When rebel forces seized Damascus on 8 December 2024 and toppled the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, it was impossible not to share in the euphoria over the end of 54 years of brutal dictatorship. After more than a decade of civil war, rebel forces began the offensive that finally brought down the regime, showing Syrians that nothing is permanent, not even dynasties. Political transformation finally came because the regime’s backers withdrew their protection and Assad’s deeply demoralized army collapsed. The essay explores the challenges facing Syria’s new leadership under Ahmad al-Sharaa, including sectarian tensions and the destabilizing influence of Western sanctions and Israeli military interventions. Whatever comes next, this chapter of Syrian suffering is over, though the complexities of transitional justice and the devastating sectarian violence that erupted in March 2025 cast uncertainty over Syria’s future.
When rebel forces seized Damascus on 8 December 2024, toppling the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad (2000–24), it was impossible not to share in the euphoria over the end of 54 years of brutal dictatorship. Syrians immediately poured into the streets to celebrate, and social-media posts rejoiced that “forever had fallen” (saqata al-abad), proving wrong the regime’s longtime refrain that Assad, like his father and predecessor Hafez (1971–2000), was graced with “living forever.” The Assad family’s dynastic ambitions had crashed; the son’s son would not be taking over.
After more than a decade of civil war, the regime and its opponents, who had been fighting since the 2011 uprising, were locked in a stalemate. Then, in late November 2024, rebel forces began the offensive that finally brought down the regime — showing Syrians that nothing is permanent, not even dynasties. The Assad regime had maintained its power, in part, through harsh repression, running a large and notoriously barbarous detention system where thousands of prisoners endured unimaginable torture and cruelty. When the prisons were liberated, some of those who emerged were unaware that Hafez al-Assad had died almost a quarter-century ago; there were children born in captivity who had never taken a breath of outdoor air. Whatever comes next, this chapter of Syrian suffering is over.
“Where power has disintegrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence, “revolutions are possible but not necessary.”1 Often, however, disintegration comes only through direct confrontation; and even then, when power passes from the ruling regime to the street, someone or some group must be ready to pick up the reins and assume responsibility. This astute assessment captures something of the unpredictability, contingency, and sense of fragility of autocratic violence. While the possibility of authoritarian disintegration always exists, people must be willing to organize and exploit any opening that presents itself. Success is never guaranteed. But if the people are determined and act in concert with one another, something unanticipated, new, and political can surprise us. This is precisely what happened in Syria in late 2024.
Political transformation finally came after so many years of fighting in large part because the regime’s backers — Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia — withdrew their protection and because Assad’s deeply demoralized army essentially collapsed. Meanwhile, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that seized the territories the beleaguered troops ceded, was disciplined and well supplied. Moreover, by 2024, the people who had supported the regime in 2011, however ambivalently, were exhausted with the naked venality and cruelty of Assad’s kleptocratic rule.
I have written elsewhere about how, in the first ten years of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, the regime devised novel modes of ideological interpellation (borrowing from Louis Althusser) — that is, new ways of “hailing” (in the sense of calling) citizens into Syria’s autocratic system.2 Generally, ideology operates by making social and historical anxieties seem natural and inevitable, arousing desires while simultaneously putting them in check. It works through mechanisms that complicate any clear understanding of belief and unbelief, and generates ardent loyalty but also ambivalence. In the case of Syria, this ambivalence, between desire for reform and attachment to order, helped the regime to continually and successfully recalibrate its relationship to rule — until it did not.
The “Fantasy Bribe”
In doing its best to suppress the rebellion while depending on the seductions of status quo conventionality, the Assad regime produced an ambivalent middle — what Syrians would refer to somewhat derisively during the first years of the revolution as the “gray” people — that was invested in stability and fearful of alternatives. Thus, what might best be described as an ideology of the “good life” (following critical theorist Lauren Berlant [2011]) operated among key metropolitan populations to organize desire and quell dissent. Syria’s good life included not only the usual aspirations of economic well-being but also fantasies of multicultural accommodation and a secure, sovereign, and proud national identity. In the first decade of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, these visions and inducements to compliance, though unevenly shared and always in flux, defined the terms on which a neoliberal autocracy was created, sustained, and, in the face of the uprising, reconfigured.
Once the Arab uprisings arrived in Syria, the Assad regime’s carefully cultivated image as moderate, chic, and enlightened was exposed as a mere façade, behind which hid a brutality that brooked no dissent. Almost a decade later, the regime attempted to revive that reputation, perhaps having no other playbook on which to draw. A revealing photo-op of the first family in the summer of 2022 — with the president, first lady, and their three children strolling amid the ruins of war dressed in preppy, pristine clothes — betrayed an ideological strategy that, far from denying the heartbreak and loss of up to six-hundred-thousand dead, sought to appropriate it.
Yet many Syrians of various familial, ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds — both inside the country and in exile — recognized the tired narratives of the regime’s righteousness as grossly false. Amid the blatantly kleptocratic spectacle of the regime’s prosperity, the “fantasy bribe,” to use Fredric Jameson’s term (1979), had ceased to function as a rationale for political paralysis. Syria’s economy was in shambles and the country’s borders were being violated at will by Israel. Meanwhile, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah were on the ground shoring up a regime that, far from guaranteeing multi-sectarian accommodation, was killing its own citizens. People could no longer bear knowing who was responsible for most of the death and destruction and simultaneously disavow it.
It is impossible to predict with any confidence what will happen now that the Assad autocracy is over. The Lebanese sociologist Rima Majed wrote to me after returning to Damascus for the first time since 2009, saying that the city “feels like a wedding in[side] a funeral.” People have reclaimed public spaces, their newfound freedom of expression the joyous obverse of a half-century of repression. But the funereal pall is equally real — the pain of having lived under authoritarian rule intensified by the bloodshed and heartache that came once revolutionary promise gave way to the horrors of war. For the Syrian anthropologist Saphe Shamoun, returning to Aleppo was “like going home where no one was home.” This sense of the surreal, of euphoric disbelief that the nightmare was finally over combined with the agony wrought by years of disappointment and loss, is an irreducible aspect of what Syrians — and people like me, who have lived in and love Syria — are experiencing today.
The joy was palpable in Damascus’s al-Hamidiyeh market, where people lined up at the famed Bakdash ice-cream parlor and bought t-shirts celebrating liberation, and the new green, black, and white striped flag flew in place of the Baathist-era red, black, and white one. Torn down were the ubiquitous posters of Bashar al-Assad spouting outlandish slogans like the one about ruling “forever” that echoed those of his father’s reign; toppled were the statues of Hafez al-Assad and other symbols of power that had been rebuilt after being destroyed in the 2011 uprising. Adorning the entrance to the market is now a large, text-laden red banner without images of the new leader and with comparatively modest statements, proclaiming that “Syria’s sun has risen” and celebrating Ahmad al-Sharaa as the “leader” of the “heroic fighters” (al-mujahideen al-abtal).
A New Beginning
Syria’s new self-appointed president has so far shied away from reproducing a cult of personality, and with good reason. Claims of omnipotence remain tied to the Assads, inseparable from memories of the dynastic dictatorship’s iron-fisted control. Gone too are the insufferably lengthy presidential speeches with sycophants giving ovations on cue. Indeed, al-Sharaa has not done much speaking at all. On January 30, some friends and I waited hours for him to deliver his first televised address to the Syrian people. When he finally appeared, it was to offer a short statement that would be hailed on social media for its brevity and straightforwardness. In it, he hit many important notes — honoring the revolutionaries who took to the streets in 2011 and Hamza al-Khateeb, the thirteen-year-old boy who was tortured to death in Daraa that year; recalling the solidarity-inducing power of revolutionary songs; and paying homage to the martyrs who had sacrificed their lives for a better Syria. Al-Sharaa’s tone was humble, with none of the arrogance or bombast of the Assad years:
I address you today not as a ruler but as a servant for our wounded homeland, striving with all the power and will I have been given to realize Syria’s unity and renaissance; we should all understand that this is a transitional stage, and it is part of a political process that requires true participation by all Syrian men and women, inside and outside the country, so that we can build their future with freedom and dignity, without marginalization or exclusions.3
Concerning for some, however, was al-Sharaa’s use of the Islamic term shura in the context of convening a deliberative body to decide on institutional matters. Although the word refers to “collective decision-making” of one sort or another, and thus encompasses various kinds of consultative bodies, it has clear religious connotations. Al-Sharaa’s use of shura at least suggests a blurring of the division between religious and secular authority, as he just as easily could have chosen to use al-barlaman (parliament) or majlis al-nawab (house of representatives), either of which would have clearly signaled the new regime’s democratic intentions — and without the religious overlay that perturbed some Syrian secularists.
While some inside Syria worried about the HTS regime’s religious and dictatorial ambitions, many remained hopeful — and relieved. If loyalists and Syrians in the ambivalent middle had felt in 2011 that there was no alternative to Assad, by 2024 many had come to join the rebels, if only in the belief that anything or anyone would be better than what Assad’s regime had become. In the end, even soldiers who had served the regime throughout the civil war mostly surrendered without much of a fight. And members of the regime’s revolutionary guard were reportedly repulsed by Assad’s flight into exile. He simply abandoned them to their fate without even a parting word of thanks.
There is now an atmosphere of overwhelming relief across much of the country. Despite the recollections of those in Idlib who had lived under HTS rule of the organization’s brutality, and despite some eyebrow-raising political appointments, including the minister of justice, whose reputation for cruelty and militancy in Idlib seemed to betray the new regime’s commitments to inclusivity, Syrians are cautiously hopeful: Al-Sharaa is smart, capable of navigating complex situations with uncommon tact, and able to speak to multiple audiences. One woman who had remained in the country throughout the war told me, “If he can get the electricity up and running, he’ll be OK.”
The comment hints at the deep challenges facing Syria. The Western press has amply reported on the issue of minority rights and whether the new regime will respect them; pundits have also worried about sectarian tensions, which have flared up in places such as Homs and the coastal provinces. I will therefore focus on two issues that get less attention, and for which Western countries bear tremendous responsibility and thus have the power to change. First, the crippling Western sanctions that were imposed more than thirteen years ago have directly contributed to the suffering of ordinary Syrians. The new regime’s commitments to state-building can only be realized if institutions can deliver goods and services in return for allegiance and obedience. Over the last fourteen years, Syria has gone from being a middle-income country to a poverty-stricken narcostate, parts of which have been demolished by relentless bombing campaigns. Once-vibrant areas such as Douma and Mukhayam Yarmuk on the outskirts of Damascus have been reduced to rubble — with most of the surviving residents either displaced or living in homes that are structurally unsafe.
Second, the continued Israeli bombings inside Syria and occupation of several hundred square miles of Syrian territory undermine efforts to build institutions and guarantee citizens’ safety. The very day Assad fell, Israel’s army invaded the buffer zone adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and carried out aerial bombardments to diminish the Syrian army’s military capabilities, destroy its navy, and rid the country of chemical-weapons stockpiles. Israel unilaterally declared the 1974 border agreement between the two countries null and void on December 8, and what was initially coded as a temporary incursion for security reasons now seems likely to become an indefinite occupation. This seizure of territory and the repeated bombings — both widely condemned as acts of aggression and violations of international law — are not only illegal and terrifying, but also humiliating for the new state. The al-Sharaa regime has condemned the aggression but acknowledges that it does not, at present, have the means to resist.
It is worth noting that Syria historically identified as part of the anti-Zionist “rejectionist front.” But it became increasingly complicated for ordinary citizens who subscribed to that position to maintain it once the revolution broke out. Hezbollah — also part of the “resistance” (known as al-muqawama) — supported the Assad regime, even when it leveled largely Palestinian neighborhoods. At the same time, most Syrians continue to see Israel as a colonial settler state, and their commitment to Palestinian rights and a Palestinian state is unwavering.
The situation lays bare how vulnerable Syria is to the machinations of foreign powers. Although other countries are also meddling in Syrian affairs, Israel is the biggest regional bully at present. If Western powers, particularly the United States, lifted sanctions and took steps to rein in Israel, they could give the new Syrian regime a fighting chance to make good on its promises to rebuild the country and reestablish an inclusive sense of national belonging. Put bluntly, the sanctions and Israeli interventions are destabilizing Syria and risk propelling it back into dictatorship.
Hope for Justice?
Along with the jubilation and hopeful challenge of building a better future comes a lingering sadness for the many family members and friends who remain missing. Syrians have begun engaging in public activism for the disappeared, staging rallies where demonstrators hold up signs with their loved ones’ names and photographs in hopes that they might yet be found alive, or at least that their corpses can be recovered for proper burial. Efforts are also underway to preserve the archives of the Baathist state so that perpetrators can be held accountable and to document atrocities and produce oral histories so that the world — including those Syrians who might deny responsibility or dismiss the extent of the violence — will know and acknowledge what really happened. This is all the work of an experienced, multigenerational civil society that is valiantly trying to make divergent voices heard and forestall a return to dictatorship. Like the citizen journalists documenting the uprising in Rami Farah’s 2021 film Our Memory Belongs to Us, civil society groups are, with these efforts, fighting for a just and equitable Syria.
Yet the question of exactly how to hold perpetrators accountable has bedeviled political theorists, social scientists, lawyers, politicians, artists, and activists since at least World War II. Hannah Arendt’s magisterial Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) argued, among other things, that the crimes committed by the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann during the Holocaust should not be heard in an Israeli court, even one whose judges she admired. Crimes against humanity, Arendt reasoned, should be adjudicated by a world court rather than one devoted to the interests of a particular people — otherwise, the stakes for humankind will be reduced to specifically nationalist or parochial concerns.
Political theorist Robert Meister’s After Evil (2011) criticizes the elaborate techniques of “transitional” justice that encourage future generations to move on from past evils — the Holocaust, slavery, apartheid — by creating a false sense of closure. Meister argues that human-rights discourses can turn perpetrators into beneficiaries (as perpetrators are able to enter new governments or profit monetarily from new financial arrangements), thereby guaranteeing the perpetual deferral of what might count as actual justice. In the 2010 book Skeletons in the Closet, game theorist Monika Nalepa shows how complicated transitional justice can be to enact. Her study of East European postcommunist states documents how communist-regime members would infiltrate dissident communities and that some dissidents had at times cooperated with the communist regimes, making it difficult to pinpoint who was and was not complicit.
The remarkable Yesterday’s Encounter (2024), by exiled playwright Mohammad Al Attar, brings this question of complicity home to Syria. Written before the fall of Assad, the play stages a chance meeting between a victim of Syrian torture and his torturer. The victim recognizes the torturer after accidentally overhearing him talk on the phone while both are out shopping in Germany. The play draws on the real-life trial of former Syrian intelligence officer Anwar Raslan in Koblenz, Germany, which was hailed as a “landmark” and “the world’s first criminal trial over torture in Syria’s prisons.”4 Raslan was found guilty on thirty counts of murder and four-thousand counts of torture and sexual assault committed in 2011–12, when he oversaw the notorious Damascus prison, al-Khatib.
While Al Attar’s play clearly sympathizes with the revolutionaries subjected to torture, it nevertheless offers a complex picture of the entanglements and intimacies of authoritarian rule. Watching the play, the audience is confident, but not completely, that the man accused of perpetrating these atrocities, Walid Salem — now an elderly houseplant-tending father of a human-rights lawyer — is indeed who his accusers claim he is. Yet he maintains his innocence. Salem claims that he had been a bureaucrat who was merely following orders — an embodiment of Arendt’s “banality of evil” — but also that he had helped to save lives. It turns out that Salem is neither Eichmann the Führer-worshiper nor, exactly, a cog-in-the-wheel bureaucrat. It remains unclear at the end whether he simply signed off on the crimes or was also a hands-on perpetrator, and to what degree his actions stemmed from opportunism, loyalty to the regime, or both.
Al Attar’s play captures the complexities of politics and their entwinement with the intricacies of family life, the sweeping effects of generational change and conflict, the experiences of exile, and the lies that the next generation must always live with. Importantly, this moving work also realistically portrays the burdens and pain that survivors of cruelty carry as well as our imperfect mechanisms for seeking justice — mechanisms that have arguably become even more imperfect as the United States and Israel have repeatedly flouted the international justice system since the war in Gaza began. But, as readers of the Journal of Democracy, we should care, not out of any sentimental nostalgia for the international tribunals of yesteryear — they have always been politicized entities that held some accountable while allowing others (especially in powerful countries) to evade scrutiny. Moreover, as Meister points out, transitional-justice systems — such as South Africa’s postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission — often amount to a convenient way of deferring actual justice.
Rather, we should care because by thinking anew and in concert with others about how to hold accountable the perpetrators of genocide and authoritarian atrocities, we might avoid championing processes that lead to local vengeance, sham trials, or both. And we should do this by moving beyond the liberal self-satisfaction that was baked into the literature on “transitions to democracy,” which, according to anthropologist David Scott, “comports almost seamlessly with . . . [a] self-image of American liberal democracy.”5 Scott wrote in 2012 that the liberal procedural understanding of democracy had become “a new normative standard taking over the conceptual-ideological work hitherto performed by civilization in governing the conduct of international order, and disciplining, where necessary, and by diverse technologies (largely military and economic), its recalcitrant or otherwise uncooperative members.”6
My point in citing Scott here is threefold: 1) to underscore that there has been a longstanding hypocrisy in U.S. democracy initiatives, underwritten by media pundits and scholars alike, which obscures or downplays how the United States has historically both undermined fledgling democracies and shored up authoritarian systems; 2) to suggest that the literature on democratization has tended to cultivate a sense of complacency, superiority, and self-satisfaction; and 3) to argue that, given the obvious issues of democratic “backsliding” and “erosion,” we scholars must widen our lenses and operate with a rigorous skepticism toward research that lauds Western democratic achievements. Citizens across the world actually have a lot to learn from Syrians. Their experience of dictatorship and their current effort to build something new offer us a world-in-formation, hopefully one in which political judgment and struggles for impartial justice have a chance to flourish.
That hope seems more elusive now than it did when I initially began this essay. In the immediate aftermath of Assad’s fall, many Syrians dreaded the eruption of renewed war fueled by sectarian hatred from decades of the majority Sunni population’s historical oppression. When that did not happen, the experience of euphoria seemed to solidify, gaining a kind of traction that pushed away fear and the immediate desire for score-settling. Joy was allowed its moment — along with the sadness and grief. But as the HTS regime missed additional opportunities (such as the National Dialogue Council) to commit to an inclusive democratic government, as people continued to experience everyday hardship, and as security arrangements remained precarious in Homs and the coastal regions, that sense of joy curdled, and residual feelings of rage and revenge came to expression in devastating sectarian violence.
The violence began when, on March 6, gunmen loyal to the Assad regime ambushed a Syrian security patrol in the coastal region of Jableh, triggering full-fledged massacres in retaliation — with Sunni militants associated with HTS carrying out revenge killings against Alawites. Hundreds, by some estimates thousands, are dead. Government forces responded, with the Ministry of Defense claiming on March 10 that it had concluded its military operation. Al-Sharaa has promised to establish an independent committee to investigate the killings and to hold the perpetrators accountable, but many have doubts that justice will be served. The videos of bodies dead in the streets, of HTS-affiliated fighters celebrating victory and hurling insults at Alawites, as well as mosque sermons intensifying sectarian hatred, have all cast a new pall over Syria’s future. And more grief. Grief for what has changed — and for what has stayed the same.
NOTES
1. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 49.
2. Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
3. For an English translation, which is only slightly different from mine, see https://www.meforum.org/mef-online/ahmad-al-sharaas-address-to-the-syrian-nation.
4. Deborah Amos, “In a Landmark Case, a German Court Convicts an Ex-Syrian Officer of Torture,” NPR, 13 January 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072416672/germany-syria-torture-trial-crimes-against-humanity-verdict; Philip Oltermann, “German Court Jails Former Syrian Intelligence Officer for Life,” Guardian, 13 January 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/13/german-court-jails-former-syrian-intelligence-officer-anwar-raslan-for-life.
5. David Scott, “Norms of Self-Determination: Thinking Sovereignty Through,” Middle East Law and Governance 4, nos. 2 and 3 (2012): 195–224.
6. Scott, “Norms of Self-Determination,” 219.
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