Transcribed by Katty Alhayek





Bassam Haddad (BH): Good morning Rana

Rana Khalad (RK): Good afternoon from here Bassam, from Scotland. 

BH: We are happy to have you on Status hour, and I am very happy to be talking about civil society and state-building in Syria as well as activism.

First, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

RK: I am a research fellow with the Centre for Syrian Studies, which is based at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. My research focus topics are governance, civil society, and the neoliberal peace. I focus on the Levant and more specifically on Syria. I am also a freelancer and a consultant about evaluations of the civil society in Syria. Currently, I am doing work on the Kurdish areas in Syria and on women in the emerging media in Syria.

BH:  Before we talk about your current research, governance without government in Syrian civil society and state-building, can we talk a little bit about your previous co-authored report under the title: "Activism in Difficult Times: Civil Society Groups in Syria 2011-2014." We will let you decide which aspects you would like to address here?

RK: That report I think was one of the first evidence-based reports about civil society in Syria. It was quantitative and qualitative research. The stronger aspect about this report is that it was done with the local civil society organization Badael, which has its own team on the ground of trainers and field-researchers. So basically we mapped nintey-four civil society groups in the past year. The research took around nine months. We were asking about civil society groups’ characteristics, their identity and dynamics, their challenges, opportunities, and moves.

I am going to talk about the highlights of this report. Looking into the characteristics, for example looking at the names of these groups, we found a trend. Of course we cannot, say the naming illustrates a certain finding, but the trend was that many of them used the word union in their naming. Many of these groups used a term of a certain region and they used the words youth and revolutionary. For instance, the Free Student Union in Aleppo. Such words were repeated many times in many of the names of the other groups and civil movements. Some groups would have more creative names like Checkmate. This type of creative naming also affected the type of work they do.

We also mapped how many groups were formed in the different periods from 2011 to 2014 and we found out how many emerging groups were established by Governorate in the parts of Syria that are out of the government control. Therefor, I am not claiming that our research covers the government-controlled parts or even the contested parts. This finding is limited to the specific period of last year.

We realized that the minute an area moved out of the government control, civil society boomed in that area, but that was not always the case because soon the growth of civil society groups started to drop due to the rise of militarization, arming, and terrorism, especially with the rise of ISIS. In Al Raqqa at a point in time there was thirty-five civil society groups, activists in Al Raqqa described that period as a dream. However, when we were mapping al-Raqqa, there were only eight groups left. The situation is changing regularly, I think now there are ninety-four civil society groups. What we tried to prove to the international community in our report is that at some point in time in these areas inside Syria there was such a number of civil society groups, but due to the lack of support, the ambivalent type of support that the groups were receiving, and the rise of extremism, these groups are dying and the space for civil society is shrinking. In the example of al-Raqqa, the number moved down from thirty-five to eight groups and now I think there is hardly two or three groups left inside al-Raqqa.

BH: What was the juncture at which the biggest drop in the number of civil society groups took place, does that relate to the rise of ISIS and its control of al-Raqqa?

RK: Yes, you can say that about al-Raqqa. However, we can also talk about [Jabhat] al-Nusra as another extremist group. ISIS and al-Nusra have different philosophies. A main difference is that al-Nusra does not interfere with the affairs of the locals until it takes full power of the place. Then, it starts to decline civil society groups legally and to detain civil society activists. I talk more about this difference in another report that I am working on that covers case studies of al-Raqqa, Aleppo, and Dayr al-Zor.

Further challenges that face civil society groups are mainly divided into: internal and external. We realized that there is a trend of NGO-ization of these groups. For example, urging these groups to be registered as NGOs to be given money by donors. The problem is the sanctions. Every Syrian is affected by international sanctions; therefore, civil society groups cannot open up bank accounts. In some European countries, the word Syria in the name of a civil society group is not allowed. Thus these groups will be forced to look for another European donor. This situation gradually will lead the groups to lose the ownership of their organizations. The other problem is why we need social movement groups to be NGO-ized. This will led them to fall into the bureaucracy of report writing, proposal writing, and other implications of such inflexible structure. As we highlighted in the report, one of these civil society groups biggest strength was their flexible structures and their ability to work in secret. This strength was the reason that at the beginning of the uprising in 2011, it was very difficult to get hold of them because of the lack of leadership. If you catch one person, another one will rise up. This aspect is what makes civil society different from old civil society groups that preceded the 2011 uprising.

Looking further into this ambivalent support, I am not saying that all international support is negative or positive. I am saying that you have well-intentioned international organizations and you have others with their owns political agendas. However, even the best well-intentioned ones are not able to support civil society groups because of these procedures such as insisting on applying international organizations own projects regardless of the actual needs of local civil society groups. For example, when we were mapping the needs of civil society groups, one of the highest need was training on media capacity building to manage their groups. When we looked at what some of the international NGOs are providing, we found that they were providing interreligious dialogue training regardless of the fact that in some areas there was no religious diversity or ethnic diversity. Our note was interreligious dialogue training is a good course, but is it really needed in this place and time? Our conclusion was that international organizations are looking to the easiest way to support local civil society groups. International organizations prefer to work with civil society groups outside of Syria like in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan because access to Syria was difficult. This is an important work; however, if you want to change things inside Syria, you should work within the country. These are some of the external challenges that we realized.

The internal challenges of civil society groups inside Syria are, for example, nowadays we are realizing that such groups are being named after specific people. Like the organization of person X or person Y. We are finding mistrust between these groups. Some of these findings were presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva at a side session. Gladly, some of the keynotes we addressed are being listened to by some NGOs. To date, I am not sure how effective is what has been said in this report, but we were able to raise the voices of local civil society groups. We were able to say that civil society groups are not the opposition and are not the government. Civil society is an entity in itself and even this finding you cannot generalize it. The tendency to simplify things in Syria, as us vs. them, is not doing any justice to the conflict in Syria.

BH: In your current paper you talk about the hybrid local-international governance notion, can you tell us more about that?

RK: The idea came from governance during conflict, looking at what research has been done about that, I realized that most work has been done in post-conflict situations. I was thinking if you really want to work on peacebuilding, you have to start doing that during conflict. If you want to work on peacebuilding, governance is a key topic. Therefore, I started working on governance during conflict. I was thinking about questions like what happened during conflict on the ground, how life goes on when government is gone.

During conflict, governance is shifted on the ground from the government to other players/networks like local leaders or religious authorities or tribes/clans. In Syria in 2011 and the beginning of 2012, there were the Local coordination committees of Syria and civil society leaders. This might be linked to social, military, and economic networks that work at a local level, a regional level, and at international level. Comparing that with Syria, we can see how these networks work locally and then we can move to see how these networks work regionally in countries like Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Then we can look at the international picture including the countries that are involved with the international coalition against ISIS. In this context, the local becomes hybridized with the global. My argument is that at the global level you have a global governance network trying to impose a neoliberal peace order. The problem with that approach, which is highly criticized by many academics and NGOs, is that it is a top-down approach that aims to create a top-down neoliberal order regardless of the rights and human security of people in conflict-torn states.

Looking at that I tried to understand what do we mean by governance in a very general understanding of the state, the market, and the civil society. However, during conflict we need to redefine our understanding of all of these factors. For example, civil society is not civil. I would like to call it conflict society because you will find the civil and uncivil forces in it. The same applies to the state in places where the government ceases to exist; here you have other alternative structures coming up to power. Also, you have the market aspect and the increasing dependence on war economy. With all these interactions the boundaries became blurred between these three spheres (the state, the market, and the civil society). I was mainly interested in how such boundaries starting to vanish and how the local and international dimensions affect that.

BH: Can you tell us based on your research as well as connections, what the scene looks like today in Syria in terms of on the ground governance locally, you can share with us your insights? Then tell us about the international level in relation to local governance? (I am personally allergic, as many other scholars, to the term governance).

RK: Similar to your allergic to the term governance, civil society groups inside and outside Syria are also allergic to words like civil society, NGO, and activists. Thus I argue in my paper about redefining our understanding of governance and conflict because we usually make it seen as if it is between two sides, where there are many sides involved in a conflict. Civil society has become a project and Syrian civil society activists feel that this project has been taken away from them according to certain agendas and certain ways of doing things.

Looking at the interaction between the state market and civil society, we have a state failure. By definition I have looked at resources to see if the Syrian state is a failed or not. I discovered that it is a failed state at least in its ability to provide for its citizens in some parts of the country.

We have a war economy and a conflict society. Looking at the state failure and the rise of alternative structures, I will discuss first local councils as one of the alternative structures. The idea of local councils started in al-Zabadani as early as 2011 with the aim of coordinating actions between civilians and armed groups. Then the idea has developed to a prototype of local governance that has been imitated across non-government controlled parts of Syria. Local councils went through different generations. At the beginning they had more capable civil society activists working with these councils, and those have been either detained, killed, or fled the country. Other leaders who offer technical and entrepreneurial capacity have replaced them. I cannot generalize but these findings are based on interviews with many civil society activists on the ground during a period of 6 months.

This is a general trend. Local councils started providing humanitarian aid and today they are providing big projects including, for example, negotiating electricity deals. We cannot talk about local councils as if they were one entity or as if one side ran them. They are far from well-established and they are at different stages of development. Local councils vary depending on which areas they come from. If they are at a border area, they have access to roads and they have income. There are also spoilers that affect the work of local councils like warlords or extremist groups (e.g., ISIS, al-Nusra, and other armed groups).

Al Sharia courts are another example of the current alternative structures that rule in the areas that are out of the Syrian government control. I did not first believe that Al Sharia courts are existed now in Syria. Then looking at how they operate and rule, helped me understand what is happening really. Al Sharia courts rule in different areas, even in the areas under ISIS control there are ISIS-Sharia courts that rule. This phenomenon started as a way of conflict management between different armed groups, then it developed to management structures that interfere with citizens’ civil affairs from colleting taxes, charity, providing jobs, detaining activists and leaders. Not all Sharia courts are run by ISIS or Al-Nusra or a certain armed group; however, Sharia courts are over taken by armed groups even when they claim not to be. I hardly heard about any Sharia court that is more powerful than the armed faction on its side. The stronger ones like the ISIS-Sharia courts were able to implement police on the ground and this is one of the biggest successes of ISIS in regard to governance.

Moving into the economy, we see now a movement of power within the economy. For instance, ISIS managed to seize the flour mills that satisfy the needs of one million people and monopolize it to generate profits and humanitarian supplies to expand its local legitimacy. The regime is not out of the picture; we see electricity deals in Aleppo between the regime and Sharia courts. In Day al-Zor, we see another deal between the regime and al-Nusra to share oil profits, the source of this information is WikiLeaks not what activists have reported to me. When it comes to sharing profits, we see conflicting parties coordinating together and we see bigger voices to such parties at the expense of civil society. This is the reason why such parties would not like to be held accountable. Even armed groups not extremist groups would not like having civil society groups in their areas.

A different component of local governance is moving between civil and uncivil society, although it is difficult to identify who is civil society and who is not in Syria. Conflict usually polarized society and destroyed cohesion, trust, hope, and identity. More importantly, it put society in state of shock in which they became prepared to accept different governance forms. On the other side, the conflict gives rise to leaders and generate activism. So it triggers this reconsideration of traditional sources of authority.

Looking into what happened in Syria, we see a beautiful boom in civil society leaders, activists, religious groups and courts, and media groups. I am saying beautiful, although these groups might be civil or uncivil ones, but my argument is that the assessment depends on the context. If you look at tribes, for instance, many academics would look at them in a negative manner that tribes are taking the Syrian civil society into a traditional state form. However, in reality the tribes were the ones that stood against ISIS in certain areas. In ISIS-controlled areas, ISIS took the tribes into its consideration. The situation is not positive or negative. For example, armed groups enabled the boom of civil society by moving the government out of certain areas. However, armed groups also ended the existence of many civil society groups and movements at the same time. Many ask the question: what is the role of religious organizations in the Syrian conflict? Some of them played a positive role in providing humanitarian aid to different sides. However, it was non-religious platforms that hatred was fostered at these platforms with a lot of motivations to increase the conflict. Therefore, we cannot define who is civil and who is uncivil in Syria. 

All these forces at the local level shape what the picture looks like on the ground. However, they are not the only forces because these local forces work with other forces at the international level either by collaborating or competing with each other. I looked at a general trend of what the international actors are doing. In my point of view, they are doing mainly a neoliberal peace project during conflict at the state-building level and through civil society engineering. The new direction of neoliberal peace is liberalization vs. institutionalization. What I mean by state-building is the top-down creation and promotion of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, and I will refer to it as the coalition. There is also the increase support of the creation and promotion of local councils with their own definition. I earlier asked one of the high-level international politicians about the support for the coalition and questioned the top-down approach. The politician answered that there is no other option; and that they had to deal with a certain institution so they created the coalition. Although they know that it is bad, but for them it is better than nothing.

I also asked local politicians about the coalition. The answers were similar. They see it as a recognizable institution of Syrian opposition that the external actors will deal with. Nonetheless, the coalition is a side that lacks local legitimacy. The coalition knew that from the beginning. So what happened was that the coalition decided to gain legitimacy through forces on the ground. By supporting local councils, the coalition realized that this support increases its own legitimacy.

However, this was not a prosperous process because the coalition was imposing its own people. Such people reflected the division within the coalition between Muslim Brotherhood and the democrats. Within the coalition, some sides are supported by Saudi Arabia and some sides are supported by Qatar. For example, al-Sabbagh, a Syrian businessman, is supported by Qatar, and Ahmad Jarba is pro- Saudi. This led to forming two different sides Local Assistance Coordinating Until (LACO) and the Assistance Coordinating Unit (ACU). These two vanished today and only exist under one component: the Assistance Coordination Unit (ACU). However, this struggle over legitimacy within the coalition was obvious to local councils on the ground. Such struggle also was not hidden from the international community that supports the coalition. However, for the international community the state-building agenda was that the creation of a minimum form of a state is a priority in comparison with the common interests of the Syrian society.

Local councils are another story; I see them as a project that is used to govern Syria by different sides. What is happening is the international community provides support to local councils through implementers (who are private subcontracted agencies and they implement projects for profit). These profit-oriented implementers do not care about creating change on the ground or assessing harm or benefits. This recipe of a neoliberal peace for "good governance" is becoming the key training point for local councils by the coalition and many other implementers. The problem with this approach is that it is apolitical and technical approach to governance, which usually disregards social power relationship, ignores structural political issues, and risks the reduction of democracy to elite-oriented events such as election rather than people-centric and relationship-oriented events.

The end of this approach is that it may empower state institution at the expense of society.

One of Syrian intellectuals highlighted that implementers trained five different Syrian local councils on five different training topics, so that they do not coordinate. It seems part of this decentralization discourse.

Going to Gaziantep the hub where everything is happening that relates to non-government controlled parts of Syria; you will hear a lot of talk about decentralization, which is debatable. However, the problem with that is when the country is lacking a robust system, what is really the meaning of decentralization discourse?

It seems to me it is a similar trend to what is happening in Yemen and Libya, which is the Balkanization of these states in the name of decentralization.

Another thing is that different governments are cooperating with different local councils. France is twinning with some local councils. Other countries like Turkey supports the local councils near its borders as part of economic and historical legacy.

That all what I have to say about the state-building project that is happening now in Syria.

Now, I will move to talk about the civil society project. My argument here is that what is happening is the attempt to institutionalize civil society. Usually international efforts have been focused on the urban metropolitan and English speaking elites groups or on taming civil society grassroots, as I have mentioned earlier when I explained the NGO-ization, so that they become parts of global governance work of institutions and professional NGOs.

What is wrong with this approach is that we are limiting civil society as a social movement on the ground. We are limiting its agency to a site of only responding to projects that are donor-dependent. This is what I said earlier about Syrian activists' problem with the word activists, NGO, and civil society. Syrian activists feel that their projects are taking away from them in the name of different donor projects and these donors’ language and priorities.

I am not saying that all social movements should stay social movements or that they should become NGOs. The choice should be left to them. However, if we really want to support these social movements, we should support them as social movements and not impose on them the process of registering and becoming NGOs.

BH: Thanks Rana, you gave a lot more than I bargained for. Actually, there is much here that is packed in, I would really appreciate the opportunity in the future to talk to you again about components of these broad efforts.

Considering complex factors such as the conflictual nature of civil society development, the emerging war economy, the existence of various groups that are themselves at war, and international intervention. I would like finally to ask you about your take on where all these complex components are headed in the future, and what are some of the things that we should look for?

RK: I was fascinated by the work of Naomi Klein about shock therapy and disaster capitalism. I would not say that I am the strongest advocate against capitalism, but I see a similar trend happening soon with the privatization, liberalization, and similar issues in Syria. What is really happening to society is this shock state where the society and even us, the Syrians who are far away, at some point we started to accept any form of governance recipes. This narrow definition of us vs. them, you either stand with the regime or ISIS, nothing in between. Civil Society started to be divided along these sides. However, when we look at the ground, we see that today demonstrations are happening on the ground against Sharia courts and against local councils. People, at least in the civil society, are working hard and doing beautiful things to gain the form of governance that they wanted at the beginning of 2011. I am afraid that things are getting worse. I spoke earlier about the hybridized governance when the local gets to shape the international. However, to be realistic, the international impact and agency is stronger than the local. If we want to improve really the picture in Syria, we need to look at it from a different perspective. To help with governance, there are three key measures: effectiveness, legitimacy, and security.

I tell people, learn from ISIS. ISIS provided these measure to people. On the one hand, people in the west would wonder how Syrians on the ground would accept forces like ISIS. On the other hand, Syrians would think how people in the international community are allowing us to be killed every day and they wonder where is the human rights aspect.

If we look through the lens of effectiveness, the international community sees it differently in comparison with the Syrian community. The international community looks at effectiveness as it relates to the success of implementing its own agendas and projects regardless of how it impacts the local community. I am not trying to homogenize all the international community because there are some examples that helped in giving visibility to many Syrian civil society voices.

Looking at security, at the international community level we hear a lot about migration and terrorism and this how security is defined. International community tries to focus on security and on the failed state through military fighting and police, justice system, and leadership. The international community focuses on creating a state that is a security-provider. From the perspective of the local, security is simply a lived experience. Locals accept rules like ISIS because the first thing ISIS do is getting rid of all other armed groups on the ground through their own police. In some areas, looting was a big problem for the local community and ISIS was very effective in providing security in this regard. I am not saying local community accepts ISIS, what I am saying is ISIS acceptance becoming higher because it is the only side on the ground that provides local with security.

The third measure is legitimacy, which is the only factor that ISIS lacks. Though ISIS has its own magazine and own ideology, it still tries to gain legitimacy in the areas that it rules. I really doubt that this will ever happen. The international community sees legitimacy as a rational legal type that relates to the security of the state and provision of public good. At the ground people see legitimacy in regard to relationships and building trust. It is a very different perspective from that of the international community. To sum it up about peace-building efforts in Syria: we need to look at these efforts differently and equate the local and international perspectives together in the governance of peace and justice together. Now the picture is you either get peace or justice and the locals need something different. We need to look not only at peace and justice together bust also at security and change together.

BH: Thank you Rana. One thing I like to ask before we close is that when you were addressing the lesser evil approach of people being satisfied with ISIS. Is this something that you feel is an absolute judgment on people part or is it simply part of this lesser evil situation and not something necessarily horrible under different circumstances?

RK: I was just assessing how ISIS was able to govern in these areas. I am not saying it is more or less successful because locals have agency. They are not totally denied out of agency, but if they were asked to rise against ISIS, it is very costly for them and is very risky. In Deir ez-Zor, before ISIS took over, armed groups did not fight ISIS. For them, ISIS was equated to al-Nusra. Why we would expect the locals to rise against any group providing them with effectiveness and security, lacking legitimacy, though. We really need to look at that to develop how to fight ISIS, this is what I am trying to say.

BH: Ok Rana, I really appreciate the work and time you put into this. I have many questions and comments that I would like to leave them to another discussion at the macro level if you were so kind to join us again. I wanted to thank you again for your time and on behalf of Status/الوضع we are very happy to have you.

RK: Thank you Bassam and thanks to Status/الوضع.