A well-known misunderstanding arose during a meeting between the premier of China, Zhou Enlai, and the U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in the early 1970s. Through interpreters, Kissinger asked Zhou for his views on the impact of the 18th century French Revolution. His reply, “Too early to say”, came to be viewed as a wise reflection on the longue durée (long duration) effects of major historical events. But, in fact, Zhou Enlai simply thought Kissinger was referring to the far more recent student protests in Paris.
Looking at the recent events in Syria and the toppling of the brutal Assad regime, Zhou Enlai’s comment on revolutions and their impacts shows its pertinence, however misconstrued. The Syrian coup is not only a major event for the millions who suffered under the Assad regime or were forced to flee from their homeland, it represents the culmination of wider historical forces leading back to the early 2010s and beyond. Revolutions do not just ‘happen’ – they are the result of a complex web of forces both within and outside of national borders, stretching across years and are often driven by entangled social, economic, political, and environmental systems.
Some call this type of confluence of issues a ‘polycrisis’: a situation where numerous systems affecting dozens of countries are strained and in danger of falling into dysfunction. Many argue that we are experiencing a global polycrisis right now, which not only makes revolutions more likely to arise as these stresses grow, but also more likely to spread to other regions when they do occur.
To understand what happened on December 8, 2024 in Syria, we need to look to the events of the 2011 Arab Spring and consider these revolutions within a polycrisis context. As the Arab Spring movements were sweeping across countries in North Africa and the Middle East, Syria was likewise experiencing their own entangled set of political, economic, and environmental crises, not unlike the forces that propelled revolution in places like Tunisia and Egypt. Angered by the Assad regime’s long history of political repression, failure to address spiralling economic inequality, and the ill managed effects of a three-year long drought, the Arab Spring movement was taken up in Syria and rapidly morphed into a full-on civil war. This in turn quickly became an international conflict with a host of global ramifications. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran exploited the political situation, both aiming to expand their influence in the Middle East. This gave rise to factionalism, where Saudi Arabia backed Sunni rebel groups, leading Iran to prop up the weakened Assad regime, in part to secure an arms corridor to supply Hezbollah affiliates in Lebanon. As we see time and again in our modern polycrisis, crises do not stay within national borders for long, as our world is globally entangled major events like civil wars will inevitably draw in others.
The unstable situation in Syria in the early 2010s became a fertile ground for the birth of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has since spread beyond the Syrian borders, its tentacles reaching different parts of Africa, Central and Southeast Asia. With the rise of ISIS’s territorial expansion, new players emerged into the fray with the United States and Russia competing for their own agendas in the region. Russia followed Iran in backing Assad, gaining strategic military bases in Tartus and Hmeimim on the Mediterranean coast. Syria’s neighbour Turkey has also been drawn into the growing pan-regional crisis, hosting around 3 million Syrian refugees and supporting the Syrian National Army (SNA) against the US-assisted Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Turkey has long regarded the SDF as a partner of the Turkish-outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) who seek to have their own Kurdish self-government, including over areas of modern-day Turkey.
With the support of Iran, Russia, and others, Assad was able to hold onto power and rule for another 14 years. But the revolution – and the repressive tactics that drove unrest to begin with – never went away. Meanwhile, during those 14 years Assad, ‘the butcher of Damascus’, held off the revolution through the help of Iran and Russia. Assad’s brutal actions included rocket attacks on his own people, which were equipped with the sarin nerve agent, killing over 1,400 people in the Ghouta area of Damascus. It is estimated that the Assad regime has killed over 500,000 people, with around 130,000 others still missing. Mass arrests, torture and killings of suspected enemies of the state were routine, as we have witnessed from the shocking and inhumane reports coming from the Saydnaya, Mezzeh and Far’Falastin prison complexes. The conflicts in Syria have also forcibly displaced 14 million people, many migrating to places in Europe like Germany and Sweden. According to the UNHRC over 7 million have been internally displaced, 70 percent of the population in Syria needs humanitarian assistance, and 90 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line, while Assad lived in a scrawling luxury compound and had amassed a net worth of 1.6 billion pounds.
The Assad regime’s capacity to project authority waned as the years went on. Israel’s entry into the conflict hastened this along further. Their actions, escalating after the October 7th, 2023 attack, have largely aimed to weaken Hezbollah, and Iran by proxy. Through mass airstrikes on Iranian assets in the country, they have severely limited Hezbollah’s capabilities and diminished Iran’s influence in Syria. In turn, and with Russia increasingly focussed on their ongoing war in Ukraine – itself not unconnected to these same historical forces – the cracks in Assad’s stranglehold on power truly started to show.
On the back of all these events, the revolution that never fully died was revived in the waning weeks of 2024. The rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) (with former allegiance to al-Quida), who had controlled the Idlib area under the leadership of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani (now known as Ahmed al-Sharaa), launched a calculated lightning offensive. First capturing villages and military bases in the province of Aleppo, they continued and took control of the city of Aleppo on November 30th. From there HTS gained command of the highway that stretched from Damascus to Aleppo, eventually taking hold of Hama, Homs, and Damascus. As the rebels moved closer to the capital, Assad and his family left Syria and were personally granted asylum by Vladimir Putin.
Just as no single revolutionary movement arises in a vacuum, but is shaped and driven by forces from years if not decades earlier, so too we expect that the events that unfolded in Damascus in December 2024 will not stop with the exile of Assad. As our polycrisis continues, so too do the pressures, stresses, and the potential breakdown of various systems – let alone globally – and are still fertile ground for the spread of crises.
Indeed, even in the first weeks after the successful end of the Assad regime, we are already seeing the ripple effects take shape – just as history teaches us to expect. In the chaos of the regime fall, international actors like Israel have further pushed into the Syrian Golan Heights buffer zone in an effort to seize territory. The US has eliminated IS-linked targets highlighting its own international security policy. Emerging as a winner from Syria’s regime change, Turkey has also launched strikes against Kurdish forces and will no doubt play a major role in shaping a new Syrian government particularly pursuing policies that prohibit an autonomous Kurdish region in northeastern Syria.
In his 2014 book, revolutionary theorist Jack Goldstone asked the reader to reflect on the major impacts and outcomes of the 1917 Russian Revolution: was it its survival after the Second World War, becoming a superpower in the 1960s, its collapse 72 years later, or all of the above? Importantly, Goldstone’s reflection allows us to contemplate the temporality and the nonlinearity of revolutions at large. When do revolutions really begin? And when can they be said to be truly over – or do they live on forever in the cascade of other events they spark?
Such critical questions are still waiting to be answered about the longer-term impact of the Syrian Revolution: What will the fall of the Assad regime mean and what kind of government will be formed in its place? Will the revolution be considered a success years from now, or only a blip in the country’s fraught history? Will the millions who fled Assad be able to return to a peaceful, prosperous Syria, or will the region’s ongoing (poly)crises embroil the country into continued strife? As Enzo Traverso has poignantly remarked on revolutions, “Liberation is not an ineluctable happy ending, but a remote possibility, a chance to be taken without any predictable outcome.” In fact, it is during the ‘revolutionary honeymoon’ that revolutionary regimes are the most vulnerable to ideological infighting among the victors. Similarly, revolutionary regimes have the difficult task of gaining international recognition while trying to attain political and economic security for the country.
As the HTS emerges as a clear victor, the international community questions the group’s intent on becoming a governing body for all Syrians. Commentators are worried about HTS’s record of targeting religious minorities and killing and torturing political opponents who they deemed to have violated their version of Sha ’ria law. This question has increasingly come to the forefront after Christians protested the burning of a Christmas tree by Islamist fighters and the Alawite protests in the cities of Tartous and Latakia after the circulation of a video from November showing an attack on an Alawite shrine. Further, as writer and journalist Mona Eltahawy has argued, there is no real revolution until the rights of women and girls are upheld. Historically – for example in France, Mexico, and Cuba – women who have protested against injustice and fought for equal treatment have frequently been sidelined in the aftermaths of revolutions. But as the unimaginable toppling of the authoritarian Assad regime has become a reality, hope still resists.
So, what then is the impact of the 2011 Arab Spring Revolution? Perhaps it is too early to say!
