‘2011 unshackled the space’: spatial analysis of diverging youth political agency in the Syrian conflict

ABSTRACT

Despite the passing in 2015 of UNSCR 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security, the study of young people’s political agency in conflict, and the possibilities for empowerment and transformative change, remains sparse. This article investigates generative processes of youth political agency in the Syrian war since 2011 and under what conditions conflict has politically empowered/disempowered youth. Drawing on 72 interviews carried out with youth inside the country in the period 2019–2021, the article conducts spatial analysis to assess how the different spaces the conflict has produced inform youth agency. The article finds that the different degrees of agency are mediated by space-specific logics of security, autonomy and control. While some youth have experienced political empowerment, this has been limited to zones of autonomous governance; meanwhile, in regime-held zones, the spatial logic of authoritarian consolidation mediates political disappropriation. The article argues that this divergence has important implications for Syrian youth’s political subjectivities and the emergence of new inequalities that are further compounded by everyday tactics of movement restriction. Given the conflict’s likely denouement, transformative potential appears dim.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth agency
• spatial analysis
• placemaking
• Syrian conflict
• political empowerment
• everyday tactics

Introduction

How do youth manifest agency under the extreme conditions of warfare? And under what conditions does conflict open up new possibilities for youth political empowerment? The complex relationship between war, the ways in which it enables and constrains agency, and the possibility for empowerment and social change, has already been explored with regards to women and their experiences in conflict and post-conflict contexts.¹ This academic attention has been boosted by the passing of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda (UNSCR 1325 in 2000) and the global policy commitment to recognise women as agents of change. Yet despite the passing in 2015 of the similar resolution on Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS, UNSCR 2250) and the international community’s efforts to move away from the securitisation of youth,² the study of how young people confront seemingly impossible circumstances, and the ways in which conflict can actually lead to forms of empowerment and longer-term transformation, remains sparse. And in the case of the Middle East North Africa (MENA), this type of investigation is almost entirely absent.³

Such research, however, is important to the theorising of youth agency and the broader understanding in both academic and policy terms of transformative praxis. Youth is not simply an age category but rather a socially constructed relationship, distinct from adulthood and institutionalised in norms and expectations, legal obligations and policy frameworks, and cultural and political practices. Youthhood is marked by the social expectation of transition to adulthood,⁴ and is constructed within implicit power hierarchies in which adults exercise authority and constraint over youth at various levels. Investigating youth agency in conflict provides the opportunity to assess how these constructs and hierarchies are transformed when social, political, and economic structures that regulate youth are upended and in flux. Moreover, assessing youth’s experiences and diverse experiential knowledge accessed by conflict provides insight for understanding present and future social and political dynamics, and has real policy implications for youth inclusion in peacebuilding and post-conflict processes.

This article assesses generative processes of youth political agency in the Syrian war since 2011 and investigates to what degrees and under what conditions conflict has empowered/disempowered youth in political terms. Building on parallel debates in Global South Youth Studies⁵ and the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies, the article undertakes an analysis of the different spaces the conflict has produced and the divergent orders therein to assess how these inform different degrees of youth political agency – everyday, empowered and disempowered. The study involves a micro-level analysis of youth’s narratives of their lives in conflict, drawing on 72 semi-structured interviews carried out inside the country and complimented by four roundtable discussions with external actors implementing programming for Syrian youth. Materials were gathered in the period 2019–2021.

The article finds that different degrees of political agency are mediated by space-specific logics of security, autonomy and control, which in turn shape the capacity for endogenous empowerment. While daily tactics of movement restriction express an everyday resistance to the imposition of conflict roles on youth bodies, political empowerment that is transformative to youth as political subjects has been largely limited to zones of experimentation in autonomous governance. Meanwhile, in regime-held zones, the Assad regime’s spatial logic of punitive reconstruction and authoritarian consolidation mediates a political disappropriation of youth space and reproduction of oppressive power structures. This has resulted in diverging political subjectivities and new inequalities that intersect with restricted mobilities to entrench differences between youth along geographic lines. Given the eventual and seemingly inevitable conclusion to the Syrian war – with an Assad victory in the absence of political settlement – the possibilities for broader transformative potential appear dim. The study represents the first of its kind to be conducted on the case of Syria and opens the door for future research on the spatial dynamics of youth political agency in conflict in other contexts in the MENA region and beyond. The study also adds to the current debates within the Youth, Peace, and Security agenda⁶ on the protection of youth civic space by revealing how different placemaking possibilities as generated in relation to spatial dynamics correlate with varying degrees of political agency.

Conceptualising the spatial dimensions of youth agency in conflict

As part of the wider spatial turn, space and place and their relationship to youth agency have been explored across both the sociology of youth and the adaptation of the transition paradigm to the Global South as well as in the literature on youth peacebuilding. Broadly speaking, the spatial turn involves locating, in physical, historical and conceptual terms, social relations and practice in space.⁷ Space is understood not as a bounded entity detached from social life but rather the basis for it. Space exists in both its social and physical dimensions, and is constructed through social relations, norms and collective processes of meaning attribution that are expressed in material and immaterial structures and practices. In this sense, the material aspects of space, such as the built environment, serve to concretise social relations and prevailing order, just as the social aspects of space, including the meanings attached to specific places, give sense to their role in structuring social relations and practices.

Within the transition paradigm, the role of space and place in youth agency has been linked to the contextualising of social structural features and meanings that shape youth reflective action. The investigation of youth agency in the Global North has been largely linked to the manner in which external conditions interact with choice-making to shape adulthood pathways.⁸ Here, agency has been theorised both as standing opposite to structure, as encapsulated in the individualisation approaches,⁹ and as limited by structure, as captured in ‘middle ground’ concepts such as ‘structured individualisation’ and ‘bounded agency’.¹⁰ Shared is an implicit understanding of youth agency as something intrinsic or perceived by the individual, and related to the ability to resist forces of constraint and social reproduction.¹¹

With the extension of youth studies to the Global South and other under-investigated contexts, however, has come a rethinking of agency and the possibilities for self-determination in relation to specificities of space and place. Not in the least, Global South Youth Studies argues for investigating what constitutes ‘youthhood’ and ‘adulthood’ in their situated meanings and how these notions shape the relational and institutional frameworks for youth agency.¹² In developing an analytical approach to the sociology of rural youth, Farrugia¹³ argues that space and place are themselves constitutive of youthhood. This includes how macro-level structural conditions create different forms of opportunity and constraint in rural contexts, but also how local and emplaced identities inform degrees of youth agency. Similarly, Mora Salas and Perez Sainz¹⁴ find that place-based social identities and restricted spatial mobilities act as key social structural features that constrain youth self-determination. Nayak and Kehily,¹⁵ meanwhile, explore how place-specific societal norms of masculinities and femininities, and traditional gender roles and expectations, inform youth agency.

Alongside this, the study of youth agency in the Global South has argued that the concept of transition as deliberative planning towards a future ‘destination’ is not necessarily applicable, favouring a reconceptualisation of agency in its timescales and its locating in place. As Copper, Swartz and Mahali¹⁶ and Oosterom¹⁷ argue, the urgent material needs of youth in many parts of Global South have created forms of knowledge and coping strategies that represent an everyday agency detached from strategically planning adulthood. Analysts have thus placed emphasis on lived experience and tactics in situ, entailing a recalibration of agency in the everyday organising of life¹⁸ and place-based practices. In contexts of conflict, this conceptualisation of youth agency is further pushed in these directions. Vigh,¹⁹ for example, theorises youth agency in a process of social navigation,²⁰ emphasising how youth get by and adapt in the present while also anticipating future hurdles over an ever-shifting terrain. Likewise, Honwana²¹ and Bøås²² put forth a tactical agency of youth, focused on coping with localised circumstances to maximise chances in the present.

Within peace and conflict studies, the spatial turn has extended the understanding of the relationship between space/place and youth agency by unpacking how the two are mutually constitutive, placing centrally both the everyday nature of agency and the liminality of youth. In their theory-building contribution, Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel²³ explore how conflict and post-conflict dynamics create new spaces that transform the possibilities for agency through changes in material structures, access points and social relations. In turn, spatialised practices in negotiation of these serve in the constitution, transformation and dissolution of peace and conflict spaces. Likewise, Berents and McEvoy-Levy²⁴ explore the spatial dimensions to youth agency in everyday practices and localised action that negotiate conflict spaces in which they are operating. This can include survival and resilience strategies expressed in spatial terms, such as alternative mobilities, that produce new spaces of peace within broader structures of exclusion and violence. Adding to this, Berents²⁵ also locates agency in the bodies of youth and the terrains they occupy, as expressed in their physical presence and routines in exclusionary social space. In her discussion of agency and subalternity among youth in post-conflict Liberia, Podder²⁶ examines how everyday interactions and the imposition of place in ambiguous public space serves as both response to marginalisation and contestation of social divisions. This literature adds two dimensions to the understanding of the spatial dimensions of youth agency. First, in conceptualising agency in relation to the spatialised manifestations of insecurity, violence and exclusion that are linked to both conflict and liberal peacebuilding dynamics, the inherently political nature of agency as negotiation of power is revealed. Second, by exploring how agency relates to both the negotiation and reconstitution of space, the transformative capacity of place-based action to transform the material and immaterial dimensions of oppressive space can be identified.

This article contributes to this research on youth agency in conflict by proposing a conceptual framework that explores explicitly political agency and its manifestations beyond the everyday tactical sense. The article also contributes to the spatial turn in conflict research by moving beyond the relationality of space/agency to explore which spaces create capacity for endogenous empowerment. Finally, the article offers a conceptualisation of empowerment that moves beyond tropes of resistance and material gain to broader transgression of the governmentality of youth.

Spatial logics, placemaking and degrees of political agency

The conceptual framework put forth here places centrally the dialectic between power and space and the manner in which political objectives serve to order the construction of space. In his seminal contribution, Lefebvre argues that spatialising practices such as the allocation and planning of physical space serves a political purpose linked to social hierarchies and the maintenance of ideological systems.²⁷ The organisation of space, in this sense, is at its base a political project that reflects power asymmetries and logics that are linked to broader narratives of what the space means in both its abstract and practiced forms. As Soja argues,²⁸ the production of space serves to reinforce power structures of oppression and injustice but also offers the possibility of contestation through transformative spatial practices.

Building off these insights within the study of conflict, trends in spatialised analysis have moved away from the more territorialised understanding of power to focus instead on how the organisation of space serves purposes of warfare. This can include how sites produced by conflict dynamics structure conflict and everyday lived experience, producing social relations and norms of behaviour that are a function of conflict’s logic.²⁹ This also includes investigation into how various actors attempt to invest meaning into space by imposing their order through productive processes.³⁰ Taking such spatialised approaches to the study of agency in conflict can be particularly instructive to understanding differences in agential behaviour by bringing to the fore how spaces that conflict produces are imbued with different political projects that enable and constrain agency varyingly. A spatialised approach thus acts a prism for investigating situatedness and how conflict dynamics intervene unevenly across a polity. As Warf and Arias³¹ argue, a spatial approach implies that where something happens has important implications for understanding why and how it happened. Here, I propose to investigate specifically the different spatial logics that have arisen in the fragmented political spaces of the Syrian conflict. By spatial logics, I refer specifically to the political project that power holders invest into a space and the underlying ordering principles that serves in the organisation of the space in both its material and immaterial dimensions.

Central to my conceptual framework is the concept of placemaking – the imbuing of meanings and narratives into a locality through the negotiation and (re)appropriation of space. Placemaking is a contested process in which the meanings inscribed in a given space are in constant reinterpretation and reattribution through social interaction and use. Placemaking processes involve both top-down efforts to consecrate meaning to a space through processes of intentional design alongside bottom-up, unintended reconstitution of space through the manifestation of other envisioning of purpose. Here, I draw in particular on McEvoy-Levy³² and her discussion of youth’s limited ‘placemaking authority’³³ and their efforts to ‘make a place for themselves’. As she writes, youth placemaking entails:

Spaces they identify, name, design, make rules for, arrive at shared meanings about, where they are free to imagine, create and risk mistakes, with porous boundaries (literal and figurative) that enable new experiences and social interactions as well as relationships with adults and with history.³⁴

As she brings forth, youth’s placemaking practices have the potential to transform material realities, historicity and social identities outside of adult territoriality.

To gain analytical leverage, and in following with taxonomical traditions developed by Lister³⁵ and others,³⁶ I propose different degrees of political agency of Syrian youth: everyday, empowered and disempowered. Here, the concept of everyday is situated within the local turn in both feminist scholarship³⁷ and peace and conflict studies as cited above,³⁸ and the collapsing of distinction between formal politics and daily action. Political agency in the everyday is understood in the quotidian organisation of life in relation to power dynamics. Such everyday agency can serve purposes of resistance and emancipation but also, importantly, coping, inclusion and participation in response to political realities. Building on the contribution of Bayat³⁹ and others,⁴⁰ the political dimension of everyday agency put forth here consists of tactics, routines and social practices that embody the negotiation of prevailing political structures.

Empowered agency, in turn, represents the various forms of action and self-determination that transgress the marginalisation of youth political and public participation, and in particular the delineated roles that constrain the range of action of youth within the political and civic spheres. Given the emphasis in this article on youth political liminality, the notion of empowered agency makes explicit reference to the transgression of the discursive and institutional frameworks that render youth an object of political subordination. In this way, the notion of empowered agency builds off the work of Sercombe⁴¹ and the normative association of empowerment with transgression of structural constraints that produce exclusion. Empowered agency can be seen in the expanded political roles and activities that defy existing power structures of exclusion and control and the new political subjectivities that youth assume.

On the reverse side, disempowered agency involves the various forms of action that reinforce the power structures that limit youth as political agents. As Raby⁴² argues, such actions are not limited to deliberate agentic acts of tacit or even explicit acquiescence but can also include acts of resistance that nonetheless uphold structural inequalities. In this sense, the notion of disempowered agency proposed here does not deny the existence of political agency or even how actions can be personally empowering in political terms. Rather, it refers to action that upholds the structures that reproduce youth political subordination. The investigation of disempowered agency permits an assessment of longer-term transformative potential and the possibility to draw insights into dynamics that will shape Syrian youth as political agents. Disempowered agency is gleaned in youth practices and reflective processes that reinforce dynamics of political exclusion, dependency and marginalisation.

The governmentality of Syrian youth

Before moving further, a brief note to contextualise what is meant by youth political subordination in the Syrian context is useful for grasping how empowerment is conceived. Here, I draw on Besley’s⁴³ conceptualisation of the governmentality of youth, meaning the institutional, discursive and reflective apparatus that is deployed to manage, control and shape the conduct of youth as political subjects. Drawing on the plurality of meaning in the Foucaultian sense,⁴⁴ this governmentality of youth comprises both how the state governs youth through constitutive and disciplinary mechanisms to produce the political subjects required, and the governing of the self through internalised subjectivity and modes of thought.

In the Syrian context, youth in the decades prior to the 2011 war faced a host of different forms of marginalisation that were institutionalised in forms of dependency on the state, further undergirded by an implicit narrative of youth as a threat to be controlled⁴⁵ and future subjects of the Ba’athist political order. Indeed, the Assad regime’s neopatriarchal authoritarian bargain, in which youth were a cog in the system of patronage, necessitated the deployment of a variety of policies and practices that served to placate youth while nonetheless maintaining them in the service of those in power. This extended to the economic, educative and political realms, where youth dependency on the state was the narrow path for mobility, and where the accepted modes of participation greatly delimited youth’s spaces for participation while also explicitly fashioning loyalty to the Ba’ath party. Youth in early adolescence were automatically enrolled in the party, and Ba’ath branches at schools and universities served as the sole vehicles for the organisation of all forms of leisure, sports and cultural activities.⁴⁶ In addition, the almost inexistent civic space was heavily controlled, preventing any possibility for autonomous engagement.⁴⁷ For youth interested in some form of political participation, the only available spaces were the Ba’ath party itself or certain forms of charity and non-political activism that were themselves state-sanctioned⁴⁸ as acceptable modes of ‘apolitical’ engagement. The net result was a depoliticised subjectivity of Syrian youth, who came to view ‘politics’ as outside their domain of acceptable action and who internalised their own self-distancing from political knowledge and practice. It is with this context in mind that we can investigate the meaning of political empowerment/disempowerment of Syrian youth in relation to the challenging or indeed upholding of youth governmentality.

Method and materials

Research design is based on a micro-level analysis of the personal narratives of Syrian youth of their lives under conflict. The research draws on 72 semi-structured interviews⁴⁹ carried out with civilian Syrian youth, meaning those who are not currently combatants or combatant-aides. Although this article takes the position that ‘youth’ is a social construction detached from age category, for interviewee selection purposes the research considered those who have entered the legal age of majority as per Syrian law (18-years-old) since the conflict began in 2011. The age range represented here is 19–32 years old, with an average age of 24.5-years-old. Interviews were carried out throughout Syria,⁵⁰ including regime-held zones, Kurdish areas, and besieged Idlib governorate, and explicit effort was made to gather interviews from a broad ethno-sectarian mix, representing eight different groups.⁵¹ The gender distribution is evenly split.

Interviews took place at different stages between October 2019 and April 2021. Interviews were carried out by a team of five local field researchers who are employees of credible Syrian NGOs with whom I am in contact. These NGOs have extensive presence and/or networks in regime-held zones and Northern Syria. The field researchers were selected based on their experience in conducting interviews and participating in research reports. I provided methods training in qualitative interviewing and worked with the field researchers to adapt the interview guide. The field researchers did not participate in analysis; however, they did provide reflections on political dynamics in different locations. All interviews were carried out in Arabic and in-person, with the exception of those in Idlib governorate and regime-held zones, which were conducted remotely for security reasons. Interviewees were identified through the personal and professional networks of the field researchers; though creating selection bias, as interviewees were drawn almost entirely from the middle class and from those with links to university or NGO networks, this was done to ensure personal safety.⁵²

Interviews were designed to capture the personal trajectories of youth from their perspective, including their activities during conflict, how these were identified, the reasoning behind their choices, the constraints they perceive, and their expectations for the future. They were also asked to comment on political and social developments since 2011. Given the pervasiveness of security threats, it is expected that a degree of omission or ‘second stories’⁵³ figure into the personal accounts. This is dealt with through the use of narrative analysis,⁵⁴ where emphasis is less on the objective ‘truth’ than how individuals make sense of their stories. In addition, to enhance the reading of the narratives, the experiences of Syrian youth were also discussed with activist networks in exile in October–December 2021 and in four closed roundtables held in March–September 2021 with NGOs and international organisations that administer programming for youth inside Syria.

The transcripts/notes were coded by hand in a multi-stage process. First, a broad reading of the materials was conducted to deductively identify preliminary analytical codes, which were then thematically grouped and inductively refined as per the different degrees of agency. In a second stage, the interviews were individually coded, and coded passages were then duplicated onto separate thematic master files that maintained the source of each passage. In the third stage, the thematic master files were cross-coded with sources’ spatial location (both in geographic and conceptual terms) in to order to identify patterns between spatial logics and degrees of agency.

Negotiating insecurity in the everyday

In the organisation of daily life, Syrian youth agency is informed by the fragmentation of the security space and the manner in which the conflict’s security logics are expressed in material sites and place-based practices, all of which provoke various forms of personal insecurity. As is largely known, the conflict in Syria started in 2011⁵⁵ with mass anti-regime protests before quickly morphing into a civil war followed by much larger conflict involving regional players and their proxies. Initially pitting the regime against a somewhat unified opposition coalition, numerous fractures alongside the rise of extremist groups, and the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous zone, saw the increased fragmentation of both the political and security spaces. What has emerged is a de facto partitioned Syria divided broadly into three zones – those held by the regime, ever-advancing and comprising the main cities and coastal region; the remaining areas held by militias, corralled into Idlib province; and the formally unrecognised autonomous regions in the Northeast under Kurdish administration.

Overlaying this division are the pockmarks of myriad checkpoints, both fixed and ‘flying’, that delineate spaces of security control. As Lombard⁵⁶ and Schon⁵⁷explore, checkpoints represent spaces of ‘anticipated violence’ that are central to the daily experiences of civilians, and particularly youth, in conflict. Checkpoints represent the materialised sites of the conflict’s security logic, utilised to enforce territorial domination and exert order over a given space. Checkpoints are established by all major players in the conflict⁵⁸ for varying purposes; in practice, however, they are a means of entrenching authority and control over the local population. Checkpoints are sites where threats of detainment, extortion, abuse and physical harm are realised. For youth, the symbolism of checkpoints as the physical point of acute personal insecurity results additionally from age-related forms of threat. For male youth, checkpoints are the location where the possibility of forced conscription, practiced by both the Assad regime and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF),⁵⁹ is most likely to be realised. The importance they attribute to avoiding conscription cannot be overstated. For women youth, meanwhile, the threat of insecurity at checkpoints comes in the form of abduction, arbitrary arrest and sexual and gender-based violence. This includes kidnappings to be used as bargaining chips between factions and the possibiliy of rape and subsequent social stigmatisation.⁶⁰

The daily lives of young men and women are defined by these age-related forms of insecurity that are actualised at checkpoints. This translates into a near ubiquitous tactic of movement restriction to avoid confrontation with these sites of security control. As one male youth explains,

I am wanted by the regime for military service, but also by the SDF. I don’t go out of Raqqa now for this reason. These days the military police is everywhere outside of Raqqa, checking IDs of all young people. Until now they haven’t come inside Raqqa, but going out is risky for me.

Staying within delimited physical boundaries, the identified spaces existing between checkpoints, serves to organise daily life in minute detail but also how opportunities come to be identified. An opportunity only exists if it located in spaces deemed safe and if its accessibility does not provoke personal insecurity. Indeed, youth are willing to make important sacrifices in terms of wellbeing, employment and educational pursuits to avoid crossing a checkpoint. In addition, beyond checkpoints, a variety of security practices are exerted in daily life for the purpose of social control, including policing, surveillance and the widespread use of informants, including on university campuses.⁶¹ To manage this context, youth employ a number of tactics to gain the upper hand. They rely on personal networks and secure messaging to share information about patrols and the location of threats, and they restrict interactions to a small trusted circle. And in more extreme cases, they restrict movement even further, confining themselves to their household even if this means losing out on education or livelihood, or going into displacement to seek out safer environments.

The political dimension in this everyday agency of movement restriction tactics can be found in the placemaking practices that resist localised politics and the scripting of youth conflict identities through control of their bodies. De Certeau⁶² calls this reappropriation of space in everyday life a ‘surreptitious reorganisation of power’. Through everyday tactics of self-protection inscribed in spatial terms, youth are defining their personal narratives outside the prism of war and the imposition of roles as conflict aggressors or collateral victims. They are instead making alternative places for themselves in the interstices between security points where they can put forth their own identities outside the conflict’s master narrative of youth.

However, the net result of this movement restriction is that exchanges between youth from different zones are rare. As such, differences in the lived experiences of Syrian youth are becoming entrenched along geographic lines, further compounded by the different logics within each zone that enable and constrain political agencies in diverging ways.

Empowered agency and the making of youth political place

In the initial mass protests of 2011, youth in Syria were able to generate a remarkable degree of empowered political agency as the revolutionary avant-garde,⁶³ a position that defied the subordination of youth in the political realm and demonstrated their capacity to organise independently of the traditional opposition. With the militarisation of the conflict and the return of elites on the international scene, however, youth were side-lined in the political process and largely demobilised.⁶⁴ As conveyed in numerous discussions, this loss of youth participation was further ingrained in the official peace negotiation processes, where youth have found themselves almost entirely absent and their needs and visions largely unrepresented. As one interviewee from Idlib states, ‘I think we should not lie to ourselves. We have no role in peacebuilding. We have a whole generation of young people who were cut off’. On the ground in Syria, though, youth have continuously been able to generate empowered agency; where this has occurred, however, is largely related to the political order in any given place.

In the Northern regions, the initial phases of the conflict saw the emergence of ‘liberated zones’, places outside the regime’s control where alternative forms of organisation of political and social life emerged. While these zones were broadly the territory of the opposition, they did not represent a unified political project but rather a patchwork of different revolutionary streams proposing different administrative authorities. This included the establishment of local councils,⁶⁵ citizen-run municipal authorities, alongside the Shari’a courts.⁶⁶ Within these liberated zones, the multiplicity of actors and orders meant that a totalising process of bureaucratisation and state-building was eschewed in favour of self-administration where different and even competing political projects could materialise.⁶⁷ The spatial purview of the liberated zones would shift, however, eventually seeing a contraction as areas were retaken by the Assad regime or subjugated to ISIS rule. What remained was the opposition enclave in Idlib province, which by 2017 was under ‘rebel governance’ by the armed group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and its administrative arm, the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG). Yet even here, the emerging political order represents a form of hybrid technocratic governance, in which a variety of different actors – civilians, international NGOs and other unaffiliated groups – take part.⁶⁸

Alongside this zone of opposition control is the formally unrecognised autonomous region of Western Kurdistan, known commonly as Rojava. In July 2012, the Assad regime withdrew its troops from Kurdish regions along Syria’s Turkish border, allowing for a Kurdish administrative body to effectively implement self-rule. Headed by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), this included a form of localised self-governance through experimentation in democratic confederalism.⁶⁹ With the defeat of ISIS, Kurdish autonomy grew significantly to encompass seven regions in the Syria’s Northeast,⁷⁰ under the rebranded authority since 2018 of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syrian (AANES) and its enlarged armed faction, the SDF. This political project has essentially been an extension of the democratic confederalist model⁷¹ to ultimately establish durable Kurdish sovereignty.

While the political projects underlying these zones are different, they are both underscored by spatial logics of entrenching autonomy and self-governance. The various forms of non-state administration on display are not reducible to the exertion of authority and force over a territory but rather include a process of popular legitimisation. Key to this has been the incorporation of civilians into the emerging political and social orders through both participation in administrative positions and in the civil society sectors that contribute to the maintenance of these new orders. As Hamdan⁷² argues, the durability of these spaces and experiments in self-rule has been less predicated on top-down territorial control than on the ability of civilian actors to invest in the maintenance of governance in the absence of a central state. In both the liberated zones and Rojava, this has translated to the emergence of a vibrant civil society sector and the inflow of international actors and donor support.

These spatial logics have been critical in opening the possibility for youth to generate empowering political agency. As one female interviewee, in speaking of her activism with other youth, describes,

2011 unshackled the space for civic and political work … People became able to make change, to reach sources of financing, sources of information… I was working in Homs in a certain activity. They noticed that activity, then suggested that we work together. I am talking about that space that was created … things were really open, we had a tremendous level of activity in the civil society.

Youth in these regions outside of regime-control – with the exception of the years under ISIS rule – have been able to seize the opportunities for participation in the public sphere for the purposes of autonomous political mobilisation and civic engagement in-line with their own values and priorities. The local councils, for example, grew out of the coordination committees of the revolution, providing an avenue for continuing revolutionary activism after the decline of the protest movement but also a real experience in municipal politics. Through the local councils, youth were able to act as representatives of their communities and assume political leadership roles that broke with the hierarchical manner in which political participation was managed under Assad. In addition, as spaces of political experimentation in democratic governance, they also put forth alternative models that corresponded with their own values regarding community relationships.

Likewise, in the cracked open civic space, youth have seized the availability of different resources to invest in the public sphere according to their own modes of organisation and priorities. Focusing particularly on citizen journalism, truth-telling and accountability-seeking, as well as aid initiatives to respond to the humanitarian crises in their communities, much of this work exists in parallel to the administrative and formal NGO sector. Indeed, among the main markers of Syrian youth empowered agency has been the burgeoning of youth volunteer groups. As one interviewee explains,

I wanted to establish a youth platform of sorts … We do things like networking among ourselves, and with government utilities offices/services centres in Deir el-Zor. I mean to handle the problems of telephone lines, electricity and such. To do networking for example towards reaching out to community leaders to think about how to enhance the situation, reach out to officials for example to … facilitate services access… We are now around 100 young men and women.

These volunteer groups are not just a mode of organisation but rather a unique youth-claimed space both in membership and the meaning attributed to the work. Across the interviews, youth express how volunteer activities represent a more legitimate means for youth to contribute to their communities as independent spaces for action, in which they respond to the problems they identify, free of external agendas, and within a logic of altruistic aid as opposed to personal financial gain.⁷³ Indeed, volunteer work is viewed as endogenous to youth, a form of civic engagement that responds to youth’s particular priorities and preferred mode of action.

These various forms of action depict quite clearly a process of placemaking in the political and civic space that transgresses the governmentality of youth. These youth appropriated spaces, in which they have placemaking authority, are sites of political experimentation where new experiences and social relationships are produced and where traditional hierarchies are collapsed. Within these spaces, youth are not just assuming new roles – as representatives, intermediaries and leaders – but also experiencing a political self-determination and agenda-setting capacity outside top-down approaches of youth incorporation or the delimitation of acceptable modes of action. It is in this transgressive dimension that we can identify empowered agency, adding nuance to our understanding of what constitutes political empowerment in conflict. Though empowerment is at times equated with the everyday resistance to exclusionary structures, as in Richmond’s⁷⁴ earlier work, or through achieving influence in political and social spaces, as in much of the feminist scholarship,⁷⁵ here we see that empowered agency comes through existing in parallel to other structures. In this appropriation of space in parallel to authorities or donor organisations, youth are able to generate an empowered political agency that exists outside of various discursive, institutional and policy mechanisms that seek to channel youth as political actors.

The disappropriation of youth political agency

Such experiences, however, stand in contrast to those of youth in regime-held zones, where spatial logics of reassertion of the authoritarian state inform a disempowering political agency among youth. The political trajectory of the regime involves power consolidation through a project of reconstruction and reincorporation of territory that aims at social control, deepened clientelism,⁷⁶ and an absence of political settlement. On the contrary, legal, institutional and financial levers have been engineered in a manner that provides the regime with near total autonomy in wielding the process of reconstruction and ‘reconciliation’ to its sole advantage.⁷⁷ Even humanitarian and development aid that is entering regime-held zones is funnelled through local organisations that are coopted, ensuring that international development and relief funds are also contributing to the reinforcement of Assad’s model.⁷⁸ UN agencies are likewise only working within the regime’s red lines, indicating that their contributions are also subsumed in the process of authoritarian consolidation.

Key to the politics of reconstruction and reincorporation of territory is a spatialised logic of collective punishment, meted out along geographic lines, where certain populations and areas that are deemed undesirable or that have previously rebelled are deliberately excluded or indeed destroyed. The regime has introduced a legal framework that allows for the expropriation of land, property and housing in the name of development works, including but not limited to Decree 66 and Law 10.⁷⁹ This logic of collective punishment means that spatialised inequality is an objective of the reconstruction process, particularly aimed at harming cities and zones previously held by the opposition but also permanently dispossessing certain populations to produce demographic shifts. Reconstruction thus serves as a form of social control, essentially creating a compliant population in the aim of contestation-proofing, reinforced by the long reach of the security sector and its repressive tactics. This is further achieved by the local reconciliation agreements⁸⁰ that have been concluded as areas are retaken by the regime’s forces. In addition to disarmament of opposition fighters and reincorporation of the territory, the agreements have also included the forcible removal of militants and civilians to opposition-held areas, the dismantling of opposition governance structures and the reappropriation of civil society groups. These various tools of collective punishment and reappropriation of the political and civil spheres are thus reshaping the populace and its modes of organisation to the regime’s advantage.

In this context, youth in regime-held Syria not only have few opportunities for autonomous engagement but also see the disappropriation of their spaces. While direct political participation means acquiescing to regime loyalty, many who are interested in contributing to reconstruction also find that the only options available are in various ministries or development agencies, resulting in tacit participation in the regime’s agenda. Aware of this dilemma, some choose not to engage at all while others frame their participation as a purely humanitarian act devoid of political meaning. Even within the realm of volunteer activity, youth struggle to carve out space for autonomous participation. Many are obliged to seek out permission and work under surveillance, or find opportunities through traditional organisations and their adult gatekeepers, such as village elders or religious associations.⁸¹ For those participating in such venues, they are often relegated to imposed ‘youth groups’, subject to age-related hierarchies and limitations in their margins of manoeuvre. This dependence on the state and the subordination of youth into specific positions, and the delimitation of manoeuverability in terms of self-determination, recreates the same forms of political marginalisation as existed prior to the conflict. Likewise, the detaching of participation from its political content repeats patterns of depoliticisation of the civic space and the reinforcement of a self-view among youth of non-political actorliness.

For those who were previously in opposition-held zones and now find themselves under regime control, the loss of space for autonomous action, and the reclaiming of the political and civil spheres by regime loyalists, is expressed as a form of diminished political capacity. It is not just that the spaces no longer exist, it is the observation of disappropriation and the necessity of keeping a very low profile politically to avoid arrest that underscores a diminished sense of political purpose. As one interviewee from Dara’a explains,

I was responsible for an association, where I was the executive director. We worked as a team in psychosocial consultations, on the local level … Now there isn’t any work… Organisations here are under the regime, coopted by it. There, unsuitable people work … . Now I am working at a dry cleaner’s.

For youth in Assad’s Syria, the processes of authoritarian consolidation have meant that spaces for political and civic action are not just closing but that almost any form of participation necessitates buying into the order that is being enforced. While some have been willing to accept this deal, for many this has meant a total withdrawal from the political and civil spheres – itself an expression of disempowered agency. Indeed, in conceptualising disempowerment not as the absence of political agency but rather the expression of political agency that reinforces oppressive dynamics, the research contributes to an expanded understanding of constitutive processes of disempowerment. The findings demonstrate the production of political disempowerment not from structural features and disruptions from above, but rather how it is generated from below.⁸²

The production of new youth inequalities

The distinction being made here between different degrees of political agency and their relationship to empowerment is, of course, dependent on how the non-static concept of empowerment⁸³ is being deployed. One possible reading of the findings is that all three degrees of agency explored provide evidence of political empowerment. The placemaking practices in everyday agency are deliberate acts of resistance to dynamics that seek to impose on youth direct roles in the conflict and, as such, impact power dynamics in place; likewise, the purposeful act of withdrawing from political and civic spheres is itself a means of exerting autonomy and even emancipation. Further, though not reflected in the interviews conducted here, it is almost certain that some youth in regime-held zones have been personally politically empowered precisely through direct or even tacit collaboration with authority structures, either for strategic or ideological reasons. However, my use of the concept of empowerment pertains specifically to fundamental change in how youth are governed and instrumentalized as objects of power, but also, critically, their own self-governing and the internalisation of political subjugation. In taking this understanding, the analysis reveals broader trends regarding youth political empowerment in the Syrian conflict and transformative potential in the future.

First, the ways in which divergent spatial logics have informed differences in youth empowerment and disempowerment can largely be seen on geographic lines. This has resulted in new inequalities among Syrian youth, with contrasting political subjectivities in terms of how they relate to governance structures and authorities, their opinions regarding politics and their aspirations for inclusion. Where they have appropriated their own spaces for political and civic participation, youth express new awareness of rights, of the meaning of politics, and their desire to continue engagement. For many, these experiences in political and civic action are viewed as a positive byproduct of the war and shape their aspirations for the future. Interviewees that have experienced empowered political agency repeatedly state that they cannot envision returning to the status quo ante. The fundamental changes they have experienced in their relationship to politics and political knowledge have undermined the depoliticised subjectivities that were a pillar in the governing of youth.

For many in regime-held zones, on the other hand, there is a total disillusionment with the political and civic spheres, and a repeated mantra of disinterest in politics. This is no doubt in part performative and was clearly on display during the interview process here. Yet even if this disinterest is in part performed, the net result is largely the same. Youth in regime-held Syria have been incentivised to disavow any interest in politics or political participation, and are reinforcing their own sense of being decidedly not a political actor. This is in essence a reaffirmation of self-governing, the internalisation of depoliticised subjectivity and a delimitation of youth spheres of action. And because of the everyday tactics of movement restriction, mixing between youth from different zones is largely absent. These inequalities, in other words, are becoming entrenched along the conflict’s spatial lines.

Given the almost certain denouement, with an Assad victory and an extension of the process of authoritarian consolidation, the prospect that the gains made in terms of empowered agency can lead to broader social change seems unlikely. The process of youth political disenfranchisement and disempowerment will instead likely continue. Indeed, looking at the trajectories of those who were previously under opposition-held territories and their fates in the aftermath of reincorporation provides a likely template for the rest of Syria. They have not only lost their spaces and ability to independently invest in the political and civic spheres but have lost their sense of political agency. The possibility for them to act as autonomous political agents in the future – to make space for themselves – seems remote.

Implications for the YPS agenda

In putting forth a spatialised notion of youth political agency in relation to different degrees of empowerment/disempowerment, this article contributes to ongoing debates within the YPS policy framework regarding the protection of youth civic space for the achievement of meaningful political inclusion. While recent reports⁸⁴ and UN resolutions⁸⁵ have called for the protection of youth civic and political space and the identification of the various barriers and threats to youth engagement, what emerges from this study is that not all youth spaces are created equal. The endogenous generation of empowerment and transformative potential depends in part on the spatial logics underscoring the possibility for agential praxis. Though Syrian youth put forth spatialised practices of resistance to dynamics of violence in their everyday organisation of life and are able to operate in youth-protected spaces for peacebuilding activities in regime-held zones, these do not translate to political empowerment in the sense of profoundly transforming the governing and self-governance of youth as political objects in service of exclusionary power structures. The use of a spatial lens to assess different degrees of youth political agency has revealed that where youth are most politically empowered is where the underlying political order allows for them to express placemaking authority and the ability to manifest a political subjectivity outside the top-down governing of youth. Importantly, this also includes placemaking authority outside the programming of donors and traditional civil society actors that are ostensibly trying to provide opportunities for participation, revealing a distinction between youth-dedicated and youth-claimed space. For policymakers and practitioners of the YPS agenda, adopting such a lens for assessing youth political agency in relation to the spatial logics in which they operate could allow for the adaptation of programming that is context-specific and avoid, as Dwyer⁸⁶ notes, exacerbating the very structures of exclusion that the agenda seeks to counter.

As the interviews reveal, there is a real desire among Syrian youth to contribute to rebuilding their society, even outside of achieving political change. This is a potential reservoir for youth inclusion in post-conflict processes – if the international community can find mechanisms to encourage participation in reconstruction and reconciliation that is not subsumed by the regime. Yet in the immediate, the analysis of everyday agency shows that any efforts to promote youth as agents of change must take into consideration the practice of restricted mobility that youth employ to manage insecurity and its impact on entrenching inequalities in lived experience. Interventions should take place within the safe spaces as identified by youth themselves, both in the physical and social sense, but also should recognise the important ruptures between youth and their different needs as a result of movement restriction. Moreover, with the passage of time, much of the political agency that youth are generating under current spatial logics will likely lead to new forms of insecurity. This is particularly true for male youth who are going to extraordinary lengths to avoid conscription, thereby incurring future insecurity risks for themselves and the possibility of permanent exclusion, but also those in the Northern areas whose political and civic activities may be viewed as security threats down the line. Given that the protection of youth is one of the pillars of the YPS agenda, assessing the nexus of empowerment and security, and how these will shift as spatial logics evolve, is essential to inform the international community’s reflection on the promotion of youth as agents in conflict/post-conflict Syria.

Conclusion

In proposing a spatial analysis of different degrees of youth political agency, the article has assessed the relationship between different spatial logics of the Syrian conflict and the conditions for empowerment/disempowerment. In so doing, the impact of these relationships in shaping the social, spatial and political trajectories of youth in conflict and post-conflict, and the new inequalities that have been produced with regards to political subjectivity, has come to the fore. More precisely, the assessment of how different conflict spaces and the political projects invested therein mediate different forms of youth agency has revealed the highly unequal distribution of possibilities for political empowerment across the Syrian polity. While the research has shown that the evolution of conflict dynamics will likely lead to further youth political disempowerment, it has also revealed the ways in which conflict has created possibilities for empowered political agency. Importantly, this has come not from inclusion in top-down processes but rather from the capacity of Syrian youth to appropriate their own spaces of political and civic action. It is within these self-generated spaces, where they hold placemaking authority, where they have been able to break from traditional forms of youth political marginalisation and experience new forms of self-determination that are uniquely youth meaningful.

The article contributes to the broader spatial turn in the conceptualising of youth agency by considering space not just in terms of context and the situatedness of social structural features, but also how spatialised practices, everyday mobilities, and placemaking processes are generated in the negotiation of political orders and the material/immaterial dimensions of the spaces in which they occur. Likewise, in conceiving of youth political agency not in binary terms but in degrees of relation to empowerment/disempowerment, the article adds conceptual depth to the understanding of how these are related. This type of analytical framework for assessing youth political agency and dynamics of empowerment/disempowerment can be usefully applied to other cases of conflict in the MENA region, including Iraq, Yemen and Libya. All three countries have experienced similar processes of fragmentation of the political and security space and the rise of contrasting spatial logics that enable and constrain youth political agency in divergent ways. Such a framework provides a way of placing the situatedness of the actor centrally and identifying how agencies generated through conflict have shaped the heterogeneity of youth as political agents. Such analysis not only sheds important light on where transformative potential to youth governmentality may lie but also can inform policy frameworks to be adapted to the specificities of place. Such reflection can help ensure that efforts towards meaningful youth inclusion correspond to the localised experiences of youth under conflict.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments and suggestions significantly helped improve the conceptual framework and analytical depth of the article. I would also like to thank Karin Aggestam for extensive discussion on an earlier draft of this paper. Finally, I thank the five field researchers for their enthusiastic participation in the gathering of materials for this work, and the many helpful discussions we shared regarding the evolution of conflict dynamics on the ground.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the International Development Research Centre-Canada under Grant [109255-001].

Notes on contributors

Sarah Anne Rennick

Sarah Anne Rennick is a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University and the Deputy Director of the Arab Reform Initiative. Her work focuses on social movements and alternative forms of political engagement in the Middle East North Africa region, with specific emphasis on youth political practices, socialisation and activism, and a broader problematisation of the meaning of ‘youth’ in the MENA region in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings.

Notes

1. A short list of relevant works includes: Berry, War, Women, and Power; El Jack, ‘Wars and Conflict’; Haeri and Puechguirbal, ‘From Helplessness to Agency’; Webster et al., ‘Conflict, Peace, and Women’; Yadav, ‘Women Benefit from War?’

2. As Altiok explains, such efforts have thus far largely come up short. Altiok, ‘Sqeezed Agency’.

3. Exceptions include the literature on Palestinian youth. See Chatty, ‘Palestinian Refugee Youth’; Norman, ‘Creative Activism’; and McEvoy-Levy, ‘Stuck in circulation’.

4. For an overview of the concept of youth transition and its problematic nature, as well as efforts toward conceptual refinement, see Shildrick and MacDonald, ‘Biographies of Exclusion’.

5. This includes Cooper et al., ‘Disentangled, Decentred, and Democratised’; Cuervo and Miranda, ‘Youth in the Global South’; Farrugia, ‘Towards a Spatialised Youth Sociology’; Nilan ‘Youth Sociology Must Cross Cultures’; Swartz et al., Global South Youth Studies.

6. Altiok and Grizelj, ‘We Are Here’; Simpson, ‘The Missing Peace’.

7. Low, On the Plaza.

8. Beck, Risk Society; Furlong et al., ‘Changing Times, Changing Perspectives’; Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Johansson, ‘Youth Studies in Transition’; Ward, ‘Opportunities for Research’.

9. Caetano, ‘Defining Personal Reflexivity’; Côté, ‘Role of Identity Capital’; Marttinen et al., ‘Intentional Engagement’; Nico and Caetano, ‘Untying Conceptual Knots´.

10. Evans, ‘Concepts of Bounded Agency’; Irwin, ‘Young People in the Middle’; Walther, ‘Not My Choice’.

11. Coffey and Farrugia, ‘Unpacking the Black Box’; Shildrick and MacDonald, ‘Biographies of Exclusion’.

12. Cuervo and Miranda, ‘Youth in the Global South’.

13. Farrugia, ‘Towards a Spatialised Youth Sociology’.

14. Mora Salas and Pérez Sáinz, ‘Youth, Labor Market Exclusion’.

15. See Nayak and Kehily, Gender, Youth, and Culture for extensive discussion.

16. Cooper et al., ‘Disentangled, Decentred, and Democratised’.

17. Oosterom, ‘Youth and Social Navigation’.

18. De Certeau, ‘Practice of Everyday Life’.

19. Vigh, ‘Social Death’, 54.

20. See also Waage, ‘Coping with Unpredictability’.

21. Honwana, Child Soldiers.

22. Bøås, ‘Youth Agency in “Violent Life-Worlds”’.

23. Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, ‘Spatialising Peace and Conflict’.

24. Berents and McEvoy-Levy, ‘Theorising Youth’.

25. Berents, ‘An Embodied Everyday Peace’.

26. Podder, ‘The Power In-Between’.

27. Elden, ‘Politics of Space’. As derived from Lefebvre, Production de l’espace.

28. Soja, Edward W., ‘Taking Space Personally’.

29. Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, ‘Spatialising Peace and Conflict’.

30. Brigg and George, ‘Emplacing the Spatial Turn’.

31. Warf and Arias, The Spatial Turn.

32. McEvoy-Levy, ‘Youth Spaces’.

33. Donofrio, ‘Ground Zero’ as sited in McEvoy-Levy, ‘Youth Spaces’.

34. McEvoy-Levy, ‘Youth Spaces’, 29.

35. Lister, Poverty.

36. For example, Devadason, ‘To Plan or Not’; Brannen and Nilsen, ‘Young People, Time Horizons’.

37. See for example Elias and Rai, ‘Feminist Everyday Political Economy’; McLeod and O’Reilly, ‘Critical Peace and Conflict’.

38. See also Randazzo, ‘The Paradoxes of the Everyday’.

39. Bayat, Life as Politics.

40. Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday Peace’; Millar, ‘Preserving the Everyday’.

41. Sercombe, Youth Work Ethics, as cited in Coffey and Farrugia, ‘Unpacking the Black Box’.

42. Raby, ‘What is Resistance?’

43. Besley, ‘Governmentality of Youth’.

44. See Lemke, ‘Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique’ for detailed discussion.

45. MacDonald and King, ‘Looking South’.

46. Al-Maaloli, ‘The Ideology of Authority’.

47. Pearlman, ‘Mobilizing from Scratch’.

48. Khalaf et al., ‘Activism in Difficult Times’.

49. Ethical approval for conducting interviews was not required as per the exemptions at Lund University; however, the data management for materials obtained from human participants followed the guidelines as stipulated by the Data Management Plan Roadmap at Lund University.

50. The following locations are represented: Aleppo (4), Damascus (6), Dara’a (2), Deir ez-Zor (13), Hama (2), al-Hasakah (6), Homs (1), Idlib (5), Latakia (1), Ma’arrat al-Nu’man (1), al-Qamishli (6), Raqqa (20), Salamiya (1), al-Suwayda (2) and Tartus (2).

51. Interviewees include those who identify as Sunni (32), Alawi (3), Druze (1), Kurdish (11), Christian (1), Armenian (2), Circassian (1) and Turkman (1). For the remaining interviews, ethno-sectarian identity was not obtained due to the personal preference of interviewees.

52. Ensuring the safety and security of both interviewers and interviewees was tantamount. Before the interview started, field researchers held an initial discussion with potential interviewees to explain the purpose and objectives of the research and to set mutually the conditions for the interview. At the start of the interview, informed consent was systematically obtained. Interview notes and transcripts, as well as recordings where available, were transmitted to the author and field researchers were instructed to delete any materials in their possession. Interview notes and transcriptions were then translated into English by a non-Syrian native Arabic speaker located outside Syria in order to ensure both the accuracy of the translation as well as the safety of the data and respondents.

53. Denov and Marchand, ‘Take Away the Stain’.

54. Riessman, ‘Analysis of Personal Narratives’.

55. See Dam, Destroying a Nation, for extensive discussion of the different phases of the conflict.

56. Lombard, ‘Navigational Tools’.

57. Schon, ‘The Centrality of Checkpoints’.

58. This includes the Assad regime, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), radical groups still operating on the ground, and Turkish, Russian and Iranian forces managing the so-called ‘de-escalation’ or ‘safe’ zones.

59. Aldoughli, ‘Militarized Syria’; Davis et al., ‘Gender, Conscription, and Protection’.

60. FIDH, ‘Violence Against Women’.

61. Milton, ‘Syrian Higher Education’.

62. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 14.

63. Khosrokhavar, New Arab Revolutions.

64. Kawikji, ‘Syrian Revolutionary Youth’.

65. Hajjar et al., ‘Perceptions of Governance’.

66. Khalaf, ‘Governance Without Government’.

67. Sakhi, ‘Anti-State Politics’.

68. Drevon and Haenni, ‘Consolidation’.

69. Federici, ‘The Rise of Rojava’.

70. This includes Jazeera (al-Qamishli and al-Hasakah), Euphrates (Kobane and Tel Abyad), Afrin, Manbij, Tabqa, Raqqa, and Deir ez-Zor.

71. Kivilcim, ‘Stateless Radical Democracy’.

72. Hamdan, ‘The Opposition’s Three Territories’.

73. The NGO sector has created a host of well-paying jobs in project cycle management that are highly coveted for their salary and access to international opportunities, but also for providing a sense of meaning to work.

74. Richmond, ‘Critical Agency’.

75. Webster et al., ‘Conflict, Peace, and Women’.

76. Asseburg, ‘Reconstruction in Syria’; Daher, ‘Political Economy of Syria’.

77. Heydemann, ‘Beyond Fragility’.

78. Leenders and Mansour, ‘Humanitarianism’.

79. See Haugbølle, ‘Law No. 10’, for more.

80. Adleh and Favier, ‘Local Reconciliation Agreement’; Sosnowski, ‘Ceasefires as Violent State-Building’.

81. See also Hadid, ‘Challenges to Youth’ for other examples of youth subordination in the civic sphere in regime-held zones.

82. See also Meagher, ‘Disempowerment from Below’.

83. Drydyk, ‘Empowerment, Agency, and Power’.

84. Izsák-Ndiaye, ‘If I Disappear’; Simpson, Simpson, ‘The Missing Peace’.

85. Security Council resolution 2535.

86. Dwyer, ‘Beyond Youth Inclusion’.