The conflict that has unfolded in Syria since 2011 represents more than a civil war; it signifies the disintegration of the social and political foundations of the state. As of 2025, the situation cannot be described either as a conventional “post-conflict transition” or as a phase of post-war reconstruction. Rather, Syria is experiencing a prolonged crisis of state reconstitution, in which the constitutive principles of sovereignty, legitimacy, and the monopoly of violence are being redefined, yet have not crystallized into a stable form. To grasp this crisis, analysis must move beyond the declared positions of actors and instead focus on historical continuities, structural constraints, and reciprocal strategic choices.
Under the Baʿathist regime, the modern Syrian state functioned not merely as a repressive authority but as a political order in which violence was centralized and social relations were reproduced through security-based hierarchies. Studies on Baʿathist state formation demonstrate that the regime relied not only on coercive apparatuses but also on patronage networks, rural–urban alliances, and selective mechanisms of integration[1]. When this structure collapsed, it was not only political authority that disintegrated but also the regime governing the distribution of violence. In the post-2011 period, violence did not disappear; rather, it circulated among multiple actors. The state’s monopoly over violence fractured, yet no new legally grounded monopoly was constructed in its place. What emerged was not a weak state in the Weberian sense, but a multi-layered configuration in which both sovereignty and power are fragmented and distributed across different levels and actors.
By 2025, this fragmentation has entered a new phase. With the dissolution of the former regime, a renewed claim to central authority has emerged, pushing Syria toward a moment of re-centralization. However, this re-centralization has not proceeded through legal or political inclusivity, but through a logic of security and exception. Rather than suspending law altogether, the state is being reconstituted by subordinating law to security imperatives. As a result, the state of exception ceases to be temporary and becomes a constitutive technique of governance.[2]
The sectarian violence that has erupted in recent months in Homs and along the coastal region constitutes not a marginal development but one of the constitutive indicators of this process. The bombing of an Alawite mosque in Homs in December 2025, followed by deadly protests in the Latakia and Tartus corridor, reveals that the emerging security architecture classifies communities not on the basis of citizenship but through categories of risk[3]. These incidents are less the result of the spontaneous politicization of sectarian identities than of a state reconstitution process in which certain communities are coded as security threats. In a context where security becomes the primary principle of governance, violence increasingly replaces political negotiation as a mode of communication.
At this point, limiting the discussion to the concept of sovereignty alone proves analytically insufficient. While sovereignty refers to a normative framework grounded in claims to unity and legitimacy, power denotes the concrete capacities through which this claim is exercised, via institutions, security apparatuses, and social coalitions. The crisis unfolding in Syria today is fueled by the tension between the reassertion of sovereignty and the question of how power is to be distributed. Accordingly, the conflict is shaped not only around the question of “who is sovereign,” but also around whether power will be centralized in a single authority or shared through plural and institutionalized arrangements. Within this framework, the position of the Kurdish political field should be read not as a claim to sovereignty, but as a political intervention aimed at reconfiguring power in plural and safeguarded forms.[4]
Here, Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ʿasabiyya offers an illuminating perspective.[5] ʿAsabiyya refers not merely to kin-based solidarity, but to the collective fabric of legitimacy and political will that sustains political order. The crisis in Syria today reflects the erosion of older forms of ʿasabiyya and the failure of new ones to become institutionalized. When the state attempts to fill this void through security apparatuses alone, it may generate short-term compliance; however, governing without recognizing collective political will renders the political order structurally fragile.
This fragility is most pronounced in northeastern Syria. The agreement signed between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Damascus on 10 March 2025, frequently described as “integration,” in fact reflects a deferred conflict over both the nature of sovereignty and the distribution of power under that sovereignty. While the text foregrounds the unity and indivisibility of the Syrian state, it contains no binding legal guarantees regarding the future of local governance or security structures.[6] This ambiguity transforms integration from a political compromise into a potential mechanism of liquidation.
For this reason, the question of northeastern Syria should not be framed as a normative debate between “unity” and “autonomy,” but rather analyzed through the structural disjunction between the military and political logics of integration. From a military perspective, integration appears largely unavoidable. The SDF’s military capacity remains structurally dependent on the presence and logistical support of the United States; should this support weaken, the sustainability of the existing security architecture would be severely undermined[7]. In addition, Turkey’s ongoing military pressure and the persistent threat of cross-border operations continually increase the military costs of maintaining a durable multi-centered armed structure in the region. Under these conditions, integration emerges as a military necessity.
Yet this same integration process is politically unsustainable in its current form. In this regard, the position of Kurdish actors should not be understood as passive hesitation, but as a stance adopted in response to uncertainties surrounding the legal and political framework of integration. Without disregarding the military imperatives involved, the SDF and the broader Kurdish political field have consistently emphasized the risks inherent in an integration process devoid of political and legal guarantees. Consequently, the Kurdish approach to integration prioritizes the quality and terms of the process rather than its speed. This orientation should be interpreted, independently of individual intentions, within the context of accumulated experience and historical memory concerning the political consequences of similar integration efforts in the post-2011 Middle East.
Whereas Damascus conceives integration as the re-establishment of sovereignty through a singular and centralized chain of command, the Kurdish political perspective advances a model of multi-layered sovereignty in which local political and security capacities are not entirely dismantled. This divergence does not concern a technical administrative arrangement, but rather constitutes a historical dispute over how the modern Middle Eastern state is to exist. Comparative regional experiences indicate that the integration of armed and political actors without legal guarantees tends to produce short-term suppression and, in the medium term, renewed cycles of insurgency[8]. Accordingly, even if integration in northeastern Syria is militarily unavoidable, it carries a significant potential for renewed rupture in the absence of political safeguards.
Interpreting this process as a purely bilateral negotiation would therefore be misleading. Turkey’s position constitutes a structural component of this conflict. Ankara’s stance toward the SDF is shaped not only by border security concerns, but also by a broader objective of preventing the regional institutionalization of Kurdish political subjectivity. In this respect, Turkey functions as an external actor that reinforces Damascus’s centralizing tendencies. This does not render Kurdish actors passive. On the contrary, the Kurdish political field operates as an active political subject seeking to balance Turkish military pressure against Damascus’s centralization demands. As a result, the northeastern file ceases to be a question of bilateral integration and instead becomes a matter of regional regime security. [9]
In this context, statements issued by Kurdish political representatives should be understood not merely as normative calls for peace, but as concise expressions of a strategic reading of the current crisis of state reconstitution[10]. The emphasis placed on the implementation of the 10 March agreement does not signal a rejection of integration per se, but rather a warning against an integration process driven by a logic of liquidation rather than negotiation and political guarantees. This stance indicates that Kurdish political will positions itself not only defensively, but as a constituent actor in the reconfiguration of political order.
At the international level, the approach adopted by Western actors has been oriented less toward resolving this crisis than toward rendering it manageable. Normalization steps taken by the United States and Europe toward the new authorities have not proceeded in tandem with mechanisms of transitional justice or accountability[11]. From the perspective of international law, this reflects the reproduction of a classic disjunction between recognition and responsibility. When political recognition precedes legal accountability, impunity risks becoming not a temporary deviation, but a structural feature of state reconstitution[12]. In this context, law is not excluded altogether; rather, it is instrumentalized through its subordination to security imperatives.
In conclusion, the situation confronting Syria today does not mark the closure of a war, but raises the question of how violence will be reorganized within a new political order. Current trends point toward the reassertion of a centralized security state. Yet unless this trajectory is supported by mechanisms of legal equality, political representation, and collective will, it is more likely to reproduce new cycles of conflict than to generate stability. Syria’s future will ultimately be shaped by whether sovereignty is reconstructed through coercion or through negotiation that recognizes plural political subjectivities. Syria’s future will be shaped not only by whether sovereignty is re-established through coercion or negotiation, but also by whether power under that sovereignty is reorganized in centralized forms or restructured in ways that recognize plural political subjectivities.
Rüştü DEMIRKAYA
Board Member, International Mojust Foundation
PhD Candidate, University of Geneva
[1] Hinnebusch, R. (1990/2021). Authoritarian power and state formation in Ba‘thist Syria. Routledge.
[2] Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception. University of Chicago Press.
[3] Reuters. (2025, July 16). Why Syria’s sectarian mix poses a dilemma for its new rulers. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/syrias-sectarian-mix-dilemma-new-rulers-2025-07-16/ (30.12. 2025) and Le Monde. (2025, Decembre 29). En Syrie, des violences meurtrières lors de manifestations dans des régions alaouites. https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/12/29/en-syrie-des-violences-meurtrieres-lors-de-manifestations-dans-des-regions-alaouites_6659707_3210.html (30.12. 2025)
[4] Krasner, S. D. (1999). Sovereignty: Organized hypocrisy. Princeton University Press. And see also Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1976) and also Migdal, J. S. (2001). State in society: Studying how states and societies transform and constitute one another. Cambridge University Press.
[5] Ibn Khaldûn. (1958). The Muqaddimah: An introduction to history (F. Rosenthal, Trans.; 3 vols.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1377)
[6] Syrian Arab News Agency. (2025, March 10). Agreement signed to integrate SDF into institutions of the Syrian Arab Republic. https://sana.sy/en/local/349228/ (30.12.2025)
[7] Congressional Research Service. (2025). Syria: Transition and U.S. Policy (Report No. RL33487). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL33487 (30.12.2025)
[8] Lacher, W. (2019). Libya’s fragmentation: Structure and process in violent conflict. I.B. Tauris. See also: Staniland, P. (2014). Networks of rebellion: Explaining insurgent cohesion and collapse. Cornell University Press.
[9] Bozarslan, H. (2014). Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. Cambridge University Press. See also: Bozarslan, H. (2024). The Kurds and the Middle Eastern state of violence. Brill.
[10] İlke TV. (2025, 30 Aralık). Abdullah Öcalan’dan Türkiye’ye Suriye çağrısı: Kolaylaştırıcı ve yapıcı rol üstlenin. İlke TV. https://ilketv.com.tr/abdullah-ocalandan-turkiyeye-suriye-cagrisi-kolaylastirici-ve-yapici-rol-ustlenin/ (30.12.2025)
[11] U.S. Department of State. (2025, November). Syria sanctions waiver briefing.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/11/sanctions-relief-that-gives-the-syrian-people-a-chance-at-greatness(30.12.2025) See also updated version at December 2025:
https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/934736/download?inline (30.12.2025)
[12] Teitel, R. G. (2000). Transitional justice. Oxford University Press. Bunun yını sıra aynı zamanda şu çalışmaya da bakılabilinir: Sikkink, K. (2011). The justice cascade: How human rights prosecutions are changing world politics. W. W. Norton & Company.
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