State budget: a mechanism to fund the political budget in Syria

This blog provides a summary of the policy memo, ‘The Interactions between State Budget and Political Budget in Syria‘ published by the Conflict Research Programme

The interactions between state budget and political budget in Syria

This memo aims to understand how the Syrian regime has used the state budget as a tool to reallocate resources for the benefit of warlords and crony capitalists. This mechanism plays multiple roles in Syria’s contemporary political economy: on one hand, it is one of the means by which elites are given access to political funds in exchange for their loyalty (and other political services). At the same time, it represents one of the different ways in which the regime can replenish its political budget, which refers to the funds available for the ruler for discretionary spending on its elites to ensure their loyalty (de Waal, 2016). The memo analyzes the interactions between state budget and political budget from the perspective of an authoritarian bargain during the conflict in Syria. This approach assumes that repression is not sufficient for authoritarian regimes, including the Syrian one, to sustain control over their countries (Desai et al., 2009). Thus, in parallel to using coercive measures, they need to bargain with people and elites. Finally, the memo also investigates the modalities through which the elites have increasingly benefitted from public spending

Understanding the impact of sanctions on the political dynamics in Syria

This paper argues that Western policy on sanctions should be part of a broader strategy for addressing the conflict in Syria. A key part of this should be transforming a conflict economy into a productive economy. It proposes that conditionality for lifting sanctions should be multi-level rather than top down, aimed at benefitting independent business, civil society, and ordinary people, who represent the main hope for a more peaceful Syria

The Marking of Accents in Croatian and the Two-Sign System

This paper is devoted to the study of the sign systems of accents in Croatian. Until the mid-19th century most Croatian grammarians and lexicographers (Bartol Kašić and others) used three signs, taken over from Ancient Greek: the acute accent (´), the grave accent (`) and the circumflex ( ̑ ). From the mid 19th century onwards a four-sign (or five-sign) system was established by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Đuro Daničić ( ̏, ̑, ´, `, ̄ ); this system has been used in Croatian accentology until today. However, there is also a two-sign notational system ( \u27, ̄ ) developed and used by Bulcsú László