Roadmap to where?

The EU’s treatment of Syrian civil society has always been ambiguous. During the war, Brussels portrayed civil society as the precious core of Syrian public life that required and deserved support so that something healthy might survive — and flourish — despite the devastation wrought by the Assad regime. At the same time, however, the EU and its member states continued to recognise Assad as the representative of the Syrian state, thereby granting his regime the political recognition and status it desperately needed. 

The updated Roadmap breaks with the EU’s special relationship with Syrian civil society as a force challenging government legitimacy. Since Brussels now embraces friendly relations with the government of President Ahmad al-Sharaa, European activities in Syria are to be framed as strictly “complementary” — a nod to state sovereignty and a condition for access. The roadmap’s stated objective is to provide actionable recommendations to the EU, other donors and Syrian civil society on how the latter can become more effective and how external support can be better aligned to that end. 

In its contextual analysis, the new roadmap notes that Syrian civil society organisations (CSOs) often limit their activities to service delivery, and have few opportunities to influence policy or represent community priorities. It consequently argues that “recognising CSOs as governance actors are [sic] therefore critical to more inclusive and responsive decision-making processes.” That sounds like good news for EU-aligned civil society actors and for the localisation agendas championed by donors and the United Nations, through which much of the EU’s support is channelled. It also appears consistent with existing EU notions concerning civil society, which describe it as contributing to “more open and deeper democracies” and that require supported organisations to commit themselves to freedom and equal rights.

The 2023 roadmap had identified “Deliberative Democracy” as a key priority, describing civil society as a force to push for democratisation”, promote a “peace and justice agenda”, and organise “across political divides” in order to become a collective social and political actor. That is now gone. 

The new roadmap applies a much narrower understanding of what it means to be a “governance actor”, reducing the role pretty much to acting as a local-to-institutional feedback loop. There is little consistency, however, in how governance and decision-making are understood throughout the document. One impact statement speaks of “shared decision-making”, implying some degree of shared authority over policy or programming. Yet an adjacent ‘outputs’ section describes something considerably weaker: community input reaching decision-makers. The roadmap leaves open whether “shared decision-making” refers to CSO networks, local councils, municipalities, ministries, donors, or all of these. 

The bottom line is nevertheless clear. The EU’s previously articulated vision of Syrian civil society as a social movement and constituent actor in state formation has given way to one of local stabilisation and consultation that lay “the foundation for future democratic reform.” 

It is their role of intermediary between state authorities and local communities that the roadmap presents as a defining strength of Syrian civil society. The document describes CSOs as “active, adaptive, and locally legitimate”. Yet the qualitative and quantitative data collected for the roadmap only partially supports this claim. Only 18 per cent of community members rated CSO responsiveness as strong, while 43 per cent described it as weak. Just 39 per cent said they felt their voices were being relayed — relayed, not necessarily considered — in decision-making processes (without any clarity as to the identities of those decision-makers). Respondents further described CSO feedback mechanisms as “ink on paper”. Community members and surveyed INGOs pointed to “tokenism in dialogue forums”, a preference for photo ops, marginalisation of women and youth, and a broader perception that CSOs are not “credible spaces for shared decision-making”. Public authorities, meanwhile, are portrayed as engaging only for appearances’ sake.

The local legitimacy that the roadmap attributes to civil society appears to derive primarily from its service-delivery role. This stands in contrast to the self-perception of surveyed CSO leaders, who describe their organisations as vehicles for representation, civic agency and collective expression. The data thus points to a significant gap between how civil society organisations understand their own role and how they are perceived by the communities they claim to represent. In reality, respondents do not necessarily see CSOs as vehicles for the “transparent and accountable governance” and civic empowerment that EU definitions of civil society emphasise. On the contrary, the roadmap itself quotes interviewees describing civic action as tolerated only so long as it does not cross certain lines related to rights, accountability and political participation. It further notes a “pervasive sense of fear and self-censorship”. 

Given how much the findings point to substantial political constraints on civic action, it is surprising that the roadmap concludes that “the core challenge is not a lack of civic action, but the fragility of the systems needed to sustain it, shaped by fragmentation, donor-driven competition, and weak long-term sustainability.” The roadmap correctly observes that the problems facing Syrian civil society are “systemic, not technical”. Yet its recommendations remain technical in nature and aligned with related dimensions of localisation agendas: improving funding modalities, strengthening coordination mechanisms and increasing local participation in programme design and implementation. Such measures may be useful, but they do little to address the systemic political conditions that the roadmap itself identifies as limiting civic agency.

Civic actors continue to operate without a clear legal framework defining their rights and obligations, within a political system that lacks democratic legitimacy, whose future trajectory remains uncertain, and in which many organisations already describe marginalisation, fear and self-censorship. If the al-Sharaa government ultimately delivers a transition that provides freedom and rights, then the broad alignment between the government and the EU-supported civil society ecosystem to which the roadmap relates may prove workable. If, however, Syria moved in a more authoritarian direction that no longer aligned either with the aspirations of a critical mass of civil society organisations or with the EU’s own normative commitments, civil society would once again become an adversary of the state. The roadmap does not consider this possibility.

Another of the roadmap’s limitations is its superficial treatment of who and what actually constitutes Syrian civil society. Most of the study is based on networks linked to Search for Common Ground, one of the organisations commissioned to produce the roadmap. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the organisations surveyed broadly belong to the internationally connected segment of Syrian civil society. This leaves unclear the position of organisations that do not present themselves in liberal terms, but nonetheless represent significant social constituencies. Some may hold positions that are incompatible with EU guidelines and funding criteria, but they remain part of Syria’s civic landscape. This matters because donor support is never politically neutral. Donors must decide which actors receive funding and which do not, thereby influencing local power relations. Such decisions require formulated political goals, which the roadmap lacks.

The roadmap also avoids the sensitive but very relevant question of power. A closer examination of Syrian organisations that control significant flows of aid and assistance would reveal that they are deeply embedded in the country’s most important structures of social organisation: families, clans, and tribes. Rather than viewing civil society organisations primarily through the lens of idealised grassroots mobilisation, analysis should also recognise them as economic and political instruments operating within these broader social orders. That would certainly help explain many phenomena identified elsewhere in the roadmap: gatekeeping, corruption, internal power imbalances and the gap between how communities and CSO leaders perceive civil society organisations. The recommendations section perhaps suggests some understanding of this iissue when it says that “power asymmetries within networks” need to be addressed; and that its evidence base is “insufficient to fully capture complex dynamics”, including power relations and perceived legitimacy. Yet this raises the question of whether a meaningful roadmap can be submitted without such crucial information.

The roadmap’s teleological assumption is that Syria is moving toward a liberal-pluralist political order and that civil society’s role is to support that trajectory. That framing, and the roadmap’s avoidance of questions of power, may be part of the game of securing access in today’s Syria; but the history of external engagement should serve as a warning. Political questions that are central to freedom, rights and dignity have systematically been pushed aside once development-champions became dominant voices. With that in mind, the roadmap’s designation of economic recovery as the primary entry point for civil society engagement raises familiar concerns. It doubles down on the service-delivery role of CSOs, and past experience suggests that once funding starts flowing, the more headache-producing political ambitions tend to be put on ice. Worryingly, the roadmap does not identify the reduction of political constraints on civil society as a central strategic objective, despite itself documenting many of those constraints.

The EU’s past relationship with Syrian civil society had a clear normative-political basis. It combined the role of CSOs in delivering life-saving assistance and acting as stabilisation actors with a political role in advancing human rights and democratic change, at both the local and national level. The new roadmap retreats from that ambitious, and perhaps unrealistic, vision without offering a coherent alternative. Its unspoken destination appears to be simpler and more modest: stability today, democracy perhaps tomorrow. Whether those two objectives ultimately reinforce one another is left unexplored.