Persisting Authoritarianism in Syria Post 2011: Assad’s Strategies to Remain in Power

Syria has been one of the long standing authoritarian regimes in the MENA region being subject to popular uprisings during the Arab spring that was never expected to happen. The regime built and sustained by Al-Assad family was mainly designed to counter coups and paid little attention to counter wide popular uprisings. Hafez Al-Assad established a hard-line authoritarian regime that successfully controlled all potential threats during the 1980s and the 1990s and maintained a regional reputation of reliability. However, when the succession from father to son happened in 2000, Bashar Al-Assad sought to create a liberalized and softened authoritarianism to build a new legitimacy for his era. Yet, in the process, Al-Assad son lost considerable factors of stability that his father has successfully collected over the years of his rule. Such a fact led to the popular uprising in Syria in 2011.

To face this new existential challenge the regime had to develop new strategies in order to persist in power. Three main strategies were introduced by the regime for this purpose, first, the militarization of the conflict which dragged the opposition factions to transform into scattered militias; second, the promotion of political propaganda of saving the State’s unity and identity, while the opposition discourses were being dragged to radicalization and sectarianism; and third, seeking the external constant support from allies, while the external allies of the opposition were extremely divergent, lacking harmonized vision and constant support.

Through exploring the aforementioned strategies as an outsider researcher, the paper investigates how the Syrian authoritarianism persisted in surviving the uprising, and how the strategies applied in the process are now undermining the longevity of the regime, as it is being vulnerable to or even threatened by the very factors it relied on to survive the uprising.