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Initially, the uprising in Syria was not fueled by sectarianism, but rather by unifying political and social grievances, largely stemming from the failed economic reforms of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Sectarian divisions that were established over five decades of dispersed, authoritarian rule and reinforced by a legacy of violence quickly changed the narrative of the conflict. Unless Syria’s longstanding system of rule is changed fundamentally and the unchecked power of the security services is curtailed, political solutions that adopt sectarian power sharing as the cornerstone of a postconflict order will likely cement instability and deep divisions in the polity.

The Divisive Rule of the Assad Regime

• The Syrian uprising’s transformation to civil war is a result of the Assads’ ruling practices, which embedded sectarianism in social relations.
• A system of dispersed, authoritarian rule allowed successive regimes to wield power through local intermediates to either co-opt or marginalize groups from all sectarian backgrounds according to political expediency.
• Political violence, which peaked in the 1980s, infused social relations with fear. The anticipation of sectarian violence in 2011—which the regime contributed to with active fearmongering—helped trigger sectarian reactions that unleashed cycles of further violence.
• While the Syrian protest movement initially conveyed a narrative of nonsectarian national unity, violent repression pushed many protesters to adopt a Sunni Islamist idiom and undermined cross-community appeal.
• Postconflict Syria is unlikely to be genuinely pluralistic, let alone democratic. Sectarian representation will likely substitute for genuine reform, facilitating the integration of militia leaderships into the postwar order.
• Without a fundamental change in social relations, in particular curtailing the power of the security agencies, any political solution to the conflict is unlikely to effect change. Conceivably, the dictatorship of one individual or family would be replaced by that of several power centers maintaining a precarious balance.

Moving Toward a Pluralistic Order

• Rebuilding community relations will require replacing existing regime-controlled security structures with fully accountable institutions.
• Civil self-government structures in areas currently not controlled by the regime may help attenuate sectarian tensions, and hence, these areas should be protected from a return of the regime’s unreformed security agencies.
• Sectarian fiefdoms are no substitute for democracy. External actors contributing to a new postconflict political order should prioritize mechanisms of bottom-up accountability rather than a “correct” balance of power between sectarian groups and their leaders.
• External actors should work with Syrian exile communities to build up political movements and create space for previously marginalized endeavors and dissenting voices; activists and politicized citizens are potential constituencies for change.
• Excluding from representation those members of Syrian society that subscribe to forms of political Islam will open inroads for extremists. External actors should not fall for the regime’s strategy of discrediting such opponents with blanket accusations of extremism and terrorism, and instead insist on the participation of all parties in favor of a pluralist order.
• Nominal sectarian inclusiveness should not be the only criterion external actors use when choosing Syrian partners. For genuine pluralism to take hold, the ability of parties, activists, and nongovernmental organizations to challenge engrained hierarchies is more important.

Introduction

Initially, the Syrian protesters who rose up against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011 adopted a nonsectarian approach. However, sectarian rhetoric and perceptions came to prevail in the ensuing conflict. Within a month following the first wave of protests in mid-March 2011, sectarian identity became an important, often overriding, element in the interpretation and escalation of violence.

This does not mean that Syria is exclusively, or even mainly, experiencing a sectarian civil war, as many analysts have represented it.¹ That a significant portion of Syrian Sunnis still support the regime, or that hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people from Sunni areas have sought refuge in government-controlled areas, illustrates that this is not a struggle between distinct and cohesive groups vying for supremacy and control over territory and institutions or the exclusion or extermination of other sects.

Nor can the Syrian war be attributed solely to “conflicts dating back millennia.”² There is compelling evidence that the immediate reason for the uprising against Assad rule was a mismanaged economic transformation during the preceding decade. This failure exacerbated social inequalities and plunged a significant portion of the Syrian population into grinding poverty.³

The narrative of a social and political struggle did not prevail. It was soon eclipsed by interpretations that presented the events purely, or mainly, in sectarian terms.

Hence, the lines dividing rebels from loyalists did not necessarily follow sectarian and ethnic affiliation. Divisions sprung up within sectarian groups, between localities that had been affected differently by social change, and sometimes even within families, setting the marginalized against profiteers, believers against clerical establishments, and youths against elders.

Despite the considerable efforts of early antiregime activists, the narrative of a social and political struggle—pitting impoverished rural masses and migrants, disenfranchised urban-middle and lower-middle classes, liberal intellectuals, and youths with dim prospects against an abusive authoritarian regime and its clientele of parasitic enforcers and crony capitalists—did not prevail. The narrative was soon eclipsed by interpretations that presented the events purely, or mainly, in sectarian terms. The regime and its partisans portrayed the conflict as a defense of Syria’s religious pluralism against Sunni religious extremism, which external actors sought to instigate and exploit. The opposition represented it as a struggle against a regime whose sectarian Alawite character had made it implacably hostile to mainstream Sunni Islam.

As events were narrated and interpreted through sectarian lenses, these representations quickly turned into reality on the ground, thus giving them credence. Attacks on Sunni mosques, which were the only available public sanctuaries for protesters, were perceived as expressions and proof of the regime’s sectarian bias rather than as attempts to extinguish centers of dissent. On the other side, assassinations of Alawite security officers were interpreted as evidence of the sectarian hatred of the opposition, not as retaliation against the enforcers of a detested regime who had met unarmed protesters with live ammunition. These perceptions affected and shaped public attitudes and behavior on both sides and fueled self-sustaining cycles of mutual recrimination, fear, and violence.

If the conflict was not caused by age-old sectarian hatreds released by a combination of regime weakness and regional and international interference, then why did the perception of an existential sectarian conflict prevail so quickly? Why did the inclusive rhetoric of the protesters fail to convince enough Syrians—in particular non-Sunnis—that “the Syrian people are one” in their struggle against the regime? Why did so many Syrians instead fall for the fearmongering of a regime that nearly everyone (including its beneficiaries) knew and loathed for its corruption, insincerity, and opportunism?

For many supporters of the uprising, the answer to these questions is clear: it was “the regime’s cynical exploitation of sectarianism” that turned the uprising away from its early inclusive and civic orientation.⁴ Such a perspective appears intuitively plausible given the advantages that the process of sectarianization offered Syria’s rulers. On a domestic level, portraying the uprising as being the result of Sunni sectarianism and extremism could scare religious minorities into siding with the regime. It could also scare liberal segments of the Sunni majority, who feared a turn toward state-imposed religious rigidity and conservatism, as occurred in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf. On an international level, this concern, in particular when expressed by religious figures in Christian communities, could also influence Western societies, in which Islamophobia is rife and where most observers were unaware that many of these figures had been co-opted by the regime.

Once the regime was seriously challenged, sectarianism served as a tool for mobilization for both sides and as a fuel for violent conflict.

Certain decisions at the regime’s highest levels may also be evidence that at least some elements in the Syrian power structure sought to steer the situation toward outright sectarian conflict. Statements that attributed the first wave of protests to a “conspiracy to sow sectarian strife” and conjured up scenarios of “internal conflict” were a sure recipe to fan fears that would hasten the outbreak of the very sectarian conflict the regime was purportedly warning against.⁵ Attacking mosques using crack troops—commonly perceived as Alawite-dominated—or irregulars recruited in minority, particularly Alawite, areas,⁶ and releasing militant jihadists from prison certainly enhanced the sectarian dimensions of the conflict.⁷

And yet there is no conclusive evidence of a coordinated and coherent regime strategy aimed specifically at igniting sectarian conflict. The regime’s responses to protests during the first few weeks were contradictory and haphazard, and sometimes elements of the regime appeared to be working at cross-purposes.⁸ While the official rhetoric concerning the sectarian dimension of the contestation certainly qualified as fearmongering, it was essentially the continuation of a longstanding and “deliberately ambiguous” strategy: branding as sectarian anyone who exposed the reality of Alawite preponderance in the composition of the Syrian regime and its security apparatus and the crony-dominated economy it fostered—all this behind a facade of secularism.⁹

Absent such change in social relations, and barring a decisive military victory of either side, Syria is liable to end up permanently bedeviled by deep, politicized sectarian rifts.

On the other hand, already by mid-April 2011, instances of anti-Alawite violence and protest activities bearing an unmistakably Sunni religious imprint occurred in parallel to the nonsectarian, civic rhetoric employed by the protest movement. Long before the contestation transformed into armed conflict, local and regional cycles of sectarian violence had begun. These events fed off a longstanding legacy of violence and fueled fears of the sectarian other, thus reinforcing and escalating the cycle of violence.

Sectarianism had been implanted in Syrian society long before external actors started to play a significant role in the country’s current war¹⁰—and to a greater extent than those who blame the phenomenon on a regime strategy to counter the uprising are prepared to admit.¹¹ Its origins lay primarily in the ruling practices of the Syrian regime, which have left a legacy of violence, in particular from the conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 1980s. Rather than an existential condition suppressed by a supposedly secular regime, sectarianism was the product of the political behavior of this regime. Once the regime was seriously challenged, it served as a tool for mobilization for both sides and as a fuel for violent conflict.

This distinction is important for at least two reasons. First, it represents a response to those who argue that no matter how unsavory, authoritarian regimes are necessary to manage divided societies outside the “developed world.” Such perspectives merit denunciation because they are culturally deterministic and occasionally racist, but also because they tend to obscure the developed world’s propensity to deepen and intensify these conflicts in pursuit of its own strategic interests. To those who defend authoritarian regimes from a realpolitik perspective, it is worth remembering that accommodating dictators is often self-defeating in that it may only delay, and likely amplify, an inevitable revolt.

Second, taking the lingering power of sectarianization seriously and understanding its origins will be necessary once Syria’s conflict is over and it comes time to reconcile the society. Blaming the violence on sinister regime manipulation may lead to the simplistic conclusion that once Assad is gone, Syrians will naturally revert to the tradition of multireligious tolerance that purportedly prevailed in the pre-war era.¹² The civic spirit of the early uprising, perhaps aided by externally led peacebuilding and reconciliation measures, would then allow for the realization of what, according to opposition representatives, is the real ambition of the Syrian people—namely fulfillment of “the right for all Syrians to live in peace and dignity; to freely practice their religious and political beliefs; to be equal citizens before the law.”¹³ In other words, a textbook definition of a liberal state.

It is understandable that representatives and supporters of the civic opposition would attempt to project such confidence. Yet, the botched state-building projects in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Iraq have demonstrated how identity politics tends to resist technocratic approaches to conflict management and leaves the potential for renewed hostility in the absence of a fundamental change in social relations.

Absent such change, and barring a decisive military victory of either side, Syria is liable to end up permanently bedeviled by deep, politicized sectarian rifts, with institutions, state power, and perhaps territory divided among competing power centers that rely on sectarian mobilization and fear to appear legitimate and maintain power. Such an outcome would represent only a moderate change from (and much continuity with) the system of dispersed domination, structured by sect, clan, region, and other substate identity formations characteristic of the Assad regimes. In other words, the postconflict system in Syria may closely resemble the system that has been in place under the Assads since the 1970s.

Alawite Predominance and the Security State

Syria is often described as having a “minority regime”—that is, a society where the minority Alawite community (some 10 percent of the population) rules over the Sunni Arab majority that accounts for approximately two-thirds of the Syrian population. However, it can be argued that the regime exploited tribal and kinship solidarity and networks to maintain the loyalty of the security sector and that the far-reaching clout of the latter created an image of Alawite supremacy that only partly reflected social reality.

The rise of Syria’s Alawites, thanks to French colonial policies, from a marginalized rural community to one that found advancement through the armed forces has been extensively documented and analyzed.¹⁴ One typical interpretation of the Alawite trajectory is that “both [Assad] regimes exploited state resources in order to reinforce Alawi solidarity or asabiyya, ensuring that public sector employment was concentrated in the hands of the Alawi community and the regime’s supporters were rewarded for their commitment to the state.”¹⁵

At least equally important, however, was the urge to secure the regime by stacking the security agencies and the officer corps with family relations of the ruling clan and its Alawite tribal allies. These preferences at the top level were reproduced among the rank and file. Military and security institutions represented desirable career opportunities that were especially attractive to hitherto marginalized segments of society, among all sects. However, recruitment and advancement were to a large extent dependent on connections to higher officials, ideally through blood relations. Thus, Alawites related to those sections of the community that dominated the upper ranks were at a significant advantage for upward social mobility, while those with less privileged access still had an advantage when it came to filling the lower ranks. Thus, employment in the military and intelligence services became a primary vehicle for upward social mobility and was “inextricably woven into the fabric of Alawite society.”¹⁶

Particularly after the conflict of the 1980s against the Muslim Brotherhood, the significant sway these institutions enjoyed meant that a career in the military and security institutions came with considerable social power, further benefiting the larger Alawite community. Statistically, an Alawite was much more likely to have a relative or close friend serving as a higher-ranking officer in the armed forces or security services than members of other communities—and that relative or friend was, in turn, likely to wield more influence and patronage power than counterparts from other sects.

Employment in the military and intelligence services became a primary vehicle for upward social mobility.

Interviews with Sunni officers who defected from the armed forces after the uprising in 2011 reveal a clear imbalance in enrollment at the military academy, in addition to significant power differentials between branches of the Syrian armed forces. Alawites were overwhelmingly assigned to those branches receiving the best equipment and the highest funding and social prestige. According to these accounts, many Sunni officers felt pressured to overcompensate for their sectarian identity by engaging in conspicuous displays of “secularism” (for example, by consuming alcohol) and being discrete about personal religiosity, even before the uprising.¹⁷ One assumes such tendencies must have applied even more in the opaque world of the security services.

A strong position in the security sector helped provide access to professional and material advantages—first and foremost public employment—and to the benefits of systemic corruption in the public sector. Thus, for many Syrians, their perception of Alawites was inextricably linked to experiences of unfair privilege and quite frequently to abusive practices, such as protection rackets or the extortion of bribes for access to public services.

Systematic and conspicuous discrimination in access to labor and life opportunities effectively leads to a deeper identification with the sect or other particular category on which this discrimination is based.¹⁸ The effect was pronounced in Syria, where the state wielded strong control over much of the economy and the labor market and where formal procedures and institutional rationality were largely supplanted by extensive networks of patronage.

Revealingly, during the first phase of the protests in 2011, protesters in mixed Sunni-Alawite cities, such as Baniyas, Latakia, and Tartus, demanded the rectification of alleged pro-Alawite sectarian biases in employment in state industries and public administrations.¹⁹ In these cities, perceived communal competition over limited state resources and benefits was also tied closely to rural migration. Migration increased the percentage of Alawites in Latakia from the single digits on the eve of independence in 1945 to around 50 percent in the first decade of this century—as well as from near zero to about 25 percent in Homs, from about 30 percent to 80 percent in Tartus, and from less than 10 percent to around 60 percent in Baniyas during the same period.²⁰ Such significant demographic shifts caused tensions between the traditional urban population, comprising mostly Sunnis and Christians, and the new arrivals.

In mixed cities where sectarian violence first erupted in 2011, relations between Sunnis and Alawites had already been clouded by longstanding social grievances.

However, these local fractures were compounded in that they appeared to indicate a dramatic reversal of communal fortunes on a national scale, whereby formerly dominant groups—urban Sunnis and Christians—were supplanted to the benefit of onetime rural outcasts. Widespread rejection of intermarriage and incompatible behavioral norms (relating to alcohol consumption, the mingling of genders, and female dress code) further contributed to community divisions. For instance, in Baniyas, the seaside area of Corniche was informally divided between Sunni and Alawite residents even before 2011.²¹ Thus, in mixed cities where sectarian violence first erupted in 2011, relations between Sunnis and Alawites had already been clouded by longstanding social grievances.

The post-2000 period of limited economic liberalization, which initiated more competition over dwindling public resources and increased social inequality, only exacerbated these tensions. As in other cases of economic transformation—for instance, in Eastern Europe after the Cold War—the precariousness and exploitative character of the emerging private sector actually made the public sector more attractive. Despite declining benefits and pay, public sector jobs remained preferable to unemployment, a fate that affected a rising number of those Alawites without access to patronage.

By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, shrinking opportunities for ordinary citizens of all communities contrasted with increasingly ostentatious displays of wealth by a small stratum of extremely wealthy businessmen and their entourage.²² Connections to those at the center of power, like the protection of high-ranking individuals in the security establishment, were essential to flourish in this environment. The prevalence of kinship ties meant that, among the beneficiaries, Alawites were still prominently represented in the top tier.²³

However, there was an increasing tendency of this “counter-society standing between the authorities and real society” to seal itself off from the populace.²⁴ As liberalization proceeded apace, horizontal, crosscutting class interests among the elite—visible through the incorporation of non-Alawite cronies (for example, the Sunni in-laws of Maher al-Assad from the Hamsho family; the Tlass, Shihabi, and, until 2005, Khaddam clans; or the Shia entrepreneur Saeb Nahhas)—increasingly displaced communal solidarity. As a result, a growing number of Alawites were left outside the circle of communal privilege they purportedly enjoyed. Yet, the influence of larger-than-life Alawite business moguls, such as Bashar al-Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, ensured that public perceptions did not adjust to these changing sociocommunal realities.

Liberalization also contributed to the exacerbation of sectarianism by diminishing the role of the Baath Party and its affiliated mass organizations. The party’s entrenchment in the public sector and its resilient commitment to egalitarian values—however compromised through practices of patronage—were increasingly perceived as a nuisance by the elite. While in the past the party had offered a degree of inclusion and an avenue of influence that potentially transcended the sectarian divide, its decline served to expose the Alawite’s domination of the security apparatus even more.²⁵ Likewise, as faith-based charities and nongovernmental organizations operating under the umbrella of First Lady Asma al-Assad increasingly took charge of social services, the number of people dependent on religious groups or powerful individuals only increased.²⁶

Economic restructuring, the state’s withdrawal as a provider, and the continued parasitic nature of the security sector served to accentuate existing communal grievances. Yet the effects of securitization on communal relations were not restricted to material issues. The regime’s response to the 1980s conflict had turned Syria into a society characterized by ubiquitous surveillance, leading to a common, probably greatly exaggerated, assumption that one in four individuals was an informer.²⁷ And because of the known recruitment patterns of the security agencies, Alawites were generally suspected of being informers until proven otherwise.²⁸ The opaque character of these agencies, their propensity for violence, and the absence of any accountability²⁹ further contributed to an aura of existential suspicion of Alawites, which contributed to popular views of them as a tightly knit, closed-off community with carefully guarded, secret beliefs—or, more unsettling, no beliefs at all.

Above all else, this Alawite aura inspired pervasive fear. For instance, in the early 1990s, rumor had it that on the beaches around Latakia, young women were at risk of being kidnapped by thugs suddenly appearing in speedboats.³⁰ The implication was that the kidnappers were part of semicriminal smuggling networks related in one way or another to the Assad clan. While such stories may have been partly invented or exaggerated,³¹ the rumor was persistently retold and believed, which inarguably deterred numerous Damascenes from vacationing on the coast—and thus expressed, as well as reproduced, the fear that was lurking under the surface of ostensibly harmonious communal relations.

One result of this generalized association of Alawites with power was that individuals with high-ranking positions in the security sector were sometimes widely assumed to be Alawites, such as, for instance, the supposed founder of the all-powerful Air Force Intelligence Directorate and current director of the National Security Bureau, Ali Mamlouk, who is a Sunni.³²

Throughout the decades preceding the uprising, sect had become a common frame of interpretation for social relations, with one particular sect—Alawites—credited with unpredictable, near magical powers.

Even in social milieus where disavowing sectarianism and exposing the insincerity of the regime’s professed secularism was common, sectarian affiliation was never entirely forgotten. For example, in 2004, the sculptor Mustafa Ali was able to purchase a 500-year-old home in an area of Damascus coveted by developers of high-end restaurants and boutique hotels and established an art gallery in what became an outlet for nonconformists. His ability to do so was generally attributed to the fact that he was an Alawite and therefore well-connected by default.³³ Thus, throughout the decades preceding the uprising, sect had become a common frame of interpretation for social relations, with one particular sect—Alawites—credited with unpredictable, near magical powers.

A Dispersed Power Structure

On the surface, the omnipresence and brutality of the security state, the absurd personality cult around the Assads, and the state’s ideological posturing and militarism made the Baath Party appear similar to totalitarian parties in North Korea and earlier in former communist Romania.³⁴ However, as will be discussed in this section, Syrian Baathism in fact relied on a dispersed, localized power structure that allowed the regime to integrate, promote, or marginalize groups belonging to different sects according to their loyalty and their usefulness for the purpose of power maintenance.³⁵

This power structure was based on the management of informal networks of power and patronage structured by subnational identities and categories—sect, region, ethnicity, and tribe. At the grassroots level, a combination of official regime representatives, intelligence officers, and prominent members of local society would cooperate in running a specific locality as a fief, sometimes with considerable autonomy. These officials would provide their loyalty and material proceeds to the leadership in return for franchises of authoritarian power. Thus, the main currency in this system of dispersed rule, and the key to accessing privilege and resources, was not so much sectarian affiliation but rather loyalty to the regime and usefulness for its maintenance of power.

In his extensive study of the political economy of the Assad state up to the 1990s, German scholar Volker Perthes described its power structure as a system of “authoritarian corporatist group representation,” similar to models found in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s.³⁶ According to this view, the holders of political power manage society as an assembly of groups with discrete demands and entitlements, which the leadership, selectively and partially, serves in return for loyalty and also attempts to balance. Power—in the sense of sometimes quasi-autonomous rule and command over resources, security, and more—is distributed from the highest levels of the state and society (provinces, sectarian communities) to the lowest (neighborhoods, extended families). Those same vertical networks and intermediaries or power brokers, in turn, also serve as conduits for bottom-up interest representation, albeit in a highly selective fashion and within constantly renegotiated limits. Framed as processes of consultation or even participation, demands, grievances, and other concerns are communicated to the leadership level, which responds at its own discretion and according to its own calculations of political and material benefit and cost. In other words, legitimacy and consent are obtained through hierarchical inclusion of the ruled by the rulers rather than through popular suffrage and legal accountability. Just how much power, resources, and influence flow up and down in specific relationships within these networks mostly depends on how reliable and valuable the support is of a particular representative group—in other words, to what extent it contributes to regime maintenance in terms of political resources and support on the popular and elite levels.

Within such a framework, everyday authoritarian rule can be exercised with a comparatively low level of actual coercion, while the permanent presence of the intelligence apparatus serves as a reminder that the potential for coercion still exists. Demands, grievances, and tensions can be communicated and potentially defused at an early stage and in a framework of unequal exchange.³⁷ Such forms of inclusion serve to confirm and reproduce existing power relations, thus avoiding a buildup of resentme