Measuring ‘state-diffusion’ in post-conflict authoritarian Syria evidence from the 2021 public opinion survey

ABSTRACT

The Syrian conflict was characterized by intense political contestation and violent clashes among various actors with contrasting views of statehood, a phenomenon termed ‘state-diffusion’. Within this landscape, Islamists, Kurdish separatists, and Ba'thists embody distinct perceptions of the Syrian state and nation. This study aims to measure the extent of “state-diffusion” in post-conflict Syria by exploring the outcomes of an independent public opinion survey. Specifically, it focuses on Syrians’ acceptance/rejection of the Assad regime by comparing regions that witnessed significant conflict-induced leadership changes with those that did not. The results reveal that regions under opposition’s governance exhibit a higher tendency towards ‘state-diffusion’; indicating a leaning towards rejecting the Syrian state-building and national unity initiated by the Assad regime. This rejection seemingly stems from the emergence of an alternative state and nation distinct from the existing Syrian nation-state. However, Assad’s legitimacy was more likely to be recognized in regions where the regime regained control after the conflict, perhaps due to their bitter experience of the devastating war and prolonged political turmoil. Thus, the ‘victory’ of the Assad regime does not necessarily promise the end of the conflict. Syrians are having a difficult time accommodating the resurgence of ‘Suriyya al-Asad’ or ‘Authoritarian Conflict Management’, leaving concerns about the future of political stability.

KEYWORDS:

• Syria
• conflict
• state-building
• authoritarianism
• public opinion survey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Suechika (2020, p. 29) suggested using the term ‘state-diffusion’ by claiming that ‘in Historical Syria today, with Syria at its core, diverse ideas of state-building exist, and they are not necessarily converging’.

2. Public opinion surveys have been challenging in Middle Eastern countries where authoritarianism has prevailed for decades. However, since the Arab uprisings that brought about partial political liberalization, the number of public opinion surveys and their analyses has gradually increased, contributing to the further development of the quantitative analysis of Middle East politics (Benstead, 2018; Benstead et al., 2022). Syria still has a data gap due to the two difficulties of authoritarianism and conflict in conducting surveys. Therefore, the data of this study’s independent public opinion surveys are helpful for filling that gap and contributing to the further development of the political research of Syria and the Middle East.

3. Suechika (2020) is a quantitative study covering all the regions of Syria. It analyses the relationship between various ideologies and views of the statehood held by Syrian citizens based on an independent public opinion survey conducted in 2017.

4. According to the leading ACM study by Lewis et al. (2018, p. 491), ‘ACM entails the prevention, de-escalation or termination of organised armed rebellion or other mass social violence such as inter-communal riots through methods that eschew genuine negotiations among parties to the conflict, reject international mediation and constraints on the use of force, disregard calls to address underlying structural causes of conflict, and instead rely on instruments of state coercion and hierarchical structures of power’.

5. Political ideologies in the Middle East, particularly ones concerning state-building in the Arab world, have generally been classified into three categories: (i) patriotism (wataniya), which is a sense of belonging based on locality; (ii) nationalism (qawmiya), which is ethnic-based gentile nationalism; and (iii) Islamism, which aims at state-building in accordance with Islamic law (shari’a). In patriotism, the people who are the bearers of sovereignty are defined by the demarcation of territory in the first place. An example is Egyptian nationalism, where Egyptians are concentrated in the coastal areas along the lower Nile River. In nationalism, the definition of the ethnic group (population) to be the nation is of paramount importance. Arab nationalism is the most prominent example, aiming to build a unified state for all Arabs whose mother tongue is Arabic. In the case of Islamism, an exclusive political community is not envisaged in a particular territory but rather the realisation of Islamic governance principles. For Islamists, the first question is not the definition of territory or people but whether the state is qualified to exercise the divine sovereignty that belongs to God – that is, Islamic law. In these three ideologies, the primary elements of state-building can be sought in the territory, population and sovereignty, respectively. These are often seen as the three essential elements of the modern state – the attributes of statehood under modern international law.

6. Indeed, many works in contemporary Syrian studies have sought to clarify the reality of state-diffusion from three main perspectives: history, ideology and politics. In history, there have been those that have vividly depicted the division of the residents’ loyalties and sense of belonging during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (Gelvin, 1998), while in ideology, there have been studies that have analysed the ideology of the elites who were committed to state-building which was different from the present nation-states (Beshara, 2011; Khoury, 1983). These studies reveal that various views of statehood have been developed without regarding the formation and existence of the present nation-state of Syria as an essential and normative option. In particular, pan-isms such as Arab nationalism and Islamism, which aimed to build a political community higher and larger than Syria, were widely discussed and theorized in Historical Syria. In politics, the Kurdish independence movements (Allsopp, 2015; Tejel, 2009), the Assad regime’s military confrontation with Israel (Jörum, 2014) and the interpenetration of politics between Syria and Lebanon (Osoegawa, 2013) were also addressed. They discuss the realities and mechanisms by which Syria’s domestic politics evolve while expanding/contracting the present nation-state framework. In recent years, studies on the radical Islamists’ state-building attempts have also flourished following the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq (Gerges, 2016; Lister, 2017; Whiteside et al., 2020). When looking at such conventional studies in general, it can be highlighted that, first, most of them have concentrated on analysing the ideas and activities of the elites, such as politicians and ideologues, through primary sources and materials, and second, they have therefore primarily used qualitative rather than quantitative methods.

7. For more details, see the official website of SOCPS (http://www.soc.sy).

8. The questionnaire and survey results are published in Suechika et al. (2022) in the form of simple tabulations.

9. The census data is available on the CBS website (http://www.cbssyr.sy). To examine the potential impact of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and refugees among the respondents on the survey results, the following supplementary analyses were conducted. Firstly, the number of respondents who answered the question ‘Since when have you been living in your current address?’ in the questionnaire as 2016 or later (within five years prior to the 2021 survey) was found to be 121 (approximately 8 per cent of the total). Secondly, this study’s regression analysis was conducted for these respondents and all the others, respectively, revealing no statistically significant differences between the two groups.

10. Blair et al. (2020, p. 1299) suggested four sensitivity bias criteria. (1) the regime is a top-of-mind social referent when answering questions; (2) regime informants can plausibly uncover responses to surveys; (3) citizens know the responses the regime prefers, learned through propaganda; and (4) costs may include harassment, imprisonment, or worse.

11. Experimental methods such as a list experiment and conjoint experiment are available to reduce the influence of SDBs. However, this study did not apply them to the public opinion survey because the survey could not avoid publicizing the purpose of the experiment, the questionnaire and the results inside and outside Syria, ultimately. It is one of the problems in experimental public opinion surveys, designed to be conducted under authoritarian regimes in general.

12. The dataset used was prepared and published by the ‘Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC)’ and is an aggregate of the number of deaths in Syria due to the conflict from 18 March 2011 to 18 February 2019 (https://ghdx.healthdata.org/organizations/violations-documentation-center-syria).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI under Grant Numbers JP23H00043, JP 22KK0018, JP19H04374, and JP16H06550.