After Assad, Syria wrestles with fragile rebirth
A caretaker president, technocrat-turned-statesman Ahmed al-Sharaa, now presides over a cabinet that deliberately mirrors Syria's mosaic. Druze, Kurdish, Alawite and Christian ministers share the table in a bid to prove that pluralism can replace sectarian rule.
Yet legitimacy remains paper-thin. Fourteen million displaced Syrians will not return unless the new authorities can guarantee safety and justice, and entire provinces in the north-east and north-west still answer to rival militias or foreign patrons.
Infrastructure lies in ruins, sanctions bite hard, and more than 90 per cent of citizens hover below the poverty line; key sectors from tourism to energy are "paralysed" by insecurity and neglect.
A major fault-line is the scramble for autonomy. Kurdish forces control a de-facto polity stretching from the Tigris to the Euphrates, while Druze factions in Sweida flirt with Israeli backing.
Their twin quests for self-rule risk snapping the country into permanent patchworks of influence and inviting further regional strikes.
These factors represents the "issues and challenges" of a post-Assad order. The battlefield victory most needed today is psychological: rebuilding a national identity shattered by a decade-long civil-cum-proxy war.
According to the Constructivist theory, societies remake themselves through shared narratives and the "Whole-of-Society" playbook, which insists that recovery cannot be outsourced to diplomats and generals alone.
At the core lies security-sector reform. Police, military and intelligence agencies must shed their reputation as instruments of terror and embrace service, legality and civilian oversight.
A professional, rights-based force vetted to exclude war-criminals and inclusive enough to reflect Syria's ethnic spectrum is the sine qua non of public trust. Plans must even envisage a National Defence University to retrain a new cohort of officers.
Economics, however, may prove the harsher taskmaster. I urge Damascus to treat recovery as a "patriotic and unifying endeavour," marrying diaspora capital with participatory budgeting and rural-urban equity programmes.
Renewable-energy micro-grids could undercut warlords who trade in oil smuggling, while community-based tourism might lure expatriates and pilgrims back to Palmyra and Bosra.
Social healing must receive equal billing. Dialogue circles, inter-faith councils and truth-telling ceremonies are prescribed to "nurture empathy and collective memory," while overhauling school curricula to champion tolerance is deemed essential for a generation that has known nothing but siege and slogans.
In the media sphere, conflict-sensitive journalism and revamped libel laws could help replace propaganda with inclusive national debate.
Above all, they need strategic patience. Syria should resist quick-fix militarism, opting instead for long-horizon diplomacy, institution-building and restraint, an approach that might gradually recast the country's image from belligerent pariah to rational peace-seeker.
Even in the best-case scenario, one foresees only "hybrid stability." Some regions may enjoy calm under power-sharing pacts while others remain contested; militias could morph into local police forces yet retain their guns; economic revival may come in uneven spurts and leave corruption largely intact.
The task, therefore, is less about restoring a pre-2011 Syria than about negotiating a new social contract robust enough to survive these imperfections.
For now, Al-Sharaa's government clings to a slender mandate: to prove that a state forged in diversity can outlast one built on fear.
Whether that experiment succeeds will depend on how fast inclusive institutions can eclipse the shadows of sect and on how patiently the international community is willing to invest in a peace that may take a generation to mature.
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