In the 1970s and 1980s, Syria did receive heavy financial subsidies - a sort of war dividend - from the Gulf monarchies because of its front-line position in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Neither were Syria’s regional policies driven by the pursuit of economic gain. Ideology, such as Asad’s famously stubborn rejection of “normal” relations with Israel, did not drive his regional and international foreign policies, but mostly served as a means to sell those policies to the Syrian and wider Arab public. At the same time, subcontracting poor-relief measures to charities eroded the regime's political legitimacy and helped sow the seeds of the 2011 uprising.Throughout the rule of Hafiz al-Asad (1970-2000), analysts widely agreed that Syria’s regional policies were mainly driven by a sometimes crude interest in national and regime security. These NGOs differed from the existing charities in terms of their social base, financial backgrounds, motivations, modes of institutionalization, and public relations strategies, and enabled the authoritarian regime to pursue a new strategy of divideand-rule politics.
The Syrian leadership outsourced important state welfare functions to charities while also creating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) under its own control and supporting developmental NGOs loyal to the regime. The sociopolitical transformations Syria experienced between 20-the shift in state-society relations, the opening of the civic arena, and economic liberalization-are explored through the activities of charitable associations, including their interactions with other Syrian actors, and we argue that they reflect the unraveling of the old social contract. This article reads Bashar al-Asad's rule through the prism of social activism and, in particular, through the field of charities.
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