Excerpted from ‘Countering the logic of the war economy in Syria; evidence from three local areas’ by Rim Turkmani with Ali A. K. Ali, Mary Kaldor and Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic (LSE 2015), which is based on empirical research in three areas of Syria: eastern Ghouta, Daraa countryside, and Idleb and part of Aleppo countryside.
Flickr/Ali Almazawi. Some rights reserved.Within four years of the armed conflict that followed the Syria uprising, the Syrian economy has been reordered into a new decentralised, fragmented and regionally and globally connected economy, in which the main economic activities depend on violence and violence depends on those same economic activities. The country has thus entered a vicious circle where Syria’s own resources are being used to destroy it, and where ordinary people have no choice but to rearrange their lives around the conflict and either join or pay (directly or indirectly) armed actors in order to meet every day needs such as fuel and food. The degree of this reordering varies hugely from one area to the other. The pre-war formal economy has dramatically contracted while new illicit and informal revenue-raising activities have greatly expanded. The financing of violence is a combination of local resources and external, mainly regional, funding.
New societal condition
In eastern Ghouta, Daraa countryside, and Idleb and part of Aleppo countryside, the main sources of revenue and employment before the war began (agriculture, the public sector, small-scale trade and industry, tourism) have shrunk dramatically. New sources of revenue are directly linked to violence, the management of internal and external borders, the extraction of local resources, and the absence of any regulation. They include bribery and extortion; loot and pillage; unregulated trade, refining and building; smuggling of people, human organs, fuel and antiquities and forging documents.
