Seeds of Peace: Local Agonistic Reconciliatory Events in the New Syria

Based on the agonistic theory of peace, we scrutinize the aspects of an emerging agonistic peace and reconciliation in Syria and the factors that help them subsist or subside. The paper analyzes the first few months of the post-Assad Syria (between December 2024 and July 2025), when the HTS ( Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham ) overthrew the Assad regime, overtook the country, established an interim government, and laid what seemed to be the fundamentals of a new state politically, ideologically, and socially. The sudden downfall of the regime has opened a political space that Syrians have never experienced since Syria became a state under the French mandate after WWI. In the first few months after the rebels’ victory, this space was riddled with conflict, fear, attempts to cancel others, and revenge, on the one hand, and tolerance, dialogue, contestation, and hope on the other. The article identifies embryonic signs of agonistic reconciliation, which emerge as spontaneous events at the local level, and emphasizes pluralism, identity contestation, and opening for new transformative engagement. Drawing on data at the societal level (such as demonstrations, celebrations, and street tensions), we argue that understanding agonistic reconciliation as events potentially embedded at the societal level could widen our imagination of reconciliation. In addition to institutionalized forms of (agonistic) reconciliation, practitioners could facilitate the agonistic potential in society from within and build on the notion of events (event-emergence) as a powerful method for diffusing agonism in post-war societies.