Which theoretical framework best explains democratic development or lack thereof in the Syrian Arab Republic?

Over the course of eleven days in December 2024, the reconstructed Islamist insurgent group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) unseated the Ba’ath Party, which had ruled Syria as a one-party state since 1963, through a lightning offensive. Rebel strategic victory, however, is, historically, an abnormal route for regime change in Syria. Indeed, between the country’s independence and the Ba’ath takeover, politically active generals have internally overthrown the incumbent government in Damascus ten times in successful coups. As such, Syria has remained predominantly autocratic since its conceptual inauguration as a nation-state. A structuralist analysis of Syria’s modern political history reveals the disproportionate institutional power of the military as a historical roadblock to democracy in Syria. The new HTS-led government must confront this time-honored barrier in order to stabilize Syria and usher in democracy.

The modern history of Syria began in 1916 with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a backroom deal between Britain and France that promised each power a sphere of influence in the Fertile Crescent. The Ottoman Empire, a loser in the First World War, was formally dismembered at the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference, and France won the charge of shepherding the “Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon,” whose people the newly-inaugurated League of Nations deemed “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Throughout the interwar period, French authorities established five states within this mandate territory, cordoning one off for the now-Lebanese and with the remaining four, creating a jurisdiction with roughly the present-day borders of Syria, although some small portions of the mandate are now recognized by the United Nations as belonging to Türkiye or Israel. This precursor entity to the Syrian Arab Republic, known eventually as the Mandatory Syrian Republic, founded many of the institutions inherited by later Syrian rulers.

Most criticisms of France and Britain’s conduct in the era following Sykes-Picot focus on their arbitrary drawing of borders without regard for ethno-religious distribution and, more accurately, their hasty imposition of the Western-style nation-state model on peoples who had only ever lived under a multiethnic empire. While a valid ground for the denunciation of colonialism, this explanation for internal conflict does not wholly bring to light Syria’s authoritarian streak. Indeed, although geographer Ieuan Griffiths cites Ghana and Benin as particularly egregious examples of sloppy postcolonial border-drawing, neither has had a large-scale war fought within its boundaries, and both score an order of magnitude higher on democracy indices than Syria. As such, this paper recounts the obstruction to the development of Syrian democracy by the outsized power of the military entrenched since the French mandate period.

For the first half-decade of the mandate, colonial authorities mostly restrained the formation of a majority-Syrian fighting force, for fear of creating an independent, anti-French base of power. However, following the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925, France reversed its unsuccessful anti-insurgent policy and began to use mostly Syrian troops to staff the territory’s defense units. These Troupes spéciales du Levant drew predominantly from the Ottoman-era officer corps, and the French senior commanders deliberately elevated members of minority nationalities within Syria—namely, the Druze and Alawites—to more high-ranking positions than the country’s Sunni majority. This strategy functioned to set the interests of the professional military class opposed to majoritarian populism, and by 1927, native Syrian troops accounted for 35% of the colony’s fighting force. After a failed bid for independence in 1936, Syria fell under the control of the Nazi-aligned Vichy government in France during the early years of World War II, but British troops tossed out the Axis forces from the mandate by July 1941. For the remainder of the war, “Free France” under Charles de Gaulle focused their attention in Syria on cracking down against pro-independence factions. When revolutionary fighting broke out in 1945, France bombarded Damascus and attempted to detain Syria’s elected provisional government, but pressure from the British led to Paris’s eventual recognition of Shukri al-Quwatli’s leadership of an independent Syria in 1946.

Quwatli opposed both the Trans-Arabian petroleum pipeline and the creation of Israel, drawing the ire of Western states. In March of 1949, per former president of Aleppo College Alford Carleton, Colonel Husni al-Zaim leaned on “the French military tradition” to stage a coup against Quwatli, giving the armed forces of government. Assistance to Zaim from the CIA has been alleged but never confirmed. Power changed hands between military commanders until 1954, when elections were restored following mass protests. In 1958, Syrian Army Chief of Staff Afif al-Bizri exploited US-Turkish threats of intervention to pressure the government into forming a political union with Colonel Nasser’s military regime in Egypt. The army’s radicalized officer corps, frustrated with old-school Nasserism, pushed through two successive coups in 1961 and 1963, eventually bringing the Ba’ath Party, a vanguard of the “new Arab nationalism” to power. Scholar of comparative politics Amos Perlmutter explains the party’s ability to preach a brand of “socialism” from a traditionally reactionary institution by citing the armed force’s relative monopoly on social mobility. Throughout the upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s, Syria remained mostly as it was under Ottoman rule: parochial, decentralized, and rural; poor Syrians best chance at climbing the social ladder manifested through the military. Moreover, the military academies at Homs and Hama were early breeding grounds for a degree of interethnic unity against common enemies, namely Israel. This apparent unity, although outpacing the division of the Ottoman and French eras, skewed in favor of the traditional hierarchy of the officer corps.

When Alawite General Hafez al-Assad consolidated power in 1970, he continued the inordinate promotion of Alawite officers to senior positions and developed a system of political patronage for preferred sects and tribes that his son Bashar would continue until 2024. Essentially, the military accrued such disproportionate political sway in Syria because of two opposite but intersecting trends: firstly, the weakness of civil institutions such that the armed forces became the public’s only option for redress of grievances and personal advancement; and secondly, the calcification of an elite military bureaucracy whose minority-dominant composition discouraged friendliness to democracy in the barracks. Bashar al-Assad, however, grew too conscientious of his country’s history of successful military putsches. He reduced training for soldiers, intensely surveilled the army rank-and-file, and restricted communication among generals in an attempt to “coup-proof ” his reign. While this strategy seemingly succeeded in stymying coups, it left the army defenseless when HTS undertook its December 2024 offensive, which forced Assad to flee to Moscow.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s transitional Prime Minister since January 2025, has promised to work towards “a republic with a parliament and an executive government” but has warned that elections may not come until 2030. Sharaa did not govern democratically in Idlib province, which HTS controlled starting in 2020. Still, his interim government has overseen an uptick in religious freedom and civil liberties, keeping the hope for Syria’s eventual democratization alive. French journalist Wassim Nasr, who has met with Sharaa twice, believes that the new government will prioritize the restoration of standardization and meritocracy in the military. Even so, without the relative strengthening of the economy and civil institutions, the armed forces will remain unduly influential. Thus, the interim government’s ability to offer social mobility and some amount of representation through non-military bureaucracy will hold a crucible to preventing another coup before elections come, if they ever do, in the Syrian Arab Republic.