Syrian War Economies

Abstract Accounts of the Syrian conflict tend to emphasize “top-down” geopolitics or “bottom-up” local-national conflict dynamics. As a contribution to this roundtable on rethinking war economies, I argue that political economy and comparative approaches can help explain the connections between global-regional processes and domestic institutional transformations brought by war. Institutional development under Asad left a contradictory legacy: the Syrian regime was incapable of compromise with domestic opposition in 2011, but it proved resilient in the ensuing devastating war that subjected the government to international sanctions, external interventions, and territorial fragmentation. The Syrian regime responded to these shocks by reconfiguring its elite networks of power, which further blurred the lines between formal and informal institutions. As its financial resources dropped, the regime initiated new economic policies, but these attempts were refracted through the distortions of the war, and either became predatory or were paradoxically blocked by the elite networks crafted earlier as a survival strategy.