CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Where, when and how did civilians organize during the Syrian civil war that started in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in 2011 and lasted until the toppling of President Bashar Assad in late 2024? According to new research co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political scientist, civil organizing persisted during Syria’s armed conflict but also shifted to “translocal organizations” operating in rebel-held territory inside Syria and in neighboring countries.
Civil organizing by Syrians was able to endure in the face of ongoing political violence and focus not only on the basic concerns of protection and survival, but also on more far-ranging issues such as governance and revolutionary politics, said Rana B. Khoury, a professor of political science at Illinois.
“I wanted to investigate what happened during Syria’s uprising in the years after the Arab Spring,” she said. “The story that’s been told was of a nonviolent movement that was severely repressed by the Assad regime, and things then devolved into a nasty civil war. That’s all true, but at the same time, those nonviolent Syrian activists didn’t just disappear. Some demobilized, some might have joined armed groups, but many of them continued to adjust and adapt to the change in conflict conditions. And what we found was the development of something that almost looked like a civil society both inside Syria and in exile.”
Drawing on a large-scale original dataset of public Facebook posts produced by Syrian organizations from 2011-20 and qualitative case studies based on 10 months of field research among Syrian activists in Turkey and Jordan, Khoury and co-author Alexandra A. Siegel of the University of Colorado Boulder were able to systematically examine “geographic, temporal and substantive variation in civil organizing,” according to the paper.
The research suggests that civil organizing emerges and persists in more places, times and domains than is typically assumed.
“In wartime, hundreds of organizations emerged, and civil organizing can combine efforts by local actors with those by refugees in border states or by the diaspora,” Khoury said. “We thought about how we could capture this broad range of action, both geospatially and substantively, and its persistence during the depths of the conflict.”
Khoury created a dataset of public Facebook pages that she said “were kind of a digital ecosystem or public space for Syrian citizens and organizations.”
“This was in the 2010s, so Facebook was where Syrian civilians turned at the time,” she said. “I put together this dataset that ends up being more than 1,300 Facebook pages. With my co-author, we then collected the millions of posts on the pages which gave us this really rich, granular and Syrian-produced view into their organizing activities.”
In addition to analyzing social media, Khoury also did 10 months of field research in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
“My conversations with these civil actors and activists afforded me a better understanding of the broad array of actions that they were undertaking, everything from humanitarian relief to human rights advocacy, transitional justice preparations and long-run contributions like development and schooling,” said Khoury, also an affiliate of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the Illinois Global Institute.
“Collecting data under wartime conditions presents a unique challenge, but the field research was how I came to understand the ways that these organizations were interacting and having this representational existence on Facebook. I wouldn’t have felt confident in the dataset had it not been for the qualitative research component.”
The implications of the study point to the persistence of civilians operating under risky conditions, Khoury said.
“Even in the midst of all this violence, these civil organizing groups didn’t go dark, although they sometimes went underground, literally and figuratively. They migrated to other places, usually in rebel-held territory and in refuge, but they didn’t cease to exist,” she said. “Sometimes it was literally underground because the areas where they were operating, where the rebels held sway, were under constant regime shelling. They were sometimes antagonized by armed groups, including the more extremist or Islamist factions. And so, literally sometimes, some of these schools for displaced children began as underground schools. Or there were underground medical exchanges, trying to get medical supplies to areas besieged by the regime.
“And yet, despite these very risky conditions, organizations persisted and evolved, and some became more formal nongovernmental organizations working with international aid organizations, as our case studies illustrate. It’s going to be these kinds of civil organizing groups that will help heal and rebuild Syria in the post-Assad era.”
The paper was published in the journal Perspectives in Politics, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association.