Syria in Transition

The first stream focuses on transitional justice, understood as a holistic process encompassing accountability, institutional reform, and socio-legal transformation rather than narrowly legalistic mechanisms. This stream integrates three closely interconnected areas: 

1. Minority Rights Protection

The project gives particular attention to the protection of minority rights as a core element of equal citizenship and post-conflict legal reform in Syria. The research examines how past and current legal frameworks have contributed to the marginalisation of religious, ethnic, linguistic, and regional minorities, including through discriminatory citizenship laws, uneven access to justice, and exclusionary constitutional arrangements. It explores pathways for constitutional and legislative reform that embed non-discrimination, minority protection, and legal pluralism, while remaining grounded in Syrian legal traditions and lived experiences. By linking minority rights to accountability, legal reform, and socioeconomic justice, this work seeks to ensure that transitional justice processes contribute to substantive equality rather than reproducing pre-conflict hierarchies.

2. Documentation and Evidence

This component supports the systematic documentation of human rights violations, working closely with the Essex Digital Verification Unit and Syrian civil society documentation initiatives. The aim is to strengthen evidentiary standards, enhance verification methodologies, and contribute to the creation of credible, survivor-centred records of violations. Such documentation constitutes a foundational pillar for future accountability processes, including criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations schemes, and memorialisation initiatives.

3. Legal and Constitutional Frameworks

This area examines pathways for legal and constitutional reform in Syria, with particular attention to addressing historical injustices, exclusionary citizenship regimes, and unequal power relations. Working in close collaboration with Syrian legal experts, the research explores viable constitutional arrangements that promote equal citizenship, decentralised governance, and inclusive political participation. Crucially, the approach foregrounds the lived experiences of communities affected by legal frameworks, ensuring that reform proposals are grounded in social realities rather than abstract institutional design.

4. Socioeconomic Justice

Recognising that justice is inseparable from material conditions, this component addresses often-marginalised socioeconomic dimensions of transitional justice, including housing, land and property (HLP) rights, survival debt, employment precarity, and educational inequalities. The research seeks to integrate socioeconomic grievances into transitional justice agendas, challenging the tendency to treat them as secondary or “post-transition” concerns. This work aims to develop frameworks through which socioeconomic harms are acknowledged, remedied, and institutionally addressed.

Decentralisation/Federalisation

The second stream focuses on leadership and governance, with a specific emphasis on decentralisation and federalisation as potential pathways for post-conflict governance in Syria. Drawing on public leadership, local governance, and peacebuilding literatures, this stream examines how leadership is enacted across multiple levels—local, regional, and national—and how legitimacy is constructed in fragmented and post-authoritarian contexts.
Particular attention is paid to:

• Decentralised governance arrangements as mechanisms for inclusion, minority protection, and conflict mitigation.
• Leadership practices that bridge grassroots actors with formal institutions.
• The role of local governance in rebuilding trust, delivering public value, and managing contested authority in post-conflict settings.

This stream builds directly on research demonstrating that peacebuilding outcomes are shaped not only by institutional design but by leadership practices embedded in place, identity, and power relations.

The third stream explores social identity dynamics in post-conflict Syria, analysing how identities—sectarian, ethnic, regional, political, and civic—are constructed, mobilised, and contested during periods of transition. Drawing on social identity theory and conflict studies, this stream examines the role of leadership, narratives, and institutions in shaping in-group and out-group relations.

Key areas of inquiry include:

• Identity-based exclusion and its implications for governance and justice.
• The relationship between decentralisation and identity recognition.
• Processes of re-imagining national identity in deeply divided societies.

This stream provides a critical bridge between legal, governance, and reconciliation-oriented work, highlighting how identity dynamics can either undermine or enable transitional processes.

The fourth stream centres on conflict resolution and reconciliation, with an emphasis on locally grounded, culturally embedded approaches to peacebuilding. It examines formal and informal mechanisms for dialogue, mediation, and reconciliation, including community-based initiatives, artistic and cultural expressions, and memorialisation practices.

This stream aligns with the “local turn” in peacebuilding scholarship, which emphasises the agency of affected communities and the asymmetries between those who experience violence most acutely and those who shape peace processes. The research seeks to identify conditions under which reconciliation initiatives can contribute meaningfully to justice, coexistence, and long-term social repair.