Our data looks at the Syrian organizations that have been helping millions for more than a decade.
To many, the story of the Syrian uprising had ended 13 years ago. A peaceful protest movement, part of the “Arab Spring” uprisings, faced severe regime repression and escalated into one of the most brutal civil wars of the twenty-first century. After taking hundreds of thousands of lives, displacing millions, creating conditions for the Islamic State’s caliphate, crushing infrastructure and livelihoods, the war settled into something like a stalemate in the late 2010s. But the war wasn’t over, and President Bashar al-Assad remained in power.
Now that has changed. The sudden and swift rebel advance that brought about the fall of half a century of the Assad dynasty’s brutal dictatorship, in a mere 11 days, surprised almost everyone.
Who will heal – and rebuild – Syria?
What comes next will depend on something besides battlefield outcomes. The activists associated with the 2011 uprising are ready to help and rebuild their country, our research suggests. We know this because many never disappeared. Civilians, refugees, and civil society organizations have been working this whole time under risky and difficult conditions to help fellow Syrians.
Some groups, like the White Helmets, are fairly well known. This group’s feats rescuing people from the rubble of shelled buildings have drawn public acclaim – and years of harassment and targeting by the Assad regime and its allies. But hundreds of lesser-known Syrian organizations have also been taking great risks to distribute almost all of the humanitarian aid that has reached rebel-held territory, to provide support and education to children, to report news and events, to track and record the names of casualties of violence, to treat patients in underground clinics, to serve displaced communities, to advocate for detainees, and more.
During months of fieldwork among Syrian activists living in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon during the war, we observed the hard work, adaptation to conflict conditions, and brokerage with international aid organizations to serve communities in refuge and inside Syria. We wanted a comprehensive picture of where, when, and why Syrian organizations were responding to the war. And we wanted a way to measure what we call “civil organizing” – the nonviolent collective efforts that were ongoing during this deadly conflict.
How we did our research
Collecting this type of data under wartime conditions presented unique challenges. We knew that Facebook was the primary social media site for these Syrian organizations. So we created a dataset of more than 1,300 public Facebook pages representing formal and informal groups of Syrians in the country, in neighboring countries, and sometimes further afield. Almost all were created in 2011 or later, in the midst of the war. We included community-based, faith-based, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as coordination committees, opposition governance bodies, and media outlets in this dataset.
When we could locate an organization’s activities from their Facebook page, we recorded it in the database. We found that the highest levels of organizational activity inside Syria were in the northwest and largely rebel-held provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. These regions also became a stronghold for HTS and other rebel groups who launched the recent campaign that overthrew the Assad regime.
Outside Syria, the highest levels of activity were in Turkey. These findings aligned with our qualitative observations and other research that suggest that civil organizing largely took place in these cross-border regions. We call organizations with apparent activities in more than one location (usually a combination of Syria and Turkey) “translocal.”
We then collected about 8 million posts from these pages, posted between 2011 and 2020. In a forthcoming article in Perspectives on Politics, we used computational text analysis to look at the volume of posts to understand the where and when of civil organizing, and also examine the content of those posts to understand why these groups were posting. This analysis gives us a sense of the goals of these civil organizers.
Formal and informal organizations provided vital aid and information
Our analysis shows that civil organizing persisted throughout the conflict – even inside Syria, despite the many hardships civilians faced. Civil organizing picked up in border states beginning in 2014 (see Fig. 1), when displacement from Syria began to surge. The data also show the importance of translocal organizing (between Syria and border countries). We believe this translocal organizing is driven by proximity of refugee and rebel-held areas, a conducive border country (Turkey), and the resources of international aid organizations that relied on Syrian organizations to implement their programs.
These organizations helped many Syrians
What did we learn from studying 8 million social media posts? Our analysis suggests that many groups are concerned with survival and protection, providing emergency relief, medical care, and displacement information and services. But we also find posts about governance, including administrative councils, courts, and provision of long-term services like education and economic development. And, importantly, we find attention to contentious politics throughout the conflict period, including appeals for justice, freedom, human rights, and revolution.
Yes, the war shifted these dynamics, as shown in Fig. 2, above. Posts about contentious politics, for instance, peaked during the 2011 uprising. After the Assad regime cracked down and the civil war intensified, a crisis of needs subsequently brought survival and civilian protection to the fore – and the focus of posts shifted accordingly.
Our research includes case studies
Even as we sought to quantify major trends in the public messages of civil organizers, we felt it important not to lose sight of the individual stories of what civil organizing meant in practice. Our research included detailed case studies of particular Syrian organizations, to understand how their efforts evolved, the challenges they faced, the risks they took.
One Syrian nongovernmental organization we studied worked relentlessly to protect children from hardships and human rights violations during the war. This work continued in rebel-held territory – first in Rural Damascus in Syria’s southwest and later in Idlib, in the northwest – and relied on an administrative office in southern Turkey. The head of that organization, based in Turkey’s Gaziantep, described in a 2017 in-person interview with one of us how difficult the work was but how dedicated he remained: “We won’t surrender. I will persist.”
For Syrians trapped in a long and brutal war, the dedication of this individual, this organization, and thousands of others helped make sure vital support continued. Our research on these efforts makes us confident these organizations will continue this difficult but important work as Syrians attempt to build a better future in the post-Assad era.
Rana B. Khoury is assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Alexandra A. Siegel is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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