Navigating Towards Peace in Syria

The project delivers ground-level, policy-relevant insights into Syria’s post-Assad transition, examining the socio-economic dynamics of governance, security and recovery to generate evidence-based recommendations for inclusive peacebuilding, political transition and sustainable stabilisation.

Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Syria’s path towards peace and recovery remains fragile. This project examines the main challenges and opportunities shaping this transition, with the aim of generating practical, policy-relevant insights grounded in local realities to support reconstruction and inclusive, sustainable peacebuilding.

A central objective is to identify the conditions under which policies and proposed solutions are likely to succeed or fail. The research therefore focuses on Syria’s precarious socio-economic environment and the complex processes of reconstruction, including interim governance and power-sharing arrangements, displacement and returnee reintegration and the impact of these dynamics on societal peace and regional stability.

The project adopts a dual local–regional approach. Locally, it explores community-level challenges and the reconfiguration of local governance and security. At the regional level, it examines broader geopolitical dynamics and alliances with particular attention to the roles of Gulf states, Turkey and Western donors. By bridging local and regional perspectives, the project deepens an understanding of how regional interventions and local dynamics interact with and shape one another while informing a just transition and ongoing humanitarian and resilience assistance in Syria.