Syria’s State-Rebuilding Challenge: Reintegrating the Border Peripheries

Since Syria’s independence, the state’s capacity to govern its border peripheries has enhanced national cohesion and stability. The civil war fragmented Syria along center-periphery lines, with several borderlands slipping out of Damascus’ orbit and forging security ties with neighboring countries. Reintegrating these borderlands into a unified Syria requires a framework that is simultaneously credible to local communities, reassuring to neighboring states, and pursued through a calibrated mix of coercion and persuasion.