The Syrian Civil Society Movement

The Dialectic Relationship between the Political and the Civil in the Syrian Civil Society Movement

The Arab Reform Initiative's monthly Brief (December 2009) published an article by Wael Sawah about the role of the civil and the political in the Syrian civil society movement. With the beginning of Damascus Spring, 2000-2001, a new expression entered the Syrian political and cultural dictionary: the civil society. No sooner had this expression been introduced than a debate started about the nature of this expression, its limits and interactions. A question started to disturb a good number of Syrian politicians and intellectuals: to what extent may the political interact with the civil, influence it, and be influenced with it? Is civil society a social-cultural concept, or it is just wrong to separate it from politics, which will abbreviate it to the limits of charities?

We cannot give a simple answer to such a complicated question. This paper tries to raise the question, and to review the complex relationship between the civil activity and the political activity in the performance of the civil society as well as the political opposition in Syria.