Imagining Syria’s future today requires sustained reflection on the profound social transformations the country has undergone over more than a decade. Syrian society is no longer the society we knew before the 2011 revolution and the long war that followed—a conflict whose embers still threaten to ignite new fires. Cities have been reshaped, villages altered, and older ways of life have receded before new forms of social relation, some forged in the crucible of war, others born of economic and political upheaval. Millions were displaced, forced to abandon their homes; some have since returned after the fall of the Assad regime, only to find a landscape utterly unlike the one they left. Syrians now inhabit their homeland—and the wider world—in patterns unprecedented in the country’s history, while class and social fissures have deepened dramatically.
Perhaps the most dangerous legacy of the past decade is the rise of sectarian, ethnic, and regional divisions to levels unseen in modern Syria. These tensions have hardened into new social architectures that reshape identities, threaten national cohesion, and influence how individuals perceive one another and the state. The erosion of trust, the collapse of long-standing networks of coexistence, and the retreat into narrow identities as shelters of survival collectively endanger the country’s long-term unity. Without rigorous scientific study, these forces will remain smoldering beneath the surface—perpetually capable of producing new cycles of conflict.
These transformations have unfolded without institutions capable of measuring, tracking, or understanding their implications. The absence of scientific knowledge about society is no longer an academic gap; it has become an obstacle to Syrians’ ability to shape their own future. For decades, policy was built on general impressions or security considerations, not on systematic social data. With the regime’s fall, understanding social reality has become a national imperative. The conflicts now visible are not merely political—they reflect deeper shifts in values, relationships, perceptions, and emotional structures.
Within this context emerges an urgent need: the creation of an independent national sociological authority dedicated to producing knowledge about Syrian society—its diversity, its transformations, its complexities. This institution must go beyond the traditional research center and avoid subordination to state hierarchies. It should function as a public, independent body with national legitimacy and clearly defined prerogatives, capable of building a comprehensive knowledge system: collecting data, analyzing trends, interpreting transformations, and providing technical support to ministries and institutions that require precise social understanding to craft effective policy. Such an authority would ensure that knowledge production is no longer marginal or detached from governance, but a foundational pillar of national planning.
Syria Needs More Than Numbers
International precedents reinforce the value of this proposal. Spain’s Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) stands out as a trusted reference for universities, researchers, and policymakers. Its strength lies in its ability to combine state legitimacy with methodological independence. The center produces social data and surveys widely regarded as the most reliable sources on Spanish society—used in academic research, public debate, and policy design. Unlike private institutes or donor-dependent organizations, CIS provides a transparent, nationally grounded, and epistemically neutral foundation for social knowledge. Drawing inspiration from such models affirms that understanding society must become a national project, and that accurate data is essential for building trust and crafting effective policy.
The sociological character of the proposed authority is not a mere academic label; it is the essence of its mission. Sociology is not an isolated discipline—it is a tool for understanding profound social change, deconstructing patterns of behavior and belonging, and observing disparities among groups and regions. Public policy cannot succeed without this knowledge. Policies are not crafted in a vacuum; they cannot respond to human needs while ignoring evolving values, new social architectures, sources of tension, or deepening marginalization. The authority would not operate outside the political sphere but at its center, equipping policymakers with the knowledge needed to perceive reality in its full complexity. The goal is not for knowledge to replace politics, but to ground politics in reality, making it more effective and sustainable.
It is essential to distinguish this sociological authority from a national statistics office. The latter produces vital demographic data—population counts, distribution, birth and death rates, migration flows, price indices, and economic indicators. Such information is indispensable, yet it reveals nothing about how people think, what they trust, how they relate to one another, or which values and identities shape their behavior. The sociological authority, by contrast, focuses on a different order of knowledge: periodic measurements of discrimination, values, integration patterns, collective sentiments, intergroup trust, conflict-induced transformations, emerging identities, sources of tension, and social support networks. It generates both quantitative and qualitative data, but its domain is society’s sociological architecture rather than its demographic skeleton.
The statistics office answers: How many people live here, and where?
The sociological authority answers: How do people live? What do they believe? How do they perceive one another? What is the quality of trust among them?
The two institutions do not compete—they complement one another. The sociological authority enables the state to understand society, not merely count it, providing the scientific foundation for managing diversity and designing policies responsive to deep social change.
Measuring Society to Rebuild the State
The authority’s essential value lies in its ability to translate social phenomena into measurable indicators, track their evolution over time, and present a dynamic portrait of Syrian society: Where do we stand? Where are we heading? Which policies move us closer to recovery? Without this knowledge, public decisions remain captive to conjecture, and policies risk reproducing crises rather than resolving them. The authority’s role extends beyond producing one-time data; it involves continuous observation, understanding trajectories, and registering the rhythms of social change—allowing decision-making to be grounded in reality rather than impression.
From this perspective, the functions such an authority could fulfill in post-conflict Syria become clear.
In workplaces, for example, the authority could measure levels of integration, tension, and trust among employees of diverse backgrounds, tracking how these indicators evolve. This is vital, for economic recovery will depend not only on financing but on institutions’ ability to manage heterogeneous teams and mitigate friction. Understanding whether these indicators are improving or deteriorating—and why—would be an indispensable tool for refining administrative policies and rebuilding cultures of trust within the labor market.
A similar approach applies to the demographic transformations produced by displacement and forced migration—among the most consequential forces reshaping Syria’s social fabric over the past decade. A sociological authority could periodically measure these shifts: Where is population density rising or declining? How are age structures and professional compositions being reconfigured? How do these changes influence local identity and intergroup relations? Translating such phenomena into measurable indicators would allow policymakers to understand demographic movement and anchor reconstruction and development strategies in present-day realities rather than outdated social maps.
The crisis of trust—now an entrenched social structure—offers another compelling example of the need to measure invisible dynamics and trace their evolution. Through surveys and mixed-method analysis, the authority could determine levels of trust among different social groups, track their fluctuations, and identify sources of fear and tension that obstruct reconciliation and integration. Rebuilding trust is not a rhetorical aspiration; it requires concrete indicators that reveal progress or regression, pinpoint where social wounds persist, and illuminate how they might heal.
This role becomes even more critical given the expanding influence of social media, which shapes public opinion and often fuels division through misinformation, incitement, and manufactured narratives. When precise, reliable national data exist—accessible to both citizens and state institutions—the power of fabricated stories diminishes. Public and institutional actors gain clear epistemic reference points against which to interpret unfolding events. The authority could measure patterns of digital interaction, monitor the spread of extremist narratives, and analyze their impact on collective sentiment, thereby helping formulate national policies to curb informational chaos. Tracking these indicators over time would allow the state to understand evolving social moods and whether society is drifting toward polarization or moving cautiously toward stability.
In the educational sphere, the authority would enable institutions to design curricula and administrative practices that respond to actual social transformations rather than outdated assumptions. It could measure students’ perceptions of citizenship, belonging, and the Other; identify regional and social disparities; detect sources of bias within schools; and monitor how these indicators evolve over time. Educational data would thus become part of a broader reading of societal movement, allowing schools to cultivate values of trust and integration rather than reproduce divisions.
Knowledge as the Engine of State Reconstruction
Skeptics may argue that current authorities would resist an independent body endowed with such epistemic autonomy and national legitimacy, insisting that existing governance structures tolerate neither transparency nor systematic data collection. Yet however realistic this objection may seem, it must not become a ceiling for our aspirations or an obstacle to imagining what Syria ought to become. We inhabit a transitional moment in which political paralysis coexists with possibilities for change. In such junctures, our responsibility is not to accommodate present limitations but to strive to transcend them. This proposal is not a luxury reserved for a stable, fully institutionalized state; it is one of the very conditions that make such a state possible. Ideas that contribute to construction do not wait for circumstances to mature—they help mature those circumstances. From this perspective, placing such an authority on the table of public debate becomes essential, for it embodies the kind of social and political order Syria must pursue if it seeks a future grounded in justice and stability.
The establishment of a sociological authority capable of producing precise, periodically measurable data would constitute a qualitative transformation in Syria’s research environment. For decades, Syrian society has lacked reliable social databases upon which researchers and students could build hypotheses and analyses. With a national data source in place, a new generation of evidence-based studies would flourish: universities could teach courses more closely tied to reality; students could prepare theses grounded in authentic national data; researchers could analyze society as it is, rather than as it is imagined or narrated.
Beyond the scholarly dimension, the authority would relieve universities of the heavy financial burden of conducting their own surveys and fieldwork. By providing a ready, reliable national database, it would allow academic institutions to redirect resources from data collection toward analysis, research supervision, and the development of graduate programs. Because the data would be produced locally and reflect Syrian social reality in all its transformations, they would strengthen the bond between universities and their societal context, ensuring that academic institutions no longer appear detached from society but become integral to understanding and interpreting its metamorphoses. Curricula and research questions would emerge from the local environment rather than be imported wholesale from foreign contexts.
Over time, periodic measurement and tracking of social phenomena would enable the accumulation of knowledge long absent in Syria, transforming sociological inquiry from a limited activity into a sustainable scientific project capable of generating insights that transcend national boundaries. With reliable national data, Syria’s experience could enter global discussions on migration, social transformation, diversity management, and post-conflict trust reconstruction—not as an exceptional case but as a contributor of epistemic value to the global social sciences. Syrian research could shift from a position of reception to one of contribution, becoming a source of knowledge for international universities, research institutions, and policy centers.
At this point, the authority appears as we envision it: Syria’s premier house of social expertise. An institution issuing annual reports; a scholarly press publishing peer-reviewed sociological studies; a provider of national data and surveys forming the backbone of economic, political, and social planning; and a catalyst positioning Syrian research on the global map of knowledge. It is a project for reimagining the relationship between state and society through a third element: scientific knowledge. Knowledge that gives the state the compass it needs to steer policy. Knowledge that assures society its lived reality is seen, understood, and respected. The authority is, above all, a project of trust—trust of the state in data, trust of citizens in both data and the state, and trust that the future can be built on clear, solid foundations.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
