Syria: From the Legitimacy of Dominance to Consensual LegitimacyA Consensus Constitution and Transitional Justice Redefine Power

A Consensus Constitution and Transitional Justice Redefine Power

This return resembles what resulted from the assumption of the collapse of the Assad state and the resilience of “new Syria,” drawing on the experience of Spain after Franco, Lebanon after the Taif Agreement, Germany after the wars, and Iraq after 2003.In addition to others’ lessons, the European Marshall Plan, and the failure of the reconstruction model.Syria today writes its constitution and sets its own equation that blends a moment from the recent past with another from the future, establishing a new legitimacy based on transitional justice, in reproducing popular demand in the name of the rule of law and the pillars of legitimacy once again.

Dr. Samir Altaqi

First: A Fragile Moment of Transition

During the years 2024–2025, Syria moved from an era of authoritarianism and occupation to a transitional state of extreme fragility. A new leadership was formed, headed by Ahmad Al-Issa, a national transitional government that is non-governmental.However, it remained lacking a central government.The United Nations and humanitarian relief dealt with this development as a forced transition, not a sovereign choice.For the state, in the sense of authority, was not present to exercise its political and economic role, and sovereign institutions remained operating almost from below zero.

Second: A Fragmented Internal Environment

1. Military Fragmentation and “Implicit” Violence

The military maps in the new Syria formed into a complex mosaic:Regional factions loyal to the government, and others entrenched by chaos.Some owe nominal allegiance to the center, but they move with ideological, regional, and contradictory regional-environmental motives.A shadow economy remained relatively free due to the absence of the primary source of funding. Local defense forces remained in pockets here and there, and black markets.Local defense forces were sometimes attributed to the Syrian Democratic Forces or tribal elite forces, but they enforce control over specific communities (tribal, sectarian, or regional).All these groups plan with factional, interest-based, and independent motives within the scope of their geographic communities, and wage daily conflicts over oil and water areas.

◀ The Greatest Challenge Facing the Government Lies in Its Relationship with Armed FactionsLoyal and opposition, for in the current Syrian conditions legitimacy cannot be derived.

Poor, and former fighters with no economic horizon.From the perspective of game theory, ISIS plays the role of the “spoiler”:Whenever the state and factions draw closer, or the government’s image improves externally, the organization initiates the creation of a security shock (qualitative attack, major bombing, assassination) that returns the level of trust to zero, and drives the parties into mutual suspicion.

ISIS is confronted by intermittent operations in which participate:

• Forces affiliated with the transitional government;

• Units from the Syrian Democratic Forces;

• Factions from the “National Army,” supported by the American al-Tanf base;

• And American special forces that carry out airstrikes or limited operations.

But the continuation of these operations does not compensate for the absence of addressing the roots of the problem: marginalization, poverty, and the absence of economic and political alternatives.

2. A Continuous Security Threat: ISIS as the Masked One

ISIS has not disappeared yet. There are pockets that control areas in the eastern Syrian desert, exploiting security and political vacuums resulting from the halt of desert wars, extending to east of the Euphrates.

3. A Political–International and Social Conflict

The collapse was not limited to the army; the new government proceeded to exclude an estimated 70 percent of the bureaucratic apparatus linked to the previous regime.This was accompanied by the dissolution of official or شبه-official civil society organizations, and the suspension of the work of many elected or appointed local councils.As a result, there emerged:

• A sharp institutional vacuum in public administrations, the judiciary, oversight bodies, and the legislative and executive authorities at the middle and lower levels;

• A break in the continuity of public services, from civil registry to education and health..Meanwhile, talk of forming the transitional government remains in the phase of re-formation, each repeating it on the path of monopolizing violence, except through negotiation and settlements with other armed forces.

◀ Containing Everyone Politically and Voluntarily through a Package of Incentives and Guarantees That Makes Each Party a Beneficiary of Civil Peace, with the Presence of an External “Guarantor”

• Weakness in the legal system, and the return of responsibility to the “custom” of disputes (through notables or tribes or clans).

• This un-institutionalized pattern imposes on the new rulers a difficult equation: balancing armed chaos while keeping legal rules continuous.

Third: A Fragile Humanitarian and Economic Base

Syria is recovering from the worst humanitarian and economic conditions since 2011.More than eight million internally displaced persons live under harsh and multiple conditions within the country.The forcing of the lira in February 2025 to exceed about twenty-four thousand dollars, after a near-complete halt of production and consumption.Inflation rates doubled, and the cost of living continued to rise by more than double over the five years between 2019–2024.

• Suffocating fuel and electricity crises disrupted the work of hospitals, water pumping stations, and rescue operations.

These operations do not appear to be an exception; they have also become a real ground for forming an unregulated economy that includes everyone, but at the same time they fuel the continuation of war economies, smuggling, and networks of corruption and patronage.From here, the current government bets on an alternative economy that exits the circle of political and bureaucratic authoritarianism.It is not certain that this project will be written what history wrote of the successes of gold, because Syria is still in the stage of pre-rise.Rather, by the hands of technocrats and administrators who reassemble collapsed institutions according to financial and administrative incentives that encourage participatory behavior.Especially under the pressure of livelihood crises.

Fourth: Dense External Penetration

Multiple security and strategic projects are converging on Syrian land:

• Conflicting regional projects carrying long-term objectives.

• The presence of permanent military bases on the coast and in the desert.

• Independent military operations by forces supported by Turkey in the north, specifically in the basis of sites connected to the belt of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or its allies.

• Ongoing American intelligence operations that support or direct certain lines related to relations and alliances around the region.

This chaos runs in Syria on a process of settling accounts, or geopolitical repositioning amid internal regional conflicts.On the other hand, at the Syrian level, the state of war has effectively stopped,but the stage of peace remains subject to a new and continuous reassessment,likely to extend for many years to come.Post-crisis Syria seeks to rebuild balances,within a social framework to reproduce legitimacy with new names and different facades.

◀ The State Cannot Acquire Its Legitimacy and Monopolize Legitimate Violence ExceptThrough a New Social Contract and a Consensus Constitution That Recognizes the Rights of All Components

• Fears of the renewal of a rural-urban conflict, with all it carries of mutual destruction of trust and resources.

• The escalation of generational conflict amid the interruption of education and the blockage of the economic horizon for youth, which fuels migration and extremism together.

These contradictions make the shift from a relationship of dominance to a coordinative-consensual relationship, of mutual benefit between the state and society, a necessity not a luxury.

Fifth: Syria to Where? From the Legitimacy of Dominance to the Legitimacy of Consensus

1. Internal Legitimacy: Legalizing Weapons and Monopolizing Legitimate Violence

The greatest challenge facing the current government lies in its relationship with armed factions, loyal and opposition alike. For in the current Syrian conditions legitimacy cannot be derived:

• Not from the logic of military dominance alone;

• Nor from an external legitimacy granted by international or regional powers;

• Nor from economic sentiments among the majority who see that the hour of their historical revenge has arrived.

The essence of internal legitimacy is consensual civil peace.

And in a climate of intense regional intervention, the state cannot acquire its legitimacy and monopolize legitimate violence except through a new social contract and a consensus constitution that recognizes the rights of all components, including the broad moderate Sunni civil bloc, which knows Syria by its civility and democratic aspirations, not by its doctrinal identity alone.As in all civil wars, factions fear that disarmament will lead to marginalization, revenge, or the breaking of promises. Success here depends on the state’s ability to provide a reliable commitment and on designing incentives that make participation in the state more worthwhile than continuing in the logic of the faction and the weapon.

2. The Structural Contradictions Facing the State

The Syrian state faces a set of structural contradictions that threaten the path of transition:

• The risks of returning to the model of the ideological centralized state, producing a new bureaucratic bourgeoisie that reproduces an exclusionary and corrupt state capitalism.

• Tensions among social, cultural, and religious components, including the moderate Sunni component itself, over the distribution of power, wealth, and representation.

Sixth: The Role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Arab States in Re-Engineering Incentives

Hannah Arendt wrote that “the greatest evils are committed by ordinary people,” not exceptional devils, and Raymond Aron writes that politics is, to a large extent, the art of avoiding catastrophe. Thomas Schelling sees that the essence of power is the ability to change others’ incentives more than the ability to coerce them directly.From this perspective, it can be said that Saudi Arabia and Arab states have a unique position to contribute to changing the structure of incentives in Syria, through five main moves:

1. Voluntary National Reconciliation

Focusing on building a voluntary national reconciliation that does not rest on the forced forgetting of crimes, but on acknowledgment, transitional justice, and compensation for victims, with a studied integration of some cadres of the former regime within new rules. This reconciliation forms a blueprint for reintegrating society and strengthening internal legitimacy, and linking the legalization of weapons to a broader path of organized truth-telling and structured forgiveness, not random revenge.

2. Arms Control, Legalization of Violence, and Trusted Integration

Aron writes that politics is the art of avoiding catastrophe, and that alliances are built through managing difference, not abolishing it. Hence, the task of arms control and legalizing violence becomes possible by linking it to long-term measures to reassure components and military blocs, in addition to regulating local governance within a decentralized state framework based on economic-geographic foundations, not sectarian quota-sharing.

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