Under Assad family rule, Syria was possibly the most centralized state in the Middle East. For decades, in a war-pressed environment, a dense web of party committees, mukhabarat (intelligence) branches, and state corporations radiated from Damascus. Land reform, nationalization, and public employment tied amenable rural populations to the central government. As for others, coercion, oppression, and propaganda ensured their obedience or marginalization—that is, until they did not.
Fast forward to 2015: the country resembled a mosaic of multiple sovereignties coexisting uneasily amid one of the most brutal wars of the 21st century. The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) developed a novel decentralized governance model rooted in local councils. The Druze of southern Syria maintained de facto autonomy. Elsewhere, Islamist factions and militia-aligned municipalities created their own micro-orders, at times hosting millions of displaced Syrians. Eventually, by 2024, the central government in Damascus was weakened enough to give up the city without resistance.
Today, Syria is at a crossroads again. Can Damascus turn the tide and recentralize power, or will the self-governance models of Syria’s minorities—who remain deeply suspicious of central authority—prevail? In the age of instantaneous tweets and near-real-time visibility into political and military theaters, one may be tempted to assign outsized weight to high-frequency events when answering this question. Perhaps the next phone call or high-level visit can seal the country’s fate. These details, however, fade quickly when Syria’s long arc of history is considered—which I turn to next.
A pendulum of power
When Islamic conquerors arrived in Syria in the seventh century, they found a textbook case of a decentralized geography born of imperial overreach and eventual exhaustion. As the Roman-built layers of administration—comprising cities, garrisons, governors, and later Byzantine dioceses—weakened, local powers such as the desert city of Palmyra under Queen Zenobia flourished.
With the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE), the pendulum swung decisively toward centralization. Not only was Damascus once again in full control of the (modern) Syrian territory, but it also became the capital of the Islamic Empire. Arabic became the language of administration, and coinage and tax systems were standardized under the protection of the army. However, the tide turned again when the Abbasids moved the caliphate to Baghdad, leaving Syria on the periphery. Over the next several centuries, the country gradually fractured into semi-autonomous city-states under the pressure of Crusader and Mongol invasions and Turco-Mamluk contestation.
Under Ottoman rule (1516–1918), geographic Syria (Bilād al-Shām) comprised the Damascus, Aleppo, and Tripoli eyalets, which were vertically integrated into the imperial administrative framework. Each eyalet had its own governor (vali/pasha), treasury, army contingent, and judicial system. While Damascus enjoyed certain privileges—such as organizing Hajj caravans and maintaining religious and ceremonial prestige—Aleppo was more dynamic economically and became a major trade and manufacturing center. Overall, this system relied on managed decentralization, supported by the legal, economic, and security systems of the empire.
When France seized Syria after World War I, it adopted what might best be described as proactive fragmentation. Syria was carved into multiple ministates—Damascus, Aleppo, the Alawite and Druze regions, and Lebanon—to prevent a unified resistance. But this fragmentation came without the benefits of integration into an imperial system, as in the Ottoman case. It lacked security, viable economic scope, and legitimacy. It was widely seen as the product of an unsustainable colonial divide-and-rule strategy.
As a result, the pendulum swung once again in the opposite direction, driving the formation of the first modern Syrian unitary state—a nationalist attempt at centralizing power. The early republic struggled with civilian and military coups, each reshuffling the balance between center and periphery. Nevertheless, with the Ba’ath Party’s ascent to power in 1963, and that of Hafez al-Assad in 1970, the centralization process finally seemed to take hold—despite occasional flare-ups such as the Hama massacre in the early 1980s—until the onset of war in 2011.
Overall, as this brief review suggests, the history of modern Syria does not repeat itself exactly. But, as Mark Twain would suggest, it rhymes. It does so in repeated cycles of consolidation of power at the center and the reassertion of autonomy in the peripheries. What, then, are the mechanics of these cycles? What overarching factors drive Syria’s Sisyphean act of centralization and decentralization over centuries—regardless of the daily details that fill newspapers and social media feeds?
Imperial dreams and the desert of the real
An important driver of Syria’s long cycles is, naturally, its geography. Modern Syria is less a single territorial unit than a corridor bordered by frontiers. The narrow coastal plain, bordered by mountains, runs north to south along the Mediterranean, and the fertile Orontes and Ghouta valleys form the core of settlement. To the east lies the vast North Arabian Desert, separating the western Syrian settlements from Mesopotamia. With long distances, erratic rainfall, and sharply divided ecological zones, the region comprises a mosaic of self-contained micro-regions: the mercantile north around Aleppo, the administrative-religious core around Damascus, the agricultural plains of Hama and Homs, and the tribal or pastoral periphery stretching to the Euphrates and beyond.
This physical fragmentation has bred economic, social, and cultural diversity over time. Distinct sectarian and ethnic communities were formed and sheltered: Alawites in the coastal highlands, Druze in the southern Jabal al-Arab, Kurds in the northeast, Christians and Jews in the cities, and Sunni Arabs in the plains. Each region’s ties of commerce and kinship ran outward as much as inward: Aleppo was connected to Anatolia and Mosul; Damascus to the Hijaz and Egypt; the Jazira to Iraq. No single Syrian city ever commanded the others for long.
With geography encouraging local autonomy, centralization has historically succeeded only when an authority could control both the corridor—the trade route from the ports of Latakia and Tripoli through Homs and Damascus to the Euphrates—and the frontier, where nomadic tribes, merchants, and settled communities met. Control of one region never guaranteed control of the other, and each required a distinct approach. Hence, only actors with external resources and administrative depth have managed to impose lasting authority over the entire territory.
The other driver of the pendulum is Syria’s strategic location. Despite the challenges of controlling a fragmented geography and society, Syria has never lacked suitors. Neighboring powers—including those in Anatolia, Arabia, Iran, and Egypt—and even distant powers such as France during the interwar period considered Syria too strategically important to ignore.
Together, Syria’s pendulum between centralization and decentralization has been driven by two countervailing forces: a centripetal force borne of neighboring great-power opportunism (these powers acted as de facto empires and were attracted by Syria’s location), and a centrifugal force emanating from geographic and social fragmentation. Historically, the centripetal forces dominated—and the country centralized—when empires poured vast resources into maintaining rule and order. But this centralization simultaneously reinforced horizontal ties within Syria and engendered counter-alliances among regional actors, who exploited Syria’s internal contradictions. Maintaining peace then required additional resources, eventually exhausting the controlling empire and triggering its withdrawal—initiating decentralization. In turn, prolonged decentralization made the country vulnerable to new entrants, closing the cycle.
To summarize: when Syria decentralizes, it becomes penetrable from outside; when it centralizes, it becomes brittle from within.
Can the pendulum be slowed?
A comparison of Syria’s centralization and decentralization episodes over the last two millennia shows that the managed decentralization achieved by the Ottomans provided a more stable form of governance than alternatives. For more than three centuries, this arrangement preserved an equilibrium that no earlier or later contender matched.
The Ottomans—drawing on their imperial experience in Anatolia and the Balkans—understood that, rather than fighting Syria’s geography through forced centralization, they should work with it, creating a layered sovereignty that stabilized the region. They did not attempt to eliminate tribal or sectarian autonomy; they internalized it through imperial law and patronage. The empire earned legitimacy by implementing lawful arbitration among communities (the millet system) rather than relying on divide-and-rule. Druze, Alawites, Christians, and Jews governed much of their own affairs, with the sultan serving as a distant but credible guarantor of safety. Under this horizontal decentralization, Syria’s diversity became a pillar of imperial strength rather than a liability.
Compared to this managed-decentralization approach, less successful attempts to rule Syria have included both more centralized and more fragmented arrangements. The French Mandate, for instance, fostered fragmentation and weakened horizontal ties across administrative units, yet failed to provide cohesive economic, judicial, and security systems to govern relationships between autonomous regions—ultimately leading to backlash.
While neither experience can be replicated today, both offer useful benchmarks for current debates about the country’s future.
Lessons for the present
If there is a lesson in Syria’s long cycles, it is that the country thrived only when it was horizontally decentralized but still enjoyed a coherent economic, judicial, and security framework that protected its distinct communities and governed their relationships. Against this benchmark, the current positions of regional and global actors on Syria’s decentralization problem can be grouped into three categories.
The first group includes the proponents of decentralization. They argue that lasting peace requires acknowledging Syria’s ethnic and regional diversity and allowing provinces—especially the northeast and south—a real say over administrative affairs and reconstruction. While history supports decentralization, it also highlights the risks of fragmentation without vertical integration. A coherent judicial, economic, and security framework is needed to regulate horizontal relationships. In the absence of such complementary systems—which often require external assistance—the decentralization process can devolve into uncontrolled fragmentation akin to the French Mandate, especially since regional powers may benefit from or encourage such fragmentation.
The second group includes the proponents of strong centralization, currently represented by Turkey’s official position. According to this view, decentralization would invite foreign tutelage and formalize the country’s partition. Moreover, this position sees majority-regime centralization as natural—unlike that under the (Alawite) Assad regime. President Erdoğan’s hands-on approach to Syria is often labeled neo-Ottomanist. However, Turkey’s current push for a strong unitary state departs sharply from Ottoman pragmatism. It more closely aligns with the country’s earlier centralization ambitions—albeit under a different patronage network—than the managed decentralization of the Ottomans. This approach is unlikely to deliver lasting peace or stability.
The third group reflects what might be called the American pragmatist stance. In recent years, the U.S. administration has pursued an eclectic strategy, engaging with a diverse set of actors in Syria. In a narrow sense, this resembles the vertically integrated model applied to minority communities under the Ottoman system. Its flexibility in engaging all parties in a cost-efficient manner has produced significant advantages and maintained relative stability among factions. However, without viable economic, judicial, and security systems to govern horizontal relationships in the coming decades, this approach alone is unlikely to stabilize the country. Given the economic and geographic distance between the U.S. and Syria—and potential threats from regional powers—a synthesis between Turkey’s capacity to provide such systems and U.S. pragmatism in fostering managed decentralization offers the best chance of extricating Syria from further conflict and development in reverse.
Syria’s tragedy is not that it has a challenging geography, but that every power—imperial, colonial, or nationalist—has tried to end the country’s swing between unity and fragmentation through coercion and domination. Stability will come only when governance adapts to Syria’s geographic and social realities rather than fighting them. The task ahead is not to rebuild the old central state, but to create a networked one: locally governed, nationally integrated, and protected from external predation. That is the country’s path out of its Sisyphean cycle.
