Conflict and Transition in Syria

A comprehensive examination of the current phase of the conflict in Syria, from 2018 to the present.

The collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 ended more than five decades of authoritarian rule and opened the prospect of political change. Yet the structures, networks, and logics forged across years of conflict passed largely intact to the new ruling authorities, becoming both the foundation and the constraint of the transition itself. Drawing on a wide range of fieldwork methods across multiple regions of Syria, fifteen empirical chapters trace three domains of conflict legacy — wartime orders, political economies and social reordering, and authoritarian adaptation and patterns of (dis)continuity — from their wartime origins into the transitional period,examining how they have shaped the terrain on which the state is now being reconstructed. The volume demonstrates that nearly a year and a half of transition has unfolded neither as a clean rupture with the past nor as a straightforward continuation of it, but as a process of uneven state reconstruction across different domains. By treating the conflict and the political transition as a single field of analysis, it offers the first sustained scholarly study of Syria's emerging political order — asking not only what has changed, but what has not, and why that matters for the country's future.