Introduction:
In a moment of multiplying maps and intersecting narratives, Syria seems to be walking on top of superimposed layers of political time that neither the present nor the past will allow it to completely remove.
We are faced with a landscape in which the facade is re-engineered without repairing the foundations, and symbols are redrawn before contracts are rewritten. Cities are renamed, projects are amplified, and institutions are emptied and replaced.
However, the question of the state, not the project, remains paramount.
The narratives of “renewal” that now accompany every official announcement, from the Damascus Gate, to the restructuring of the army, to the rhetoric of institutional development, are an attempt to produce a future that offers an alternative to the accountability of the past.
But a future without forced narratives is not built, it is suspended.
In the absence of a real social contract, symbolism becomes a tool of governance, and the state is only possible to the extent that it can contain the contradiction between its form and its history, its discourse and its structure.
From the perspective of political philosophy, the state is not just a legal structure or an administrative project, but a relationship based on recognition, trust, and the negotiation of interests and destinies. If, as Habermas argues, politics is a space for rational deliberation among free individuals, what we are witnessing is the decline of the political in favor of a symbolic “post-political”, where dialogues are replaced by decrees, and public debate by media production.
A possible state is not born out of rhetoric, but out of two prerequisites: The ability to produce shared meaning and a commitment to a fair distribution of power and resources.
In the absence of these two conditions, the state becomes only a facade, and its projects, no matter how ambitious they may seem, turn into silent maps! It does not tell the truth, but rather draws the contours of a hoped-for illusion.
Stream of images: The Syrian State Between the Media Body and Strategies of Symbolism:
In current Syria, where narratives of renewal intersect with the fragility of institutional reality, symbolic projects are stepping in to fill the vacuum of politics. A fundamental question arises: does the political system reproduce itself through political action, or by intensifying the presence of the image?
In this context, the Damascus Gate project emerges as more than a media city; it is a symbolic structure that aims to redraw the map of the state through a visual narrative, rather than through the institutionalization of the social contract.
Far from reading the project as a purely productive investment, its timing, location, discourse, and institutional context all point to an attempt to enshrine what could be called “representative power,” where the state is brought back to the forefront, not through interactive public policies, but through large-scale images that fill public space and create a sense of “active presence” for the state.
A state whose ability to distribute justice and services is declining tends to compensate for this with a heavy symbolic presence, where images of achievement are exported as a substitute for the achievement itself.
A project like Damascus Gate has many dimensions.
On the one hand, it is a symbolic repositioning of the capital as the center of identity and production, and on the other, it is an attempt to contain the media sphere within official frameworks – both in terms of structure and content.
The danger of this centralization is revealed when the project is proposed in the absence of an institutional environment that guarantees freedom of expression and the independence of the public space. In other words: If a media city only transmits what the state allows, it does not create media, but rather reproduces the system.
This is where political philosophy plays a crucial role in unraveling the mechanisms of symbolic appropriation.
As Michel Foucault has shown, power is not only exercised through laws and violence, but also through discourse, knowledge, and truth-making.
In this sense, the media body of the state, when it moves outside the circle of public debate and pluralism, becomes a tool for reproducing submission, not consciousness.
The same goes for the visual sphere, where the image becomes a “sovereign sphere” that only allows for one interpretation.
Major projects should be read in light of this relationship between form and content, between what is proclaimed and what is practiced.
A state with more scenes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more present, it can be more empty.
The citizen who watches and does not participate does not enter into a contract, but into a symbolic ritual that reinforces absence.
The question, then, is not about Damascus Gate as an idea, but about the lack of accountability and the lack of debate about its content, independence, and developmental feasibility in an environment that suffers from fragile structures, uneven distribution, and shrinking independent authorities.
The state is not built by image alone, but by justice, participation, and meaning.
Therefore, the “Damascus Gate” project may be more metaphorical than actual: A gateway to the state’s perception of itself, not its society.
A gateway to a narrative that continues to reproduce the past in the form of the future.
In this delicate tension between image and institution, the contours of a possible state in Syria are determined: whether it will be an open system that reflects the plurality of society, or a “media façade” that locks the truth behind a single lens.
Substituted authorities: Shrinking religious space and neutralizing symbolic autonomy in Syria:
In regimes that lack institutional guarantees and pluralism of references, the relationship between power and religion becomes a central field for the reproduction of symbolic control.
The dissolution of the Syrian Islamic Council, one of the most prominent religious formations that attempted to maintain a degree of independence outside the frameworks of official political control. This move did not come in a vacuum, but rather falls within a broader scene of reshaping the symbolic and religious sphere in favor of a monolithic hegemony that reproduces power in a securitized, aligned, and ostensibly neutral religious body.
First: The disappearance of independent authorities and the expansion of the institutional vacuum:
The Syrian Islamic Council, despite its criticisms, was one of the rare attempts to frame religious action in post-2011 Syria independently of the official center or transient bodies.
When it is dissolved, without adequate explanations or social consultations, we are facing a politically loaded moment: There is no retreat from the symbolic authority of the state, and no room for independent religious action that produces unauthorized interpretation.
This contraction of references intersects with what Tunisian scholar Abdelmajid Cherfi has called the “interpretive state,” meaning a state that monopolizes the right to interpret the text, produces what is called “official Islam,” and eliminates any religious narrative that does not conform to its political geometry.
II: Religion as a sovereign rather than civil domain:
Turning the religious sphere into a sovereignty issue makes any uncontrolled faith-based discourse an implicit threat to the symbolic prestige of the state.
Thus, the engineering of religious discourse is no longer subject to the logic of ijtihad or interaction with social needs, but has become part of the general security and political structure, which undermines civil space and reduces religious endowments and institutions to arms of control rather than means of reflection or reform.
As the Moroccan thinker Abdullah al-Aroui has shown, power in the Arab context does not tolerate the existence of a “neutral” institution, even if it is religious, and considers neutrality an implicit breach of the center’s legitimacy.
III: Loss of symbolic diversity and reflection on community identity:
The decline in the independence of religious authorities means not only the reproduction of meta-direction, but also the disruption of society’s dialectic with itself. In Syria’s pluralistic society, religion is not just a ritual system, but a sociocultural fabric that connects villages and cities, the interior and the diaspora. When interpretation is confined to a single roof, the community’s cultural consciousness and its ability to initiate and break out of repetition is malfunctioning.
While Syrian scholar Mohammad Jamal Barout spoke of the need to preserve the “cultural bond” as the basis for any viable political project, the neutralization of independent authorities leads to the breakdown of this bond and opens the way for a double extremism: The neutralization of independent authorities leads to the disintegration of this bond, and opens the way for a double extremism: either a subordinate nominal religiosity, or a radical reaction outside the framework.
IV: Reference as a community mediator rather than a spokesperson:
The need for an independent religious authority stems not from a confrontation with the state, but from a desire to activate the cultural medium within society.
Reference, in this sense, is not an authority, but a bridge between text and life, between the sacred and the everyday.
It is a field for testing interpretation, not indoctrination.
If power does not tolerate diversity, society will not grow or progress.
The absence of an independent authority deepens identity anxiety and removes religion from its reformist potential to a tool of ritual control.
This is what the late Hassan Hanafi referred to when he called for what he called “liberating religious consciousness from authority,” emphasizing that religion can only flourish outside of official, directed use.
Here, in light of the shrinking of independent religious authorities inside Syria, we read a clear attempt to contain the symbolic space within the confines of the body politic and deprive society of any free cultural medium.
Unless the balance between state and society, official and civil, is restored, the public sphere will remain a dysfunctional space where power, not justice, is reshaped. In this case, it is necessary to think of an authority that emerges from society, expresses it, and remains independent of all its authority, whether religious or political.
Secret Politics: From Undeclared Negotiations to Exile Assassinations in the Syrian Landscape:
In a political context rife with contradictions and clouded by rhetoric, “secret politics” in Syria emerges not as an aberration, but as a familiar pattern, where public affairs are managed through secrecy rather than participation, implicit messages rather than explicit declarations.
It is a policy that is produced in the shadows, managed behind the scenes, and justified under the pretext of security and higher interests.
The manifestations of this policy are intensifying today through remarkable paradoxes: An official denial of the attempt to assassinate the head of state in Daraa, while reports leak the names and locations of those involved; backdoor contacts with Israel that are leaked to the media without official recognition, while external rhetoric continues to adopt the slogans of conflict and resistance.
It is a watershed moment in which indicators are piling up: A policy is being made away from the citizen, it is made in his name, but it is not announced to him, and he is not consulted on it.
First: Negotiation as a marker of lack of representation:
When negotiation takes place outside of parliamentary and public frameworks, it turns from a mechanism for building understanding into a method for distributing complicity.
Contacts with Israel, regardless of our position on them, if carried out without a national reference or popular mandate, become part of the hegemonic architecture rather than the peace process. Negotiations, as scholar Azmi Bishara has explained, lose their legitimacy not only by their content, but also by their terms and institutional structures.
The lack of transparency in foreign policy reflects domestic fragility and turns international relations into an extension of secret politics, where the country’s fate is shaped not in its institutions, but in closed rooms where representation is replaced by acquiescence and authorization by monopoly.
II: Logic of negation and ambiguous sovereignty:
Denying an assassination attempt on the head of state is not just a technical clarification, it is an act of sovereignty.
In a state where truth is managed as a security issue, systematic denial becomes the main method of constructing the official narrative. As Abdallah Laroui explained, “traditional authority needs the noise of silence more than it needs facts.”
This is where official silence becomes political performance.
Not only are dissenting voices silenced, but reality itself is silenced and filled with ready-made representations. This weakens the citizen’s perception of the facts of politics and loses the ability to self-interpret, turning the public into a passive bystander in a scene they are not allowed to interpret or even believe in.
III: From Governance to Structural Ambiguity:
The “secret policy” undermines the principle of accountability.
When information is absent, no one can be held accountable, and when the state is reduced to its security, the conditions of a modern state based on law, institutions, and popular authorization are eliminated. As Tunisian historian Hicham Jaiyat has noted, “political modernity is not based on façade, but on access to public meaning through accountability and debate.”
Politics in Syria is not run as an open system, but as an “intractable system,” where control is not based on the power of persuasion, but on preventing access to knowledge.
This is reflected in all aspects of governance: From security to the economy, from the media to the judiciary.
IV: The state as a political imaginary rather than a contractual entity:
In this form of governance, the state becomes more of an imagined entity than a lived reality. The citizen does not experience the state’s role in delivering rights as much as he or she receives its narratives in the media.
Politics is absent as an area of negotiation, administration is replaced by technical administration, and the citizen is relegated to the position of recipient rather than decision-maker.
This is not only political, but epistemological: It is a confiscation of the ability to interpret, which is the basis of any civic engagement.
The issue is not negotiating with adversaries, nor preventing assassination attempts, but that these actions remain suspended between insinuation and denial, between rumor and leak, without giving way to a society that demands knowledge and participation.
You can’t build a possible state with an impossible politics, and there is no legitimacy without a public process of deliberation.
Secret politics, no matter how effective it may seem, always results in a judgment that is untrustworthy and even meaningless.
The Possible State in Syria: Beyond the Ashes, Beyond the Symbol:
More than a decade after the breakdown of Syria’s political and social structures, different narratives are coming forward to answer a single deferred question: What kind of state can be born from the rubble of the present? Is it an updated extension of the previous state, a complete break with it, or a new project whose contours are shaped by the friction between the margins and the center, the contradictions of the interior and the diaspora, religion and politics, the past and the possible?
Symbolic reconstruction projects from the “Damascus Media Gate” to the “restructuring of the army” have not been accompanied by real shifts in governance or the structure of legitimacy.
It’s like repainting the walls that have fallen apart, without drawing a new blueprint for the house we want to inhabit.
First: The state as a contract, not a spectacle:
The essence of the modern state lies not in its bureaucratic structures, but in the “implicit contract” that binds the citizen to the political community. This contract is not a piece of paper, but a practice: The practice of justice, equality of opportunity, distribution of wealth, and protection of dignity. In Syria, this contract has not been reconsidered; rather, it has gradually disintegrated and has been replaced by a chronic political, security, and livelihood emergency management that has denied citizens the right to imagine and dare to ask questions.
A possible Syria begins with reclaiming this imagination, not building structures on top of sand.
As the thinker Tariq al-Bishri pointed out, the state is only complete when “its legitimacy stems from the formula that the collective mind accepts as just and representative.”
II: The state as a shared space, not an appropriation device:
In post-conflict paradigms, the state redefines itself as a shared space rather than a tool for monopolizing truth. The difference here is fundamental: the imagined state in Syrian consciousness is still associated with control, not assurance; with prestige, not with dialog.
This calls for a non-violent conceptual break with the old rentier paradigm and the evocation of a participatory state that does not reduce society to a discourse, nor does it empty politics of its plurality.
According to Burhan Ghalioun, transformation begins when “the citizen regains his place as a political actor, not as a recipient of service or discourse.”
III: Justice as a cornerstone, not a cosmetic addition:
There is no future for any reconstruction if it does not start with justice: Transitional justice, social justice, justice in the distribution of power and opportunity.
Any project that does not start from this point is doomed to become another “media portal” or a “meta-initiative” that does not touch the core of the division.
Justice is not a slogan, but a condition of the possibility of the state itself.
Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakbi’s statement that “justice is the foundation of civilization” comes to mind here, not in an abstract sense, but as a reminder that political injustice inevitably leads to the dissolution of the community, and that institutionalized fairness is the essence of stability.
IV: The possible state as a consciousness rather than a procedure:
The new Syrian state will not be born from a decree, nor from an emergency meeting, but from the crystallization of a collective consciousness that it is time to bury the sham state and summon a state that answers questions about destiny, not spectacle. A state that listens more than it speaks, distributes more than it monopolizes, and multiplies more than it forcibly unites.
This can only be achieved by restoring the public sphere: Free media, critical education, elected councils, and open debates. Without this, every development project, no matter how big, is just another scene in an old theater.
Conclusion:
In the midst of this reflective and analytical survey of the current and possible faces of the Syrian state, it is clear that the country is at a conceptual crossroads before it is a political one: Is the state to be restored as a hegemonic apparatus reproduced from above, or as a space of partnership built from below?
The bet is not on intentions or images, but on the ability to shift from narratives of containment to contracts of justice, and from centralization of discourse to pluralism of recognition.
The previous analysis showed that the Syrian scene is laden with paradoxes: the media is glamorized without accountability, religious authorities are disappearing rather than being renewed, and politics is conducted in whispers while the symbolic weight of the state is falling in people’s minds.
In the face of this complexity, the only viable answer is one that reclaims politics from the shadows, restores voice to its domain, and restores the meaning of the state as a bridge between different people, not a roof over everyone’s head.
A possible Syria is not within reach, but it is not impossible. It grows in the margins, in the silence of victims, in the determination of local communities, and in voices that never tire of dreaming despite disappointment.
Hence, state-building does not begin with a speech or a statement, but with a collective decision that memory is not a burden, pluralism is not a charge, and freedom is not an exception.
From the ashes comes not reassurance, but possibility.
From possibility, politics is reborn as the art of justice, not the management of loyalty.
Therefore, before leaving the article, we offer complex recommendations, not from a superficial reformist desire, but from a political philosophical perspective that recognizes the fragility of the moment and the need to build a possible state:
- Building a new social contract through a deliberative national pact:
- Launching a genuine, sustainable, time-bound and transparent national dialogue in which all intellectual, societal and civic currents participate to draft a charter that redefines the relationship between the state and the citizen.
- Moving beyond centralized narratives in favor of a participatory vision that reflects the country’s religious, national, political, and geographic diversity.
2. Liberating the symbolic sphere from official monopoly via:
- Independence of religious, cultural and media institutions from the executive apparatus, to be free spaces for shaping meaning rather than arms of indoctrination.
- Encouraging the emergence of independent knowledge authorities (religious, cultural, artistic) that link society to its value store rather than to official curricula.
3. Institutionalizing the right to knowledge as a condition of sovereignty by passing laws to ensure transparency in decision-making and budgeting, activating realistic accountability mechanisms for the executive authority, transforming the media into an arena of public criticism and accountability rather than an arena of directed reassurance, and engaging society in the production of national narratives.
4. Transitional justice, not justice of promises, which is the launch of transitional justice paths that begin with the recognition of victims and societal grievances, and progress towards reconciliation through justice and documentation, not erasure and forgetting, while not reducing reconstruction to cement and iron, but integrating it within a more comprehensive concept of symbolic and institutional recovery. Our position on decentralization is full and detailed in a previous article published on our official website Syrian Future Movement entitled: “Centralization, Decentralization and the Third Option Between Them.”
5. Decentralization as a developmental guarantee rather than a threat to the unity of the state, meaning adopting a truly decentralized approach that grants local communities broad powers in decision-making, administration, and knowledge production, and transforming governorates from executive units to independent developmental and knowledge actors linked to the state through a contract, not through dependency. We stated our position on decentralization in full and in detail in a previous article published on our official website Syrian Future Movement entitled: “Centralization, Decentralization and the Third Option Between Them.”
6. This involves redefining the state as a shared space for justice and freedom, not a media-reproduced security or symbolic apparatus, and updating the concepts of sovereignty and patriotism to include dignity, freedom, and the right to difference, not just control over borders or images.
Syria needs not only a “new regime,” but a new time, a time when the state is the result of a long-standing societal consensus, not an imagined authority that imposes itself in the language of rescue, resistance, or resurgence.
Syria’s future is only possible when the silence of its society is listened to, not the noise of its image.
