Syrian Regime Resilience and State Power Through Contracting Stateness: The Cases of al-Hasakeh and Aleppo

Creator

Reinoud Leenders, King's College London
Steven Heydemann, Smith CollegeFollow

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Publication Source

Syria Transformed: State, Society, and Economy in the Shadow of War

Creation Date

3-2025

Publisher

IB Tauris

City

London/New York

Comments

Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.

Edited by Abdullah Aljabassini, Joseph Daher

Accepted/In press - 2025

Document Type

Book Chapter

Description

This chapter challenges the concepts of state weakness and state fragility that treat territorial control and control over the means of violence as key indicators of state strength in the context of civil war. We demonstrate that during the years of civil war in Syria, including periods when its survival was most precarious, the Assad regime’s
capacity to manage processes of state contraction and state reassertion played a critical role in its endurance.

Rights

Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY 4.0 under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.