Syria's civil society after Assad: Cooperation or control?

Damascus, Syria – For most of the war, Bahjat Hajjar worked outside the Syrian state system. As co-founder of the Local Administrative Councils Unit, he spent years shuttling between Turkey and opposition-controlled areas of northern Syria, supporting councils that ran bakeries, clinics, and schools where there was no government.

Now, he works inside the state apparatus as deputy minister of social affairs and labor, the ministry that licenses associations in Syria. “The relationship with civil society is one of the most important joints in the reshaping of the state,” he told Al Jazeera.

More than a year and a half after President Bashar al-Assad's fall on December 8, 2024, that relationship remains unsettled. In the old system, Hajjar said, managing civil society organizations was almost entirely dominated by intelligence agencies: “No minister went through this ministry without security intervention or approval.” Only about 10 associations were licensed each year, sometimes fewer.

After Assad's fall – the culmination of a 13-year war – organizations that had operated in opposition-controlled areas and neighboring countries were asked to register in Damascus, and their numbers have surged. Setting up an association is now sometimes easier than registering a company, according to Hajjar: procedures are simple, costs are nearly zero, and the only remaining condition is that founders have no criminal record.

“But we should not fall into the trap of thinking that open registration automatically means a strong civil society,” he said. “In countries undergoing transition, civil society tends to expand and multiply. The more important question is what its real role will be.”

A decade of improvised response

Syria's civil society sector has spent 14 years answering that question.

“Its development is tied to the unfolding of events in Syria,” said Mutasem Syoufi, executive director of The Day After, an organization working on democratic transition. He described a layered landscape: old charities still operating, new organizations linked to political forces in government-held areas, relief associations born out of the uprising, human rights and development groups, and coordination committees set up in 2011 when the protest movement began.

According to Syoufi, what organizations achieved was the ability to work under pressure, a degree of institutionalization thanks to international funding, and the involvement of large numbers of Syrians in the field. What they could not build was a mature civic space.

“You cannot talk about a developed civil society under wartime conditions, with an unstable state,” Syoufi said.

The challenges

The crisis-response capacity of civil society was built to fill a gap that is now gradually closing. Yet none of the organizations interviewed said they had been pushed out by the new authorities.

Registration has been opened and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor has drawn up a 2026–2028 strategy with the participation of civil society organizations. The unease is more about direction than specific incidents: limits that sound reasonable when stated by a minister can prove more complicated in practice, activist Alia Shams said.

The return of the state creates a fundamental dilemma for organizations that once replaced the state. Many functions they took on – clinics, schools, clean water, and shelter – are things ministries are gradually reclaiming, and the sector must argue for a role it once could take for granted in the state's absence.

“There is still a huge need for these roles, because state institutions remain weak,” said Bashar Moubarak, a civil society activist and local governance consultant. Though the government has made progress in restoring public hospitals and other facilities, he argued, the state cannot simply cast aside organizations that have spent a decade working in these areas.

A crisis of local legitimacy poses a separate challenge. Not every organization can convincingly justify its continued role, as not all have standing in their communities. Legitimacy comes from representing a community, being trusted to address a real gap, and responding to needs identified by local people rather than donor-driven priorities, Moubarak said.

Organizations shaped by donor agendas rather than local ones can become “strangers in the eyes of their own communities.”

Legal uncertainty further complicates the sector's future. Associations are still governed by a law from 1958 that requires them to obtain approval before receiving foreign funding. When a ministry circular in October ordered them to comply, 31 organizations signed a joint statement calling it a return to a repressive framework and urging the drafting of a new law with their participation. The issue is still under discussion.

In May, the Interior Ministry issued Syria's first framework recognizing the right to peaceful assembly, but it requires permission from local authorities. Human rights groups have criticized the rules as overly restrictive.

Civil society is also divided over how to engage with the new authorities. Shams, who has worked with numerous civil society organizations since 2011, divides them into three groups: those that have registered and operate under the new rules; those that refuse to register because they distrust the new authorities; and those she describes as “marching to the government's drumbeat,” fully backing government decisions.

Space for differing views has narrowed since the near-total freedom of the first weeks after Assad's fall, Shams argued. “The boundaries of civic work are being drawn right now,” Shams said, making it more urgent to protect that space today than a year from now.

Organizations also face significant capacity and coordination gaps – but not always in the expected direction. Activists who worked underground in government-held areas had fewer opportunities to build organizational skills than their counterparts in the northwest and northeast, where they operated openly and on a larger scale. But they have another advantage: years of navigating the old bureaucracy made them better at pushing issues through ministries. Northern organizations, according to Shams, tend to see paperwork as an obstacle and thus lose time in Damascus.

No common agenda

The polarization within civil society mirrors that of the wider society, Syoufi said. Organizations became politicized throughout the conflict, some documenting the victims of one side but not the other. Years of division also left Syrians unfamiliar with each other's experiences, while priorities differ from region to region.

Since December 2024, he argued, a new fault line has opened between organizations aligned with the new authorities and those in opposition.

“This was expected,” Syoufi said. “But the whole of civil society is still far from a common agenda, and building it will take time.”

For his part, Moubarak sees the sector as one of the few channels that can cut across sectarian, religious, and tribal loyalties – a role tested over 14 years of war. “But if it is left alone and isolated from support, that positive role will shrink,” he warned, saying civil society could become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The tilt toward relief work is a legacy. The law governing associations before 2011 framed civil society as charity and humanitarian work, Hajjar said, not as a space for public participation or policy influence – and that law remains in force. A decade of emergency funding reinforced this model, producing organizations staffed enough to deliver services but lacking resources for anything else. Service delivery is also the least controversial role the government could ask them to play: few object to a clinic, while election monitoring or documenting abuses could land an organization in trouble.

Inside the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, Deputy Minister Hajjar is trying to build a new relationship between the state and civil society organizations – one he argues Syria has never had. It is neither the pre-2011 model, when association files sat with intelligence agencies and no decision was made without security approval, nor the wartime model, when organizations ran schools, clinics, and rescue teams precisely because there was no state to do it.

“We do not want to return to the old model, where the state viewed civil society as something to control,” he said. “And civil society cannot be a permanent substitute for the state. What is needed is not guardianship or conflict, but cooperation.”

“In war, when institutions were absent, civil society emerged and took on many roles,” Hajjar said. “Today, as institutions return, that experience should not be erased. It should be transformed into energy for building a new Syria.”