Damascus, Syria – For most of the war, Bahjat Hajjar worked outside the Syrian state. A co-founder of the Local Administration Councils Unit, he spent years between Turkiye and opposition-held northern Syria, supporting councils that ran bakeries, clinics and schools where no government existed. Today he sits inside the state, as deputy minister of social affairs and labour – the ministry that licenses Syria’s associations.
More than a year and a half after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad on December 8, 2024, that relationship is still unsettled. Under the old system, Hajjar said regulation of civil society was effectively run by the intelligence service: “There was no minister who passed through this ministry without security intervention or approval.” Perhaps ten associations were licensed a year, sometimes fewer. After al-Assad’s fall – the culmination of the 13-year war – organisations that had operated from previously opposition-controlled areas and neighbouring countries were told to register in Damascus, and their numbers have risen steeply.
Founding an association is now sometimes easier than founding a company, Hajjar said: procedures are simple, costs are close to nothing and the main remaining condition is that founders have no criminal convictions. The more important question is what role it will actually play.” Syria’s civil society sector has spent 14 years trying to answer that question. He describes a landscape assembled in layers: old charities that continued operating, new ones tied to political actors in government-held areas, relief associations born inside the uprising, rights and development organisations and the coordination committees that were established in 2011 at the beginning of the protest movement.
What organisations gained, Syoufi said, was the ability to work under pressure, a degree of institutionalisation that came with international funding and the entry of large numbers of Syrians into the sector. What they could not build was a mature civic space. That capacity for civil society to respond to crises was built to fill a vacuum that is now closing.
Yet none of the organisations interviewed said they had been pushed out by the new authorities. Registration is open and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour drew up its 2026–2028 strategy with civil society in the room. The unease is about direction rather than incident: limits that sound reasonable when a minister sets them out can prove more complicated on the ground, activist Alia Shams said.
The return of the state creates a fundamental dilemma for organisations that once substituted for it. The functions many took on – clinics, schools, water and shelter – are the ones ministries are now reclaiming, and the sector has to argue for a role it could previously assume was its to do in the state’s absence. Even with the government’s progress in working towards the rehabilitation of public hospitals and other facilities, he argues, the state cannot dispense with organisations that spent a decade in those sectors.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
