Syrian writer and journalist Imad Naddaf has published a wide-ranging reflection on the dilemmas of governance in post-Assad Syria, warning against premature debates over partition and federalism and arguing that the country’s best chance of stability still lies in rebuilding a democratic national state that preserves unity while guaranteeing genuine representation for all communities.
A Debate Reopened After Assad
Naddaf’s intervention comes in response to a recent report by the Forum of Federations, an Ottawa-based organisation specialising in federalism and inclusive governance. Released in November 2025 under the title Pathways to Inclusive Governance in Syria: Balancing Unity and Diversity, the report set out to map how Syrians across different communities envision the future structure of the state, while drawing on international models that might guide Syria’s transition. Naddaf was invited to join a roundtable discussion at the report’s launch webinar on 20 November, where Syrian commentators from different backgrounds debated the implications of recent violence and the arguments being advanced in favour of a federal model as a safeguard for Syria’s diverse social fabric.
A Political Argument Shaped by Prison and Memory
For Naddaf, however, the question cannot be approached as a technical exercise in constitutional design alone. His reading of Syria’s crisis is rooted in history, and shaped by personal experience. He has spent decades studying the country’s political trajectory and engaging in debates over its national identity, and he paid a heavy price for the views he holds, spending nearly ten years in the notorious Tadmur and Saydnaya prisons under the former regime.
That experience has long informed his public voice, which moves between political analysis and cultural production. Naddaf has published numerous books on Syrian political and cultural life and has worked in the production and direction of documentaries. He has taught television and documentary production in several workshops and served as president of the Short Story and Novel Association within the Arab Writers Union. He also worked as the programme director for Al-Dunya TV, and later served as programme director for the Syrian News Channel. In 2016–17, he was editor-in-chief of the Hashtag Syria website. He also took part in a Rome workshop organised by the Mediterranean Audiovisual Production Organisation on a joint documentary television project titled Between the Shores. Across these roles, he has remained a figure who understands Syria not only as a political arena, but as a society shaped by memory, culture, and the long shadows of authoritarian rule.
The Conflict Was Political, Not Communal
In his latest article, Naddaf argues that the conflicts Syria has endured over the past decades were not born of an inherent inability to live together, nor were they driven by an irreconcilable clash between communities. They were, in his view, the product of authoritarian military rule seeking to dominate resources and control the fate of the population. From this premise, he returns to two defining moments that he believes should anchor any discussion of Syria’s political future: the 2011 uprising and the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024.
2011: A Revolution of Shared Demands
Naddaf insists that the revolution that began in 2011 was not a sectarian revolt, nor an uprising by one component against another. It was, at its outset, a collective movement that brought Syrians together around democratic demands, encapsulated in early slogans such as “The Syrian people are one” and the insistence on peaceful protest. He acknowledges that the regime’s deliberate fear-mongering, particularly among minority communities, succeeded in discouraging full participation by some groups, especially as the uprising was pushed toward militarisation. Yet he maintains that many Syrians from across the country’s social and religious spectrum did participate, and that the original aspiration for a democratic national order was shared more widely than later narratives suggest.
He cites examples from Syria’s Druze, Alawite, Ismaili, Christian, Syriac, and Assyrian communities, pointing to activists, intellectuals, detainees, and public figures who either joined the uprising or suffered under the regime’s prisons long before 2011. The point of this catalogue is not merely historical. It is political: to reject the framing of Syria as a mosaic of communities destined for separation, and to argue that the idea of unity is not an abstract slogan but a lived national instinct that has repeatedly resurfaced under pressure.
Lessons From a Century of Partition Plans
Naddaf also draws on earlier episodes from Syria’s modern history to reinforce his warning against externally encouraged fragmentation. He recalls the findings of the King–Crane Commission, which toured Syria in 1919 to gauge public attitudes toward proposed partition plans, and concluded that a large majority of petitioners favoured the unity of “Greater Syria” and full independence. He links these historical precedents to later milestones that shaped the region’s modern traumas, including the Balfour Declaration, and to what he describes as recurring projects that seek to reshape the Middle East against the aspirations of its peoples.
After 2024: Transition Without a Unified Vision
When he turns to the post-Assad moment, Naddaf argues that Syria’s new transitional phase remains fragile and contested. The regime’s fall on 8 December 2024, he notes, came at the hands of a coalition of armed factions led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, forces that do not necessarily share a unified democratic vision. Yet he stresses that the transitional leadership’s public discourse, which rejects collective blame toward the Alawite community, is an important corrective. The old regime, he argues, oppressed both majority and minorities alike and never truly represented any one sect, even if it sought to claim that mantle for survival. For this reason, he writes, grievances voiced by Alawites in response to reprisals are legitimate where abuses have occurred, since the community as such cannot be held responsible for the crimes of a coercive state apparatus.
Federalism as a Last Resort, Not a Starting Point
Against this backdrop, Naddaf warns that the growing preoccupation with federalism, partition, or even decentralisation risks becoming detached from Syria’s own political memory. Such frameworks, he suggests, should be treated as extreme remedies, comparable to cauterisation in traditional medicine: a last resort when coexistence has become impossible. Syria, in his assessment, has not yet reached that point. The country is emerging from a long war and entering a transition whose outcome remains uncertain, but he argues that it still retains the possibility of restoring the original national consensus around unity and democratic citizenship.
The Real Test: Turning Support Into Recovery
The decisive question, he concludes, is whether Syria’s transition will be supported in ways that translate international commitments into tangible recovery. Delays in meaningful support, he warns, have already contributed to outbreaks of violence and have postponed the hoped-for stabilising effects of the post-regime moment. What Syria needs now, in his view, is not a rush toward constitutional blueprints imported from abroad, but a new democratic social contract that preserves the country’s unity while guaranteeing full representation for all its communities as equal citizens.
In Naddaf’s reading, inclusive governance is not achieved through maps and formulas alone. It is built through legitimacy, trust, and the difficult work of reconstructing a state after decades of coercion. Syria’s future, he suggests, will depend on whether its leaders and its partners can resist the temptations of fragmentation and instead rebuild a national framework that makes unity meaningful again.
