Reconciling fighters, settling civilians: the making of post-conflict citizenship in Syria

Abstract

The absence of an internationally-mandated peace process for Syria has allowed the Syrian regime to embark on a post-conflict reconstruction process unperturbed by international norms and actors. The emergent illiberal peace in Syria extends the conditions of war and violence into the post-conflict period through the creation of new citizenship regimes that bifurcate Syrian society into the reconciled and settled, on the one hand, and the unsettled and cast out, on the other. The post-conflict citizenship regimes in Syria are generated through a series of new laws around property ownership, military desertion, absenteeism, and political amnesty that are informed by a discourse of abandonment, betrayal, and desertion that casts some Syrians as loyal and worthy of citizenship, and others as disloyal and worthy of being cast out of citizenship. The bifurcation of Syrian society into the loyal and disloyal occurs through government-led processes of ‘reconciling’ with former rebel fighters and ‘settlement’ with civilians. In both cases, fighters and civilians have to prove their loyalty to the homeland in order to secure an albeit precarious return to citizenship and rights. Those denied settlement or reconciliation are simply denied citizenship rights and legal identity in Syria.