Syria’s War Economy – new research
This project explores what can be termed the ‘war economy’ in Syria. The major empirical study looks at how the Syrian economy has become distorted to depend on violent and illegitimate activity and puts forward a number of recommendations to break this cycle. The SiT team, led by Dr Rim Turkmani, focused their work on three areas of Syria under opposition control, eastern Gouta, Idleb and the Daraa and Aleppo countryside.
The output of the project has been two substantive reports, which include proposals aimed at dismantling the political economy of war. The core paradigm on which these recommendations are based, is the notion of transforming the societal condition from one typified by the existing private and/or identity-based mutuality, in which different actors have a shared interest in continuing the conflict, to a different kind of public mutuality that is centred on mutual interest in stability and aimed at the public good broadly conceived. If we understand what is going on in Syria as a societal condition rather than a short-term humanitarian disaster, a different kind of assessment and response is required.
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