Syrian Regime Resilience and State Power Through Contracting Stateness: The Cases of al-Hasakeh and Aleppo

Abstract

This chapter challenges the concepts of state weakness and state fragility that treat territorial control and control over the means of violence as key indicators of state strength in the context of civil war. We demonstrate that during the years of civil war in Syria, including periods when its survival was most precarious, the Assad regime’scapacity to manage processes of state contraction and state reassertion played a critical role in its endurance.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/mes_books/1002/thumbnail.jp