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Re-enacting the international order, or: why the Syrian state did not disappear

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2021

Janis Grzybowski Open the ORCID record for Janis Grzybowski [Opens in a new window]
Janis Grzybowski*
Affiliation:
European School of Political and Social Science (ESPOL), Lille Catholic University, France
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

At the height of the Syrian civil war, many observers argued that the Syrian state was collapsing, fragmenting, or dissolving. Yet, it never actually vanished. Revisiting the rising challenges to the Syrian state since 2011 – from internal collapse through external fragmentation to its looming dissolution by the ‘Islamic State’ – provides a rare opportunity to investigate the re-enactment of both statehood and international order in crisis. Indeed, what distinguishes the challenges posed to Syria, and Iraq, from others in the region and beyond is that their potential dissolution was regarded as a threat not merely to a – despised – dictatorial regime, or a particular state, but to the state-based international order itself. Regimes fall and states ‘collapse’ internally or are replaced by new states, but the international order is fundamentally questioned only where the territorially delineated state form is contested by an alternative. The article argues that the Syrian state survived not simply due to its legal sovereignty or foreign regime support, but also because states that backed the rebellion, fearing the vanishing of the Syrian nation-state in a transnational jihadist ‘caliphate’, came to prefer its persistence under Assad. The re-enactment of states and of the international order are thus ultimately linked.

Keywords

StatehoodSovereigntySyriaIslamic StateInternational OrderState Collapse
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 47 , Special Issue 5: The Multiple Origins of IR , December 2021 , pp. 672 - 691
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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58 Ibid.; Bourdieu, Bureaucratic Field; Devetak, ‘Incomplete states’; Weber, ‘Performative states’.

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80 Ibid., p. 20.

81 Ibid., pp. 19–47.

82 Ibid., pp. 77–104.

83 Ibid., pp. 141–62.

84 Ibid., p. 35.

85 Kheder Khaddour, ‘The Assad Regime's Hold on the State’, Carnegie Middle East Center (2 July 2015), available at: {https://carnegie-mec.org/2015/07/08/assad-regime-s-hold-on-syrian-state/id3k} accessed 18 March 2020; Martínez and Eng, ‘Stifling stateness’; Baczko et al., Civil War.

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90 Khaddour, ‘Assad's Hold’.

91 Ibid.; Baczko et al., Civil War, p. 131.

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93 Phillips, Battle for Syria, p. 127; Khaddour, ‘Assad's Hold’.

94 Baczko et al., Civil War, pp. 103–32.

95 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 105–24; Baczko et al., Civil War, pp. 133–44; Daher, State Resilience, pp. 125–36.

96 Khaddour, ‘Assad's Hold’; Martínez and Eng, ‘Stifling stateness’.

97 Khaddour, ‘Assad's Hold’.

98 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 168–72.

99 BBC interview with Assad, Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) (10 February 2015), available at: {https://www.sana.sy/en/?p=28047} accessed 18 March 2020.

100 Landis and Simon, ‘Assad has it his way’. See also Aron Lund, ‘How Assad's Enemies Gave Up on the Syrian Opposition’, The Century Foundation (17 February 2017), available at: {https://tcf.org/content/report/assads-enemies-gave-syrian-opposition/} accessed 18 March 2020. See also Andrew Parasiliti, Kathleen Reedy, and Becca Wasser, ‘Preventing State Collapse in Syria’, RAND (2017), available at: {https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE219.html accessed 18 March 2020.

101 Baczko et al., Civil War, p. 75; Phillips, Battle for Syria, p. 359; Ismail, Salwa, ‘The Syrian uprising: Imagining and performing the nation’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 11:3 (2011), pp. 538–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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106 The position of Ahrar al-Sham between Islamist and jihadist strands is complex and fluctuating, but it has generally taken a more modest and especially a more Syrian nationalist stance than the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra (see Lister, Syrian Jihad, pp. 145, 107–10); Jaysh al-Islam emerged from a merger of Liwa al-Islam and more than forty other Islamist militias brokered by Saudi Arabia in 2013 (Phillips, Battle for Syria, p. 185).

107 Jabhat al-Nusra was renamed Jabhat Fatah al-Sham in July 2016 and then Tahrir al-Sham, as an umbrella incorporating other groups, in January 2017, and its relationship with Ahrar al-Sham in particular has been complex, shifting between competition and cooperation (Lister, Syrian Jihad; Baczko et al., Civil War).

108 The most important include the Syrian Islamic Front, the Islamic Front, the Syrian Liberation Front, and Jaysh al-Fatah (Lister, Syrian Jihad; Baczko et al., Civil War).

109 Lister, Syrian Jihad; Baczko et al., Civil War, pp. 188–91; Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 129–32.

110 For an overview of the Islamisation of the insurgency, see Lister, Syrian Jihad.

111 Ibid.

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115 Ibid.

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117 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 139, 178–88.

118 Baczko et al., Civil War, pp. 167–72.

119 Ibid., pp. 172–7.

120 Rabinovich, ‘End of Sykes-Picot’, p. 2.

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124 Kienle, ‘New struggle for Syria’.

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128 Ibid.

129 Rabinovich, ‘End of Sykes-Picot’.

130 Fawcett recounts the ubiquity of references to ‘Sykes-Picot’ in the literature on the Syrian civil war and its regional context (‘States and sovereignty’, pp. 793–4).

131 Lister, Syrian Jihad, pp. 59, 227.

132 For an Islamist vision of postwar Syria, see, for instance, the covenant issued by Islamic Front, including Ahrar al-Sham, which nevertheless openly vows to ‘preserve … Syrian territorial integrity’ and restrict leadership roles to Syrians (Lister, Syrian Jihad, pp. 225–7).

133 Cited in Phillips, Battle for Syria, p. 107.

134 Phillips, Battle for Syria, p. 178.

135 Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions.

136 Ibid., pp. 109–21.

137 Ibid., p. 115.

138 Cited in Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions, p. 116.

139 Cited in Menshawy, ‘Sovereignty’, p. 3.

140 Ibid.; Phillips, Battle for Syria; BBC interview Bashar al-Assad, SANA.

141 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 178–84.

142 Ibid., p. 183.

143 Ibid., pp. 172–3; Del Sarto, ‘Contentious borders’, p. 784.

144 Cited in Reuters (27 June 2015), available at: {https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-turkey-kurds/turkeys-erdogan-says-will-never-allow-kurdish-state-media-idUSKBN0P70QB20150627} accessed 18 March 2020.

145 Baczko et al., Civil War, pp. 155, 177.

146 Phillips, Battle for Syria.

147 Cited in Lister, Syrian Jihad, p. 214.

148 Ibid., pp. 221–60; Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 196–206; Cockburn, Patrick, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (London, UK: Verso, 2015)Google Scholar; Weiss, Michael and Hassan, Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (2nd edn, New York, NY: Regan Arts, 2016)Google Scholar; Matin, Kamran, ‘Lineages of the Islamic State: An international historical sociology of state (de-)formation in Iraq’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 31:1 (2018), pp. 6–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

149 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 199–202.

150 Lister, Syrian Jihad, p. 122.

151 Ibid., pp. 261–78; Matin, ‘Lineages’, pp. 18–20.

152 Lister, Syrian Jihad, pp. 261–9.

153 Ibid., pp. 119–49.

154 Ibid., pp. 119–260.

155 Although criticising the IS declaration of a Caliphate, Jabhat al-Nusra also pursued a global agenda (Lister, Syrian Jihad, p. 59), seeking to establish local emirates in Idlib, Aleppo, Deraa, and Ghouta 2014 (ibid., p. 243). Indeed, Jabhat al-Nusra criticised in turn a statement issued by the Islamic-Front that vowed to limit the insurgency to the territory of Syria and favour Syrian citizens in its leadership (ibid., pp. 225–7).

156 Al-Adnani, cited in Lister, Syrian Jihad, pp. 236–7.

157 Cited in Cockburn, Islamic State, p. xi.

158 Lister, Syrian Jihad, pp. 261–78.

159 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 213–17.

160 Ibid., pp. 217–23, 238–42; Seliktar and Rezaei, Proxy Wars, pp. 167–201; Landis and Simon, ‘Assad has it his way’.

161 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 219–23.

162 Washington Post, available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/28/read-putins-u-n-general-assembly-speech/} accessed 18 March 2020.

163 Ibid.

164 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 223, 231.

165 Barack Obama speech, 11 September 2014, CNN, available at: {https://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/10/politics/transcript-obama-syria-isis-speech/index.html} accessed 18 March 2020.

166 Ibid.

167 Phillips, Battle for Syria, p. 209.

168 Global Coalition, available at: {https://theglobalcoalition.org/en/partners/} accessed 24 April 2020.

169 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 208–09, 225.

170 Ibid., p. 208.

171 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 208–09, 225.

172 Ibid., pp. 184–8.

173 Ibid., pp. 240–2; Lund, ‘Assad's enemies’.

174 Ibid., p. 206.

175 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 206, 256; Baczko et al., Civil War, p. 157.

176 Ibid., pp. 238–41, 246; Lund, ‘Assad's enemies’.

177 Phillips, Battle for Syria, pp. 235–8; ‘Syria's Kurds forge “costly deal” with Al-Assad as US pulls out’, Al-Jazeera (15 October 2019), available at: {https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/pullout-syria-kurds-costly-deal-assad-191015122222288.html} accessed 18 March 2020.

178 Ibid., p. 224.

179 Grzybowski, ‘Paradox of state identification’.