The relationship between the centre and the periphery in post-war Syria is no longer what it once was. Following Ahmad al-Sharaa’s consolidation of power in Damascus, central authority has ceased to be synonymous with stability. Instead, for many Syrians, it has become a burden that recalls past eras when the capital viewed the provinces as territories to be subdued rather than included. Today, amid vast disparities among Syria’s social and geographic components, the question of decentralisation has re-emerged – not as an administrative luxury but as a structural need to rebuild a state exhausted by war and division, now facing the challenge of survival more than that of governance.
The post-war reality exposes a deep fracture in the very notion of a unified Syrian state – a fracture sustained by both memory and the present. In the coastal region, the Alawites feel they paid the heaviest price defending a power that no longer represents them, while witnessing a decline in their traditional influence within the army and state institutions. In the north and north-east, the Autonomous Administration sees its model of local federalism and civilian governance as irreversible after a decade of political and military experience. It now demands an expanded political decentralisation that guarantees genuine representation and equitable distribution of wealth and power – not mere symbolic administrative autonomy.
In the south, the Druze community of Suwayda faces an even sharper paradox. On one hand, some demand local self-governance to protect their political, social and religious distinctiveness from both the dominance of Damascus and the reach of its security apparatus. On the other, a few have voiced desperate calls for secession or even alignment with Israel – a reflection of despair amid what they perceive as the state’s total collapse and an Islamist monopoly over the central government. These voices may not yet shape policy, but they reveal a dangerous shift in regional sentiment and a profound erosion of the national symbolism that once, at least nominally, bound Syrians together.
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The greatest obstacle to any decentralisation project, however, lies in the nature of the current regime – a conservative Islamist-leaning authority whose legitimacy rests on notions of ideological and political unity. This worldview sees diversity among components not as pluralism within a national frame, but as a threat to the very identity of the ummah. Such an outlook directly shapes the regime’s stance on decentralisation, which some of its theorists dismiss as disguised partition or even betrayal of the idea of the single “house of Islam”, indivisible within its own boundaries. Thus, any proposal to grant provinces or communities broader political powers is confronted first by intellectual suspicion, before facing political resistance. For the ruling movement, state unity and doctrinal unity are inseparable – and administrative fragmentation risks becoming symbolic disintegration.
Yet Islamic history itself presents a revealing paradox. While decentralisation is often rejected in principle in the name of unity, in practice Islamic governance historically relied upon it. The Umayyad Caliphate, for instance, operated through a system of provinces whose governors wielded near-autonomous authority so long as they maintained allegiance and paid tribute to Damascus. Under the Abbasids, eastern and western frontiers were administered by quasi-independent emirates that offered only nominal loyalty to Baghdad. The Ottomans went even further, developing a sophisticated form of administrative decentralisation through the millet system, which allowed religious communities to manage their own civil, judicial and educational affairs. These arrangements were born of demographic and political necessity rather than pluralist philosophy – but they illustrate that the Islamic centre has long practised power-sharing, even if it seldom named it as such.
In contemporary Syria, the demand for decentralisation has ceased to be a purely intellectual debate; it has become a prerequisite for the state’s survival. The old, centralised model can no longer maintain control – neither through military coercion nor ideological loyalty. During the war, local societies created their own mechanisms of governance: local councils in the north, networks of notables and tribal leaders in the south. These experiments are diverse and inconsistent, yet they converge on a single outcome – the erosion of central authority and the fading of the unitary state.
Ahmad al-Sharaa now faces a complex dilemma. His insistence on maintaining a strong central state may secure superficial control, but it will not deliver legitimacy or stability. Moving towards genuine political decentralisation would mean confronting the ideological core of his regime – and potentially alienating regional allies who fear Syria might become a precedent encouraging similar claims by minorities within their own borders. Between these two perils, the Kurdish model stands as the most tangible expression of what a decentralised Syria could look like: effective local governance, elected councils and a relatively independent economy. Yet it also provokes unease among both Islamists and traditional nationalists, who see in it not reform, but the first step towards disintegration.
The true danger, however, lies not in decentralisation itself, but in the absence of trust among Syria’s communities and in a collective memory of blood that turns every compromise into perceived betrayal. Nevertheless, clinging to absolute centralism in a shattered and plural society can produce only a subtler form of separation – the separation of citizens from their state, of regions from their capital, of belonging from authority.
Syria’s future thus demands a delicate equilibrium between the unity of the state and the right of its regions to self-governance. Decentralisation is no magic formula, but it may well be the only viable path to reconstructing a national contract grounded in realism rather than rhetoric. The illusion of enforced unity perished alongside the barrel bombs that fell on its own citizens. A homeland cannot be preserved through slogans but through mutual trust and shared responsibility.
Unless Damascus recognises that ruling Syria today means ruling with its people rather than over them, the spectre of fragmentation – stretching from the coast to the Jazira, through Jabal al-Arab – will remain the defining shadow over Syria’s future, even if the official discourse continues to deny it.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of +963.
