf Aldoughli: The choice I made was never between gender and something else; it concerned where, within gender, the explanatory power lies in the Syrian case, and my answer is that it lies with the dominant category rather than the subordinated one.

Scholarship on women has told us a great deal about the effects of power, about who is excluded, who is harmed and what is foreclosed, but it is less well positioned to explain how that power is produced and reproduced, because the category doing the producing remains unexamined and therefore continues to appear natural rather than constructed. If one wants to account for how a regime governed Syria for five decades, why men fought in the ways they did, and why the structures that sustained them survived the collapse of the state that built them, then the dominant term has to become the object of analysis rather than the unremarked background against which analysis proceeds.

When I began interviewing fighters, I expected to encounter the incentive structures the literature assumes, whether material calculation, coercion or sectarian identification, and what the interviews returned instead was a vocabulary of honour, obligation, recognition, and moral injury, in which commitment was sustained far less by what men stood to gain than by what they understood manhood to require of them. Such a finding is not available from a research design that treats gender as a question only about women, and it is what led me to argue that masculinity in Syria is not a by-product of Baathist rule but one of its mechanisms, and that its structures have outlived the regime that produced them.

The same analytical gap runs through the study of sectarianism, which is where I have made the argument most directly. The field takes sect as the operative category and treats gender, on the rare occasions it appears at all, as a variable bearing upon women, and yet the mobilisation of sectarian identity in Syria works through claims about protection, honour and masculine duty, so that sectarianism read without gender appears primordial and inherited, whereas read through masculinity it becomes legible as a technique of rule.

None of this amounts to a dismissal of feminist scholarship, or of the Syrian feminist movement, which has achieved a great deal under conditions that make any achievement extraordinarily costly. My position is rather that we need a feminism generated from Syrian social conditions instead of transposed onto them, and that examining how masculine authority is constructed, legitimated and maintained forms part of building such a feminism rather than a departure from it.

The Syria Dispatch: But doesn’t that leave a gap in your work, then?

Rahaf Aldoughli: Yes, and it is one I now want to close: how this masculinity is affecting women, and especially the wives of central commanders.

I will give you two examples. In 2022 I was in Kilis, on the border, meeting the commander of Al-Jabha Al-Shamiya. It was in an apartment rather than an office, and since he knew I would be scrutinizing him, he brought a lawyer to make sure his answers were politically correct. When I asked him about women in his areas and how they were dealing with them, he said: “Doctora, we are completely pro-women’s rights. Do you know that we have asked our wives to launch an NGO to promote women’s rights?” And this was while I was telling him what I had heard from women activists: that their centers were being raided by his security men. So even that isn’t enough; these commanders can use women too. You see the complexity.

The other story is from the commander of the Third Corps. I always begin with the same questions: why did you join, how did you defect, what was the first feeling? He was from Hama, and he had been a military pilot. The first time the regime ordered him on a mission, he said he was ill. The second time, his wife told him that if he went, she would go outside unveiled and shame him. She told him she would rather receive him as a martyr than have him go and kill others.

He said it in passing. But for me, the gender component was enormous. His wife’s shaming forced him to defect and act manly.

We are grateful to Dr Rahaf Aldoughli for her time, openness, and generosity throughout this conversation.

Readers interested in exploring her work further can begin with Romanticizing Masculinity in Baathist Syria: Gender, Identity and Ideology (Manchester University Press, 2024), which she discussed at length in an interview with SyriaUntold. Her forthcoming books are Who Owns Sunnism, on sectism and the struggle over religious authority in Syria, and a study of Syrian armed groups and fighters’ motivations in the Syrian war.

Her recent writing on post-Assad Syria includes “Syria’s New Men: Masculinities and the Post-Asad Political Order“, the MERIP essay referred to above, and “Syria’s New Rulers Are Working To Unify Military Power“ in New Lines Magazine. Her academic work on fighters includes “‘The end of the revolution (al-thawra) but not revolutionaries (thuwwār)’: insights from Syrian fighters“, published in Conflict, Security & Development, and “‘Loyalism’ as masculinist identity politics: navigating the use of symbolic discourse in the Syrian war“, published in Contemporary Levant. On the Baathist state’s management of religion, see “Departing ‘secularism’: boundary appropriation and extension of the Syrian state in the religious domain since 2011“ in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and “Authoritarianism and the Emergence of Parallel State Dynamics: Evidence From the Syrian Earthquake“ in Digest of Middle East Studies.

Recent interviews and recorded discussions include “Syria remains an entirely masculinist state“ with L’Orient Today, “Al-Sharaa must be put under pressure“ with Qantara, and a talk on “End of the Revolution but not Revolutionaries“.

A fuller collection of her books, articles, and public-facing writing is available on her Lancaster University profile and her Google Scholar page.

For nearly fifteen years, Professor Wendy Pearlman has documented the experiences of Syrians living through revolution, war, displacement, and exile. Her 2017 book, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled, traced Syrians’ political awakening and the transformation of the uprising, while The Home I Worked to Make explored how displaced Syrians rebuilt their lives, identities, and sense of belonging across the world. Following the fall of the Assad regime and her return to Syria, Pearlman is now confronting a third and still-unfolding chapter. In this interview with The Syria Dispatch, she discusses the dangers of declaring Syria’s story finished, the complex relationships between those who stayed and those who left, why “return” is often a misleading word, and how encountering Syria as an actual place is reshaping her work as a researcher.

(Please note that Substack allows readers to listen to articles by clicking the “play” button in the top-right corner of the article.)

A Third Phase in the Syrian Story

The Syria Dispatch: Your work has moved from documenting Syrians’ political awakening in We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled to following displacement and home-making in The Home I Worked to Make. Has Assad’s fall opened a third phase in your work? What are you trying to understand now that neither of those books could have asked?

Wendy Pearlman: This new phase poses questions that I did not even imagine being able to ask, and that I think most of the people I interviewed did not imagine they might confront in their own lives.

I began interviewing displaced Syrians in 2012. I was interested in the Syrian uprising. And as I felt that it was too dangerous, or I was too afraid, to go inside Syria, I began interviewing Syrians who had left the country.

My interviews are very open-ended. I always say that I ask people two questions: “Do I have your permission to record?” and “Tell me about yourself.” And then people talk. My early interviews focused on fear, breaking the barrier of fear, and how people came to participate in protests. When I started the first book, I did not think there would be a second one. The story was “the uprising.” The uprising became a war, and the war led to displacement. That’s where the first book ends. I did not think that displacement would become so protracted, but as it did, new questions emerged about exile, home, and belonging. And when people spoke about belonging, they were not simply asking whether Syria was still home or whether a new place had become home. They were also saying: the world that I once knew has been shattered. Who am I amid all of this?

That is the focus of the stories in The Home I Worked to Make. It is a book about migration and exile, but also about making meaning in a context that people who identified with the uprising were regarding as defeat. It was written at a time when people were saying that Assad had “won”: the revolution had been defeated, the conflict was frozen, countries were beginning to normalize with Assad, and he seemed to have survived this tremendous challenge to his rule. One of the themes of the book is about moving forward in the face of that political reality. So, it is a heavy book that captures something of the mood of that time.

When the regime fell, it became clear that it would be premature to end there. A whole new and incredibly different chapter had opened. So, I said to myself, “Now these two books need to become a trilogy.”

The second book now makes more sense as the middle phase of the story: between the beginning of the revolution and the end of Assad. I am now happy that the second book captures what those years were like for so many Syrians, because that could otherwise get lost between the excitement of the revolution’s beginning and all the messiness of the current moment.

I still do not know what a third book about post-Assad experiences will look like because the situation is still tremendously dynamic, complex, and unclear.

People often speak of books having a narrative arc. My first book of Syrian interviews had a very clear arc from authoritarianism to the height of the revolution, and then to militarization, war, and displacement. The second book starts with what compelled someone to leave home and then passes through the stages of journeying, searching, losing, building, and gradually feeling that one might be in a place where it is possible to move forward.

I do not know what the narrative arc of the post-Assad era is. We know the beginning: the military offensive and the fall of the regime. But if I had to draw the shape of Syrian politics since December 8, 2024, I do not know what kind of line I would draw. Is it a curve? Does it go up and down like the heartbeat on a heart monitor?

Right now, we are in the middle of it. It is hard to know where the train is headed when you are on the train, and it is moving very fast. So, I might be working on this third book for several years to come. For now, my hope is simply to conduct as many interviews as I possibly can. This can be my call: I’m excited to speak with any Syrian, anywhere in the world, who might be interested in telling their story or sharing their perspective. I want to connect and collect, and then discover how the contours of the story become clearer with time.

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The Danger of Declaring an Ending Too Soon

The Syria Dispatch: You said that “it would be premature to end [the story] there,” which resonates with what you wrote in the introduction to The Home I Worked to Make. You emphasized that these stories, Syrians’ stories, have not ended. Assad’s fall may nevertheless tempt observers to impose an ending on the Syrian revolution and war: victory, return, reconstruction, or reconciliation. Which ending are people most in danger of declaring too soon?

Wendy Pearlman: I think we can definitively say that the Assad regime has ended and that we are in a post-Assad moment. But this is a political transition, and political transitions are very complicated. They are not necessarily linear. Transitions from authoritarianism do not necessarily move from authoritarianism to democracy.

There are all sorts of trajectories that many Syrians, and many of us watching Syria, hope Syria will experience: from authoritarianism to a pluralistic, democratic country governed by the rule of law and respect for human rights; from conflict to civil peace; from economic devastation to reconstruction and recovery; and from displacement to return—for those who want to return.

These trajectories may or may not happen in that way. Even if things eventually move in those directions, there may be stops, reversals, circularities, one step forward and many steps back. It could be a very long-term process. There is still a great deal to be contested and for Syrians to figure out together.

There are questions of national identity: What does it mean to be Syrian? There are questions of economic recovery: How will it happen, and on what terms?

Return is also a major question. Some people who were displaced have already returned. Some have not yet returned and want to return. Some do not. Some have returned and are wondering whether they made the right decision.

Human lives are so complex that there is no automatic path that is best for everyone. There is no single redemptive narrative in which what was wrong in the past will now be corrected in one specific way. These things will be worked out through interactive and complicated processes that are not predetermined.

Hope, Disappointment, and the Shape of the Post-Assad Story

The Syria Dispatch: There are indeed “all sorts of trajectories that many [Syrians] hope Syria will experience.” Thus, could this third phase of your work ultimately be a book about hope, about what Syrians hoped Assad’s fall would make possible?

Wendy Pearlman: There is certainly hope. Most people I speak with say that the worst is behind them and that nothing can be as bad as Assad. In that sense, there is absolutely a sense of possibility. Things are no longer stuck and can only get better than what they were.

During the early days after Assad fell, people asked: Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Many still struggle with that question. And as we speak in July 2026, you can talk to many Syrians who will speak about disappointment.

Those disappointments take many forms. There is disappointment with the slowness of economic recovery, inflation, the lack of jobs, the slow restoration of basic services such as electricity and water, and the slow pace of rebuilding housing.

There is tremendous pain caused by the violence that has happened since December 8, from sporadic and isolated incidents of kidnappings and killings to the sectarian massacres on the coast in March and in Suwayda in July. Identity-based violence has crushed some people’s hopes of what the post-Assad era would be. Disappointment is too mild a word to describe that.

There is hate speech and sectarian incitement online, and the fractures and divisions among citizens. Something I hear many Syrians speak about is the breakdown of friendships and close relationships over these issues, and especially over people’s reactions to the massacres. There are people who they love, who might once have been comrades in the revolution, and now they have been shocked at the things they have said and don’t feel like they can sustain those relationships anymore.

There is so much hope, but there is also already a great deal of pain. I think this pain needs to be acknowledged if the country is to move forward.

And this says nothing of people’s frustration with the slow pace of transitional justice and progress on the very difficult issue of getting information on the fate of people who were forcibly disappeared. The pain of family members still searching for their loved ones is unbearable. So, hope is an essential part of this phase, but there is also fear, sadness, and so much uncertainty.

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Can Syrians Still Build a Collective Narrative?

The Syria Dispatch: You have highlighted that Syrians emerged from the past fifteen years with profoundly different experiences. This echoes what Rime Allaf argued in a previous interview with The Syria Dispatch: that even Syrians who opposed the old regime often struggle to understand one another because they lived through completely different realities. In the absence of a single shared story, what might still allow Syrians to rebuild a common sense of belonging?

Wendy Pearlman: I think there are so many different ways of thinking about differences within Syrian society. There are differences of sect and ethno-religious background, but also between those who left and those who stayed, those who are staying outside and those who came back, those who lived under regime control and those who lived under rebel control, people in cities and people in the countryside, and people with different class backgrounds, ideologies, and levels of religiosity.

It is a tremendously complex landscape of people with different experiences who, because of politics, war, and distance, have not had full opportunity to encounter each other and understand one another’s experiences.

That is both the challenge and, potentially, the beauty and hope of this moment. If people can listen to one another, I imagine they will discover, first of all, that everyone has suffered.

Perhaps people have suffered different things in different ways. But I do not think anyone has made it through this reality that we call Assadism and this brutal war without some form of pain, loss, fear, and being denied something of their dignity.

What is dangerous is when suffering becomes a competition or a hierarchy: that is, when the focus is on who suffered most, or when acknowledging someone else’s suffering is seen as somehow diminishing one’s own.

It might sound very dark to say that suffering is a kind of common ground. But it can also be a space for healing. People who have suffered want what happened to them to be acknowledged and recognized. That is part of transitional justice. It is part of moving forward.

The idea here is not to create a new national identity based on suffering, but to cultivate a kind of dialogue that can allow people to meet one another, understand one another’s experiences, and build the empathy, sympathy, and respect that enable them to say: We are part of the same society, and there is space for all of us.

Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed

The Syria Dispatch: There are also important differences between those who left Syria and those who remained. Yet many displaced Syrians also shared remarkably similar experiences of exile. As they visit or move back, they are encountering people who experienced the past fifteen years very differently. What are they discovering about one another?

Wendy Pearlman: Every individual is unique, and therefore every story of displacement is unique. But certain themes and stages are shared by many people who were forced to leave.

There is the experience of leaving, how people got out, the journey itself, the danger, the smuggling, the expense, the risk, and the crossing of borders. Some people were able to board a plane and fly far away, but many landed first in a country neighboring Syria. Most people spent some time in Türkiye, Lebanon, or Jordan and, to a lesser degree, Iraq or Egypt.

Even people who eventually went further to Europe, North America, or Australia often still had a “Türkiye phase” or a “Lebanon phase” that allows them to understand the experiences of those who remained in those countries.

There are shared questions about dealing with the host society, discrimination and prejudice, learning a new language, finding one’s way, trying to get children into school, and finding work; probably work that was not what one was trained to do, and that one might feel was beneath their professional qualifications. You might have a university degree and be working in a textile factory in Türkiye. Or you might reach somewhere where your degree can be recognized, where you can find a path to financial and legal stability and, if you are lucky, eventually obtain another passport.

Those are phases of displacement that different people experienced in different ways, along with homesickness and ghorba (غربة).

Many people outside Syria had family members inside with whom they spoke to daily and, because of video calling, perhaps saw regularly on their screens. That technological connection could give people a sense that they were in close contact. But family members living in Syria might not have communicated certain things because they were afraid to speak openly on the phone, or because they did not want their loved ones abroad to worry, or because there were things that are simply impossible to put into words.

But now, as people from outside come back, whether to visit or to move permanently, there is a moment of discovering what they knew and what they did not know. In the interviews that I am gathering now, people talk about what they discovered in a new way when they arrived in the country and saw things with their own eyes.

For example, people describe being surprised by the degree of hardship. Everyone knows the statistics about the devastation of the country, the billions of dollars needed for reconstruction, and the hundreds of thousands of buildings that have been destroyed. Everyone has seen videos and photographs. But there is nothing like seeing it with your own eyes: kilometer after kilometer of destruction in some areas.

There are also the small details of daily life. I have heard many people say that, before returning, they did not fully realize what it was like to live without electricity or hot water. They knew these things intellectually: there is no electricity, there is no water. But they arrive and realize: my mother has been showering in cold water for years or not bathing at all. Now I understand what that means.

I heard an interesting anecdote from many Syrians who returned during the first months after Assad’s fall. They would arrive at their parents’ or relatives’ homes and find that all sorts of things were broken and had not been repaired.

They would say: “Mom, this window is broken and cold air is coming in. Why don’t you fix it? This has not been repaired in fifteen years.”

Those who stayed might be thinking: First, we do not have the resources to repair these things. Second, why bother fixing it? It is just going to get broken again. Third, perhaps there was no longer a sense of the future that made a long-term investment in fixing those types of things feel worthwhile.

For somebody coming from outside who had not been living in that reality, this could be a shock. These small details provide windows into the world of the person who remained: What was their life like? How did they see themselves in the world? How did they see their own rights, dignity, and aspirations?

So, I think there is a process of mutual discovery between those who left and those who stayed. People are discovering one another and discovering themselves.

The crucial thing, I think, is that all people have been changed by what Syria endured. It might be easier for us to imagine how somebody who was displaced changed because they were forced to deal with a new society, learn a new language, confront a new environment, and adapt. Someone who had to survive in Türkiye and then Germany is obviously going to be a changed person.

It is easy to imagine that those who remained instead became stuck—that they were preserved in formaldehyde. But, of course, those who stayed also changed with every phase of politics, war, and economic crisis.

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Is “Return” Really Return?

The Syria Dispatch: Syrians may cross back into the same country or town, but they are not returning to the same neighborhoods, institutions, family structures, or versions of themselves. Does the word “return” mislead us? Could going back to Syria be understood as another form of migration?

Wendy Pearlman: You have taken the words right out of my mouth. “Return” is not simply an oversimplification. It is actually misleading.

“Return” implies going back to what was. And that is not possible. In any context, no person can simply return to the past. And in the Syrian context, there are the layers of other change that have been forced upon people. Given the scale of destruction, a displaced person who is “returning” may find that their house no longer exists. Their entire neighborhood or town might have been so badly destroyed that they no longer exist as it once did. Many of the people who lived there and made it the community it was might have also been forced to leave, or people who were forced to leave their homes elsewhere might have relocated there.

Materially and socially, the community might have changed. And you have changed as a person, and whoever remained has also changed. And you are entering a political and social reality that is changing by the minute. Everything is in flux: a political system is forming itself, laws and institutions are being created, and access to power and resources is shifting.

“Return” also becomes a microcosm for many internal debates. Displaced Syrians are grappling with incredibly difficult decisions about where they and their families should make their lives. They are dealing with nostalgia, family obligations, economic challenges, and uncertainty about where Syria is headed and what their lives might be like if they move there.

There are also enormous questions of identity: Who am I? How have I changed? Where do I feel that I belong after a decade or more outside the country? Where will I be able to achieve my aspirations? Where do I feel most at peace?

It is asking a lot of the word “return” to capture all of this. And on top of that, the word is problematic because it has become such a buzzword in countries with large populations of displaced Syrians. These are often countries that are quite eager to get rid of their refugee populations.

We see anti-refugee and anti-migrant sentiment all over the world. We see political parties competing over who can be most anti-refugee, and opinion polls showing that people want refugees and migrants to “go home.” Return is a political football that politicians kick around.

In Türkiye, Lebanon, and across Europe, you hear people asking, “Will Syrians return?” It is often a disguised way of saying: How do we get rid of the refugees whom we did not want in the first place?

It would be interesting to eliminate the word return and instead say “migrate again.” Instead of asking Syrians in Türkiye, “Are you going to return home?” people could ask, “Are you going to migrate again?”

At least that would acknowledge that what people are doing is actually very hard. It is as difficult as another migration. People are not simply going back to where they were and picking up life from where they left it. They are going to a new place, as a new person, to build a new life.

“Return” implies that this is easy. You simply fall backward. It does not take effort, initiative, creation, or rebuilding. It is the default right option; things naturally go back to where they are supposed to be.

In reality, it is an undertaking of creation, change, and building, no less than what it took for people to establish their lives in exile in the first place. It is not easy. Nor is it necessarily any more natural than remaining where one was forced to seek refuge.

Return should not be assumed to be what people want, what they need, or what is best for them. That is a decision people must be able to make for themselves.

Can a Homeland Be Inherited?

The Syria Dispatch: In “Dear Syria,” you describe children who have moved with their parents to what is, for them, an unfamiliar country. Can a homeland be inherited? What might Syria mean to a generation whose connection to it was formed mainly through family stories, language, food, loss, and memory?

Wendy Pearlman: Some children were born in Syria but left at such a young age that they do not have clear memories. Young adults might have only bad memories of violence, war, and fear.

And millions of children were born abroad, meaning that they have never set foot in Syria. They would be “returning” to where they have never been. The country of exile is the only home they have ever really known. That is another reason to criticize the language suggesting that refugees should simply “go home.”

These children might not speak Arabic, or their Arabic might not be at the level they need for school. They are moving from one school system and curriculum to another. They may be going from one quality of life and set of norms about their physical environment to another, from having electricity to not having electricity, or from living somewhere with parks to somewhere with rubble and destruction.

On the other hand, they might be discovering an entire extended family that they did not have during displacement, and that might be wonderful. They might be relieved to leave a situation of prejudice, discrimination, and bullying.

For example, last summer, I spoke with school-age Syrian boys in Türkiye who could not wait to move to Syria with their families, even though they had no memories of Syria. The bullying in Türkiye was so severe that they simply could not stand living there anymore.

So just as it might be difficult moving to Syria for the first time, these children might also be leaving extraordinarily difficult circumstances. That is the reality of a generation that has been forced to confront so much hardship at such a young age, and from so many different directions.

The larger questions—what does homeland mean, and what does home mean?—are terrific questions. What I came to appreciate in writing The Home I Worked to Make is that home is a tremendously dynamic and multidimensional concept.

For some people, home is a place. For others, home is not a place; it is a feeling, people, experiences, memories, or a sense of comfort or possibility.

Home is always changing. That is true not only for a Syrian who has experienced dramatic displacement and war, but for any person in any setting. Whatever home meant to you as a child might be different from what it means at later stages of your life.

Home and homeland will continue to change for this generation of refugee children as well. What they are experiencing now might mean something completely different to them in five or ten years.

From an Imagined Syria to Syria as an Actual Place

The Syria Dispatch: You visited Syria in 2008 and then did not return until 2025. What was it like to visit Syria after Assad’s fall?

Wendy Pearlman: When I returned in 2025, many Syrians asked me: “What has changed since 2008? What do you see differently?” But my frame of reference was not the Syria I had visited in 2008. I was comparing the Syria that I was discovering in 2025 with the Syria I had constructed in my imagination after fourteen years of interviewing Syrians abroad.

I came to know Syria, or to feel like I knew Syria, through the interviews I conducted. The 2008 visit was a relatively short touristic trip. It did not leave the impression on me that years and years of talking to Syrians did.

As I write about in my essay “Dear Syria,” those conversations led me to construct a kind of imagined Syria in my mind. Syria became larger than life to me. Every aspect of it was heavy with the meaning of war, dictatorship, and revolution.

That is why it felt so important to see Syria with my own eyes, and why it remains important to continue going back: to develop a relationship with Syria as an actual place where people live, and not only as the scene of these enormous political struggles.

Of course, it should not be a surprise that Syria is also a place of everyday life. But knowing that and experiencing it firsthand are emotionally different. It is an incredible privilege for me to be able to experience that now.

How Entering Syria Changes the Research

The Syria Dispatch: Has being able to experience Syria directly changed how you approach the country as a researcher, the kinds of questions you ask, the conclusions you draw, or the way you interpret the testimonies you gathered abroad?

Wendy Pearlman: I think I am still figuring that out. I am still in a state of semi-shock that all of this is possible.

I have spoken with Syrians who say that even now they sometimes wake up and cannot believe that it really happened. They ask themselves: Is Assad really gone? Absorbing the enormity of it is a gradual process.

For all those years, I knew that basing my research on only interviews with Syrians who had left the country was incomplete. In my academic work, I wrote many times that the people I interviewed were not a representative sample of the Syrian polity.

But it was still easy to slip from interviewing only displaced persons to drawing conclusions or making claims about Syria as a whole.

My first book is composed entirely of interviews with Syrians who left the country, but it is a book about the uprising and the war, in general. It tries to be a book about Syria. Now I have to take a step back and ask: How might the book have been different if it included the voices of people who remained? What did I miss? What might I have misunderstood? What questions did I fail to ask? What stories did I not hear?

Everyone I interviewed had spent most of their lives in Syria. But when they described their experiences in Syria, they were not narrating their actual lives at that moment. They were narrating memories of a life different from the one they were currently living. They were speaking from the outside. Did being outside color their memories? Unconsciously or consciously, did it shape what they said or did not say to me?

Also, I was not able to see them living their lives in Syria. I only had their stories—the narratives that they chose to put into words.

I could observe aspects of their lives in Türkiye, Lebanon, Jordan, Germany, and the other places where I met them. I could develop a feeling for displaced communities because that was something I could experience with all my senses. I could ride minibusses, visit homes, hear conversations, and see people in the contexts that they were living in.

But when they described their lives in Syria, all I had were words. That is not at all about people being honest or dishonest. It’s simply about the complexity of memory, narration, and place.

I still need to grapple with whether there are conclusions or ideas that I developed over the years that I now need to reevaluate. I know there are gaps in my knowledge and understanding. I am still discovering what those gaps are, and I think I need to spend much more time in Syria to appreciate them.

When going to Syria was not an option, it was perhaps easier to know intellectually that these gaps existed but ignore them. Now, there is no excuse to ignore them. You can at least try to fill them.

That is both a wonderful opportunity and an obligation for many of us who analyze and research Syria for a living.

We are deeply grateful to Professor Wendy Pearlman for her time, openness, and generosity throughout this conversation.

• Readers interested in exploring her work further can begin with her books We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, and Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee Speaks Out.

• Her recent writing on post-Assad Syria includes the personal essay “Dear Syria …”; “Syria One Year After Assad,” co-authored with André Bank and Marc Lynch as part of the wider POMEPS volume Syria After Assad; From ‘Refugee Crisis’ to ‘Integration’ to ‘Return’? Conceptual Lenses in the Study of Syrian Displacement and Diasporisation, published in International Migration; Genocide in Syria, Gaza, and Beyond: An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh, published in the Journal of Genocide Research.

• Her recent recorded discussions include “Understanding Syria”, “Making Sense of Syria”, and a book talk on The Home I Worked to Make.

• A fuller collection of her books, essays, and public-facing writing, academic research, and interviews is available on her website.

More than fifteen years after the start of the Syrian revolution and less than two years after the fall of the Assad regime, Syria finds itself confronting a question that goes far beyond politics: how does a society rebuild after decades of authoritarian rule, war, displacement, and fragmentation? In It Started in Damascus: How the Long Syrian Revolution Reshaped Our World, Syrian writer and policy adviser Rime Allaf argues that understanding Syria’s future requires first understanding the lived experiences that shaped its past. In this interview with The Syria Dispatch, she discusses why she wrote the book, how life under the Assad regime shaped everyday behavior and social relations, the importance of memory and justice, and the opportunities—and risks—facing Syria’s post-Assad transition.

(Please note that Substack allows readers to listen to articles by clicking the “play” button in the top-right corner of the article.)

Why this book, and why now?

The Syria Dispatch: After decades of writing and commenting on Syria, what made you decide that now was the right moment to write and publish It Started in Damascus? Looking back, was there a particular moment that convinced you that Syria’s story needed to be told in this form?

Rime Allaf: The book was always in the back of my mind. Throughout the years, especially at the beginning of the revolution, a couple of people in the business approached me and asked whether it was time. But I never felt it was the right moment. At the time, I was very intellectually and emotionally involved in what was happening in Syria. I felt that, to write deeply about something like this, you needed perspective. You needed a little bit of distance.

I began thinking more seriously about the project around 2019–2020. By then, the hopes many people had held were fading. We had already gone through so much. Idlib was becoming the focus of attention, and then the pandemic happened. In some ways, that should have been the perfect opportunity to write. Everybody was sitting at home. But I still wasn’t ready.

The moment that changed everything came in May 2023. I was staying with friends in Geneva. The idea of the book was there. The concept was there. But I still hadn’t committed to writing it. Then I was watching the news and saw Bashar Assad being welcomed back into the Arab League in Saudi Arabia.

Without any doubt, that was the moment.

It felt like a dagger in my heart. It felt like an affront to the intelligence of Syrians. After everything that had happened, after all the destruction, the suffering, the displacement, the deaths, it suddenly felt as though the world was saying: “That’s enough. Let’s move on.”

And I thought: no. The story isn’t over.

People had lost interest in Syria. There were surprisingly few books being written. The country was disappearing from public debate. Yet from my perspective, the Syrian story was far from finished.

So I decided that I had to write it.

The proposal was sold a few months later, and I was supposed to deliver the manuscript in January 2025. By the end of November 2024, I was around 90 percent finished. The entire structure of the book was already there. Most of the manuscript was written.

Then the military operation began in northern Syria.

I remember writing to my agent and my publisher. At first, I simply told them that something important was happening and that we should keep an eye on it. A few days later, I wrote again and said: “They’re at the doors of Hama. I can’t write anymore.”

When the regime fell, like many Syrians, I simply stopped functioning normally. I spent days glued to multiple screens. I was crying for hours watching events unfold. Many Syrians experienced something similar.

What is important to understand, however, is that the fall of the regime did not change the book itself.

I didn’t go back and rewrite it. I didn’t suddenly turn it into a book about the collapse of Assad. The only part that changed significantly was the final chapter. The original conclusion was going to argue that Syria’s story was not over, despite the international rehabilitation of Bashar Assad. After December 2024, obviously, that chapter had to be rewritten.

But the central argument remained exactly the same.

This was never a book about the Syrian revolution itself.

It is a book about why there was a Syrian revolution.

That distinction matters enormously.

Too often, people begin their analysis of Syria in 2011. They focus on the revolution, the war, the Islamists, the foreign powers, the geopolitics. But if you do not understand what Syrians lived through under Hafez Assad and Bashar Assad, if you do not understand the restrictions, the fears, the frustrations, the hopes and disappointments that shaped everyday life, then you cannot fully understand why people rose up in 2011.

And I think that problem still exists today.

Many people have returned to discussing Syria primarily through geopolitics: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, the Islamists. But Syria is also a society. Syrians are not all the same, but they lived through many of the same structures of repression. If we don’t understand that history, we cannot understand why Syrians behave the way they do today.

“It” Started in Damascus

The Syria Dispatch: The title of the book is deceptively simple. You have said that this is not primarily a book about the revolution itself. So what exactly is the “it” that started in Damascus? Is it the revolution? A longer struggle for dignity? Or something else entirely?

Rime Allaf: Hope.

Or perhaps more precisely: the conviction that a normal life was finally possible.

You discover this very early in the book because the opening chapter begins with the death of Hafez Assad in June 2000.

What people often forget today is just how much expectation surrounded that moment.

Many observers look back and say, “Well, Bashar Assad arrived and people were naïve.” But that interpretation misses something important.

The Syrian people were exhausted.

They had lived through three decades of Hafez Assad. They had experienced a system of extraordinary control and restriction. They were not dreaming of grand political transformations. They were not expecting Western-style democracy. They were asking for something much more modest.

They wanted a normal life.

This is one of the reasons I insist that Syria cannot simply be compared to every other Arab dictatorship. Every authoritarian system is different. The Syrian experience was unique in many ways.

People today sometimes forget how restrictive everyday life could be.

For years Syrians could not import cars. Everyday goods were unavailable. People spent enormous amounts of energy trying to secure basic necessities. The state inserted itself into countless aspects of ordinary life.

When Bashar came to power, many Syrians genuinely believed that this would change.

What started in Damascus was not simply hope in an abstract sense. It was the conviction that Syria was finally beginning a journey toward normality.

People looked at neighbouring countries and thought: perhaps we can be like that. Perhaps we can have a little more freedom. A little more economic opportunity. A little more dignity.

And that conviction also explains something else that is often forgotten.

It explains why Bashar Assad initially enjoyed so much support.

People weren’t supporting him because he had already proven himself to be a reformer. They supported him because they desperately wanted to believe that change was possible. They invested enormous hopes in him because they had already waited so long.

That, ultimately, is what “started in Damascus.” It was the belief that the future could finally be different.

A Chronicle, Not a Memoir

The Syria Dispatch: The book has been described in different ways: part history, part memoir, part social chronicle. Yet you’ve pushed back against some of those labels. How do you think readers should understand the book? And how did you navigate the balance between personal experience and historical analysis?

Rime Allaf: I usually describe it as a chronicle.

People often call it part memoir because I appear in the book. I insert myself at the beginning of many chapters. I tell stories from my own life. I recount moments that I witnessed personally.

But I don’t really think of it as a memoir.

If it were a memoir, I would have written a memoir.

The reality is that I am present in the book primarily as a guide for the reader.

I often compare it to a theatre play. Sometimes a narrator steps onto the stage, explains where we are, introduces the scene, and then disappears while the story unfolds. That’s essentially my role in the book.

The focus is not on me. The focus is on Syria.

The reason I chose this approach is because I wanted the book to be accessible. I did not want to write something that felt like an academic text. I wanted someone with no prior knowledge of Syria to be able to pick it up and stay engaged.

The target audience was never specialists or historians.

It was my neighbours. My friends. People who hear about Syria, hear about Syrian refugees, hear about the war, but don’t necessarily understand how we got here.

That’s why the personal anecdotes matter.

They provide an entry point.

At the same time, they are also representative. Many of the stories I tell are not important because they happened to me. They are important because they illustrate how Syrians experienced life under the Assad system.

In fact, there is far less of me in the book than people might imagine. I left out far more than I included.

The book moves between the personal, the social, the cultural, the political, the regional and the international. It explains what the Assads did inside Syria, but also in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere. It follows different themes across different decades.

That is why I call it a chronicle.

It is not a rigid history, even though it contains history. It is not a memoir, even though I appear in it. It is an attempt to tell a larger Syrian story in a way that remains accessible to ordinary readers.

I wanted readers who knew nothing about Syria to arrive at the revolution and think: “Now I understand why this happened.”

That was always the objective.

Beyond Politics: Why Everyday Life Matters

The Syria Dispatch: A review of your book by Syria in Transition argued that one of its strengths is the way it examines Assadism not only as a political system, but through the lens of everyday life and lived experience. Why was it important for you to focus on those dimensions rather than solely on institutions, ideology, or political events?

Rime Allaf: Because for decades Syria was analysed almost entirely through geopolitics.

People spoke about Syria as a strategic actor. They discussed alliances, negotiations, wars, regional balances, peace talks, and security questions. Syria was treated as a geopolitical file.

What was largely ignored was the lived experience of Syrians.

There was an assumption that Syria was simply another Arab dictatorship, that all authoritarian systems in the region functioned more or less the same way. I reject that entirely.

Even Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was different. Saddam committed terrible crimes, but he also invested in infrastructure, education, and public services at first. Syria under the Assads was a different kind of system.

One of the chapters in the book is called Banana Politics. People laugh when they hear the title, but it reflects something important. Syrians spent years dreaming of giving a banana to their children. A banana.

This was not because Syria was naturally poor. Syria was not a poor country. It was because scarcity became part of how the regime governed.

People outside Syria often don’t understand what daily life was like. They hear about intelligence services and repression, but they don’t understand the countless small restrictions that shaped ordinary existence.

For years, people struggled to obtain basic goods. You could not simply start a business. You could not move freely. You could not speak freely. You could not trust freely.

The regime wanted people focused on survival.

When you force people to spend their lives worrying about obtaining basic necessities, navigating bureaucracy, securing employment, or avoiding trouble with the authorities, you leave them with little space to think about politics.

And that is why everyday life matters.

The regime did not only control institutions. It shaped behaviour.

When children entered school, they immediately entered the Baathist system. Every morning they repeated slogans. They learned which opinions were acceptable and which were not.

The point was not necessarily ideological conviction. Most people were not committed Baathists. The point was social conditioning.

Eventually, people adapted.

They learned how to behave. They learned how to survive. They learned what could and could not be said.

That is one of the reasons I wanted to focus on daily life. Because if you don’t understand how people actually lived, you cannot understand either the revolution or what followed it.

What Remains of Assadism Today?

The Syria Dispatch: In previous interviews, you’ve spoken about how Syrians learned to “pretend” under authoritarian rule—that performance, conformity, and self-censorship eventually became second nature. Since returning to Syria after the fall of the regime, what aspects of Assadism have struck you as most persistent? What legacies do you think will be the hardest to overcome?

Rime Allaf: This is one of the most difficult questions facing Syria today.

What people often overlook is that Syrians are no longer a society that has lived through a shared experience.

We all experienced Assadism, but we did not all experience the revolution and the war in the same way.

For me, one of the most important distinctions today is not between Sunni, Alawi, Christian, Kurd, or Druze. The more important distinction is between Syrians who spent the last fourteen years in different environments.

There are Syrians who remained under regime control.

There are Syrians who rebuilt their lives in Europe, where they learned new languages, entered new institutions, and experienced different political systems.

There are Syrians who spent years in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, or along the Turkish border.

There are Syrians who lived in opposition-held areas and experienced entirely different forms of governance.

These are radically different experiences.

When people speak about rebuilding Syria, they often focus on physical infrastructure. Roads, electricity networks, housing, water systems.

But there is another infrastructure that was destroyed.

The social contract.

Trust between people.

Trust in institutions.

Trust in the future.

For decades under Assad, people learned not to trust.

They learned to be careful with what they said, whom they spoke to, and how they behaved. Then came the revolution, displacement, war, exile, and fragmentation.

Today, even Syrians who oppose the old regime often struggle to understand one another because they lived through completely different realities.

The challenge is not simply that Assadism created fear.

It is that Assadism destroyed the foundations upon which trust is built.

That is why I become frustrated when people reduce Syria’s problems to sectarianism.

Sectarian tensions exist, of course. But for me, sectarianism is often a symptom rather than the root cause.

The deeper issue is that millions of Syrians have emerged from radically different experiences and now have to rebuild a country together.

That is an enormously difficult task.

Fear, Memory, and Justice After Assad

The Syria Dispatch: Can a society stop being afraid simply because the regime that produced the fear has disappeared? More broadly, how should Syrians remember the Assad era? Is justice primarily about trials and accountability, or is it also about preserving memory and understanding how the regime shaped society?

Rime Allaf: We need both.

We need memory, and we need justice.

The stories of Syrians need to be documented and preserved. We need more Syrian voices telling what happened, because there are still too many aspects of Syrian life that remain misunderstood.

But memory alone is not enough.

There must also be accountability.

One of the things that worries me today is the sense of unresolved injustice.

Many Syrians still do not understand what is happening with former regime officials, former perpetrators, or the broader accountability process.

Part of the problem is communication.

The government may have reasons for the decisions it is making. Perhaps there are practical constraints. Perhaps there are legal constraints. But people need to understand the process.

There needs to be a vision.

There needs to be an explanation.

There needs to be a conversation with Syrians about what justice is going to look like and what is realistically possible.

Because if people feel that everything is being decided behind closed doors, resentment begins to accumulate.

And this matters because justice is not simply about punishment.

Justice is also about restoring trust.

It is about demonstrating that the rules have changed.

It is about showing people that the future will not function according to the same logic as the past.

At the moment, I think one of the government’s weaknesses is communication.

For the most part, Syrians are trying to understand major political developments through rumours, social media, Facebook posts, and word of mouth.

That is not sustainable.

Communication is not a cosmetic issue.

It is a state-building issue.

People need to understand where their country is going.

They need to understand why decisions are being made.

And they need to feel that they are part of the process.

Without that, rebuilding trust becomes much more difficult.

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Is 2026 Another 2000?

The Syria Dispatch: Many Syrians remember the optimism that accompanied Bashar Assad’s arrival in 2000. Today, after the fall of the regime, there is once again a sense of possibility. What feels different this time? And are there lessons from the disappointments of 2000 that Syrians should keep in mind today?

Rime Allaf: I actually disagree quite strongly with the comparison.

I understand why people make it. Both moments are associated with a sense of hope and the possibility of change. But I think the similarities stop there.

The Syria of 2000 had not experienced what Syrians have experienced over the last fifteen years.

The revolution, the war, the displacement, the destruction, the abandonment by much of the international community—these experiences fundamentally transformed Syrian society.

The other major difference is external.

For the first time in decades, there is broad agreement among regional and international actors that Syria needs to be stabilized.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar, much of the Gulf, and large parts of Europe all understand that the collapse of Syria has been enormously costly. They may not all have the same vision for the country, but they broadly agree that another collapse would be disastrous.

This was not the case in 2000.

Today, there is a much stronger support structure around Syria.

Part of that is because everyone wants refugee returns. Part of it is because everyone wants stability. Part of it is because the region has seen what happens when Syria collapses.

I also think there is a greater sense among Syrians themselves that this opportunity cannot be wasted.

The price paid over the last fifteen years has simply been too high.

That does not mean success is guaranteed. Far from it.

But I do think the circumstances today are fundamentally different from those that existed when Bashar Assad came to power.

Communication, Legitimacy, and the New Syria

The Syria Dispatch: During our conversation, you repeatedly returned to the importance of communication. Why does this matter so much for Syria’s transition?

Rime Allaf: Because communication is not simply a public relations issue.

It is part of governance.

One of the frustrations many Syrians feel today is that major decisions are being made without sufficient explanation.

People often do not understand why certain policies are being adopted, why particular individuals are being appointed, or how the government intends to address questions of justice and accountability.

That creates uncertainty.

To be fair, I think the current authorities are often listening to public reactions. We have seen examples where criticism emerges and adjustments are made.

But listening is not the same thing as communicating.

Communication means explaining decisions, outlining objectives, sharing constraints, and involving people in the process.

Many Syrians today are learning about major developments through Facebook, social media, and rumours. That is not healthy.

A government needs to talk directly to its people.

One of the reasons I commented on Ahmad al-Sharaa’s public apology after the controversy surrounding his father’s remarks was precisely because it showed another side of leadership.

The apology itself was important, but what interested me more was the willingness to acknowledge that people were offended and to address the issue publicly.

For decades, Syrians lived under a system where rulers never admitted mistakes.

That does not mean symbolic gestures are enough. Ultimately, institutions matter more than symbolism.

But symbols matter too.

Political cultures do not change overnight. Sometimes a small gesture can signal that a different relationship between rulers and citizens is possible.

The challenge is ensuring that these gestures are eventually translated into institutions and practices that endure.

Syria’s Greatest Test

The Syria Dispatch: Much of the discussion about Syria today focuses on reconstruction, sanctions, investment, governance, or geopolitics. Yet transitions often succeed or fail for reasons that are less obvious at the time. What do you think will ultimately determine whether Syria’s transition succeeds or fails?

Rime Allaf: Justice.

Not revenge. Justice.

I think Syrians need to feel that what happened to them matters and that there is a meaningful process of accountability.

That does not necessarily mean putting every perpetrator on trial. But it does mean showing people that there is a path forward and that the future will not simply reproduce the injustices of the past.

At the same time, people need something much more basic.

They need a normal life.

And this is something that connects directly back to the beginning of the book.

When Hafez Assad died in 2000, Syrians were not dreaming of grand ideological projects. They wanted normality.

Today, after everything they have endured, they want the same thing.

They want housing.

They want electricity.

They want water.

They want jobs.

They want schools.

They want to know that their children will have a future.

If Syria can provide that, then I think there is reason to be optimistic.

And I am optimistic.

Despite everything, I remain optimistic.

The circumstances are difficult, but there is also an extraordinary opportunity.

The challenge is transforming that opportunity into functioning institutions, accountability, and a social contract capable of bringing Syrians back together.

That is what will ultimately determine whether this transition succeeds.

What Does the World Still Misunderstand About Syria?

The Syria Dispatch: Throughout your book, you challenge many of the assumptions that outsiders have made about Syria and Syrians. If there is one thing you wish both Syrians and the rest of the world understood better about Syria today, what would it be?

Rime Allaf: That Syria is not a geopolitical abstraction.

Too often, Syria is discussed through the language of states, alliances, sects, armed groups, and foreign powers.

Of course those things matter.

But Syria is also a society.

The revolution did not emerge from nowhere. Nor did the transition that followed.

Both are rooted in the lived experiences of millions of Syrians.

If we want to understand where Syria is heading, we must first understand what Syrians lived through under the Assads, how those experiences differed during the years of war and displacement, and how they continue to shape the choices people make today.

That, ultimately, is what I hoped to capture in It Started in Damascus.

Because before we can understand the revolution, we have to understand why there was a revolution in the first place.

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