Damascus, Syria – For most of the war, Bahjat Hajjar worked outside the Syrian state. A co-founder of the Local Administration Councils Unit, he spent years between Turkiye and opposition-held northern Syria, supporting councils that ran bakeries, clinics and schools where no government existed.

Today he sits inside the state, as deputy minister of social affairs and labour – the ministry that licenses Syria’s associations. “The relationship with civil society is one of the most important joints in the reshaping of the state itself,” he told Al Jazeera.

More than a year and a half after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad on December 8, 2024, that relationship is still unsettled. Under the old system, Hajjar said regulation of civil society was effectively run by the intelligence service: “There was no minister who passed through this ministry without security intervention or approval.” Perhaps ten associations were licensed a year, sometimes fewer.

After al-Assad’s fall – the culmination of the 13-year war – organisations that had operated from previously opposition-controlled areas and neighbouring countries were told to register in Damascus, and their numbers have risen steeply. Founding an association is now sometimes easier than founding a company, Hajjar said: procedures are simple, costs are close to nothing and the main remaining condition is that founders have no criminal convictions.

“But we should not fall into the idea that opening the door to registration automatically means we have a strong civil society,” he said. “In countries that pass through transitions, civil society does expand and multiply. The more important question is what role it will actually play.”

A decade of improvising

Syria’s civil society sector has spent 14 years trying to answer that question.

“Its development was tied to the development of events in Syria,” said Mutasem Syoufi, executive director of The Day After, which works on democratic transition. He describes a landscape assembled in layers: old charities that continued operating, new ones tied to political actors in government-held areas, relief associations born inside the uprising, rights and development organisations and the coordination committees that were established in 2011 at the beginning of the protest movement.

What organisations gained, Syoufi said, was the ability to work under pressure, a degree of institutionalisation that came with international funding and the entry of large numbers of Syrians into the sector. What they could not build was a mature civic space.

“You cannot speak of a developed civil society under conditions of war, with no stable state,” Syoufi said.

Challenges

That capacity for civil society to respond to crises was built to fill a vacuum that is now closing. Yet none of the organisations interviewed said they had been pushed out by the new authorities.

Registration is open and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour drew up its 2026–2028 strategy with civil society in the room. The unease is about direction rather than incident: limits that sound reasonable when a minister sets them out can prove more complicated on the ground, activist Alia Shams said.

The return of the state creates a fundamental dilemma for organisations that once substituted for it. The functions many took on – clinics, schools, water and shelter – are the ones ministries are now reclaiming, and the sector has to argue for a role it could previously assume was its to do in the state’s absence.

“There is still a great need for these roles, because state institutions are still weak,” said Bashar Moubarak, a civil society activist and consultant on local governance. Even with the government’s progress in working towards the rehabilitation of public hospitals and other facilities, he argues, the state cannot dispense with organisations that spent a decade in those sectors.

A crisis of local legitimacy presents a separate challenge.

Not every organisation can make the case for a continued role convincingly, because not all have standing in their own communities. Legitimacy comes from representing a community, from being trusted to close a real gap and from responding to needs identified locally rather than priorities set by donors, Moubarak said.

Organisations shaped by donor agendas rather than local ones can end up “strangers in the eyes of their own communities”.

Legal uncertainty further complicates the sector’s future. Associations are still governed by a 1958 law that requires associations to obtain prior approval for foreign funding. When a ministerial circular last October instructed them to comply with the requirement, 31 organisations signed a joint paper calling it a return to a repressive framework and urging that a new law be drafted with them. That remains under discussion.

In May, the interior ministry issued Syria’s first framework recognising peaceful assembly as a right, but requiring permission from local authorities. Rights groups have criticised those rules as too restrictive.

Civil society is also divided over how to engage with the new authorities. Shams, who has worked with various civil society organisations since 2011, divides organisations into three groups: those that have registered and are working within the new rules; those that refuse to register because they distrust the new authorities; and those that, as she puts it, “beat the drum” for the government, in that they fully back its decisions.

The space for different views has narrowed gradually since the near-total freedom of the first weeks of the post-Assad era, Shams argued. “The boundaries of civic work are being drawn right now,” Shams said, making it more urgent to defend that space today than it may be a year from now.

Organisations also face significant gaps in capacity and coordination – but not always in the obvious direction. Activists who worked underground in government-held areas had fewer opportunities to build organisational skills than colleagues in the northwest and northeast, who operated more openly and at greater scale. But they have another advantage: years of navigating the old bureaucracy have made them better at getting things through ministries. Northern organisations, Shams said, are more likely to treat paperwork as an obstruction, losing time in Damascus as a result.

No agreed agenda

Polarisation inside civil society mirrors wider society, Syoufi said. Organisations became politicised during the conflict, some documenting the victims of one side but not the other. Years of separation also left Syrians unfamiliar with one another’s experiences, while priorities diverged from region to region.

Since December 2024, he argued, a new fault line has opened between organisations aligned with the new authorities and those opposed.

“This was expected,” Syoufi said. “But civil society as a whole is still far from an agreed agenda and building one will take time.”

Moubarak, on the other hand, sees the sector as one of the few channels capable of cutting across sectarian, religious and tribal loyalties – a role tested across 14 years of war. “But if it is left alone and isolated from support, that positive role will shrink,” he said, warning that civil society could become part of the challenge rather than part of the solution.

The pull towards relief work is inherited. The law that governed associations before 2011 framed civil society as charitable and humanitarian work, Hajjar said, not as a space for public participation or influence over policy – and that law is still on the books. A decade of emergency funding reinforced the model, producing organisations well staffed to deliver services but thinly resourced for anything else. Service provision is also the least contentious role a government can ask them to perform: few object to a clinic, whereas election monitoring or documenting abuses can land an organisation in trouble.

Inside the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, Deputy Minister Hajjar is trying to build a new relationship between the state and civil society organisations – one that, he argues, Syria has never had. It is neither the pre-2011 arrangement, when the associations’ file sat with intelligence services and no decision moved without security clearance, nor the war-years model, when organisations ran schools, clinics and rescue teams precisely because no state was there to do it.

“We do not want to return to the model of the past, where the state saw civil society as something to be controlled,” he said. “And civil society cannot be a permanent substitute for the state. What is required is neither tutelage nor conflict, but partnership.”

“During the war, when institutions were absent, civil society appeared and took on many roles,” Hajjar said. “Today, with the institutions returning, that experience should not be cancelled. It should be turned into energy that builds the new Syria.”