The international community is failing Syria, again

The July visit of UN Secretary-General António Guterres to Damascus was a major act of international recognition for the government of Ahmad al-Sharaa. In the words of Syria’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ibrahim Olabi, it was the “ultimate legitimisation”. According to Olabi, Guterres was so eager to visit that he accepted the invitation before it had formally been extended. After more than a decade of failed international efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict, the UN appeared eager to produce a different set of images.

While the Assad regime fell with a bang, the Geneva process faded with a long whimper. Over the course of the internationalised civil war that followed the 2011 uprising, the Geneva process became a byword for diplomacy detached from reality. From 2014 onwards, successive Special Envoys – each carrying less political weight than the last – presided over a process that steadily lost substance. Tasked with facilitating the political settlement envisaged in Security Council Resolution 2254, it instead produced new procedures, working groups and, eventually, a Constitutional Committee that became its final vestige. By the end, Special Envoy Geir Pedersen had spent more than a year being ghosted by Ahmad Kuzbari, the head of the so-called government delegation – which hardly deserved the name, given that Bashar al-Assad had long made clear that his government was not formally participating.

At the same time, international engagement increasingly revolved around securing humanitarian access from the Assad regime in a way that enabled wholesale politicisation of aid and entrenched a system of patronage, mismanagement and corruption. The UN and many member states, meanwhile, gradually accommodated themselves to the regime’s survival, making its normalisation self-fulfilling. Yet the implementation of Resolution 2254 remained the dominant diplomatic script through which engagement was justified, until Assad’s fall in December 2024 brought it to an abrupt end. Encouraged by President Trump’s unusually warm embrace, Syria’s new authorities were quickly welcomed into the international fold and the beginning of a new era proclaimed.

Has the international governance system that failed Syrians under Assad learned from its mistakes? Or is the transition from Geneva to post-Assad stabilisation better understood as organisational adaptation?

If the latter is true, repeated failure is likely, to Syria’s detriment and the detriment of international governance itself and the institutions that constitute it. One might argue that the collapse of the Geneva process demonstrated the UN’s political irrelevance, rendering any further discussion of its role in Syria largely theoretical. Yet international governance – understood here as the way politics around Syria, including humanitarian and development engagement, are organised through the UN, its member states and international NGOs – will remain central for years to come. Syria’s dependence on external assistance is unlikely to end anytime soon. Combined with the uncertainty surrounding its political future and the stakes that regional and international powers continue to have in the country, Syria’s transition will remain deeply internationalised despite all the rhetoric of sovereignty. Governments continue to channel the bulk of their support through the UN despite the well-documented shortcomings of its humanitarian and development architecture in Syria since 2011. And while competing powers continue to create facts on the ground, governments formally outsource much of the responsibility for the broader political transition to the UN, pointing to their support for the UN and civil society.

To understand how international governance on Syria changed after Assad’s fall, it is not enough to look at what political realism would describe as political objectives. International governance is also driven by the organisational imperative to remain relevant and engaged. Institutions validate governments that enable their presence; governments validate institutions that legitimise their authority; and both present the resulting relationship as progress. This cycle of mutual legitimisation for the sake of self-preservation reinforces itself, with lasting consequences for Syria’s transition.

International politics is usually analysed through the lens of political realism, with its focus on a specific understanding of power and interests. That remains indispensable, but it leaves out the more mundane fact that states act through organisations, and organisations have a logic of their own. From a systems-theoretical perspective, organisations reproduce themselves by connecting decisions to further decisions and by continuously generating the premise on which those decisions can be made. Foreign ministries are expected to remain engaged in major conflicts. UN envoys need interlocutors. Development agencies need programmes to administer.

Aid organisations illustrate this particularly well because their operations are simultaneously conditioned by several functional logics. Humanitarian need provides the rationale for intervention, while political access and donor funding determine which recognised needs can actually be translated into programmes. Organisations continuously convert these constraints into new decisions: where to operate, whom to negotiate with, which programmes to fund. In doing so, they reproduce themselves. This logic is not confined to senior leadership. Throughout the international system, countless routine decisions are made every day that are individually rational and often entirely well intentioned. Collectively, however, they reinforce a pattern of engagement that acquires a momentum of its own, increasingly measured by its continuity and activity rather than by whether it advances clearly defined humanitarian, development, and political objectives.

The Geneva process was a case in point. Long after Resolution 2254 had ceased to offer a meaningful path towards resolving the conflict, it continued to organise international engagement because it gave governments, UN agencies and international organisations a legitimate framework through which humanitarian, development (dubbed “early recovery”) and political engagement could be justified. Once Assad fell, that script disappeared with remarkable speed. Had Resolution 2254 suddenly been treated as the binding document it is, uncomfortable questions would have followed almost immediately regarding elections under UN supervision, constitutional arrangements, the nature of political transition and the limits of executive power. Those questions quietly faded from diplomatic discourse and gave way to a new diplomatic script centred on stabilisation, reconstruction, support for the transitional authorities and the sense that one chapter had closed and another was beginning. Ahmad al-Sharaa quickly embraced and helped shape that script. “We are now focused on state-building. The revolution ended with the regime’s fall,” became one of his standard talking points after entering the Presidential Palace.

The new script allowed international actors to present their engagement as a continuation of long-standing policy, even as some of the principles that had previously been presented as indispensable to a legitimate political order in Syria slipped into the background. This is one of the reasons why governments are so often accused of hypocrisy. What appears to domestic and international audiences as an inconsistent application of principles is not necessarily the result of political diabolicalness, but of organisations adapting their engagement to new political realities in ways that preserve their own institutional relevance. It is, in many respects, a matter of mundane bureaucracy, albeit with serious political consequences.

If references to Resolution 2254 in Security Council meetings are taken as an indicator, the gradual adaptation to the new diplomatic script can be traced quite clearly. During the HTS-led offensive in December 2024, the Council continued to reaffirm the resolution. On 17 December, it issued a statement calling for the implementation of Resolution 2254 under UN facilitation. On the same day, Special Envoy Geir Pedersen, sensing what was ahead, argued for a successor resolution that would preserve the principles of Resolution 2254 while providing the UN with a mandate better suited to post-Assad Syria. The proposal was never taken up.

The Council nevertheless continued to reaffirm the resolution, doing so in stronger terms after the coastal massacres in March 2025, when it called for the implementation of a democratic political process based on the key principles of Resolution 2254 facilitated by the UN. The European Union reiterated that position a month later. Over the following months, at least twenty-five countries serving as permanent or elected members of the Security Council - from France, Russia and China to the Arab states - also reaffirmed their support for the resolution in Council sessions. This broad, though gradually shrinking, performative consensus declined rapidly once the new Deputy Special Envoy, Claudio Cordone, took office. Since assuming the position, he has not mentioned Resolution 2254 – the resolution that legally constitutes the basis of his mandate – a single time in the Security Council. Meanwhile, the structure, emphasis and political vocabulary of his briefings have shifted to reflect the new script. The new vocabulary appears to have caught on. Since his first Council briefing in February 2026, only Russia, Somalia, Liberia, Colombia, Panama and, on one occasion, Greece, have continued to argue that the principles of Resolution 2254 remain the legitimate point of reference for Syria’s transition.

In short, a new script has clearly emerged, centred on constructive relations with Syria’s new authorities and an overall atmosphere of optimism and new beginnings. There is little doubt that it has succeeded in reorganising international engagement. Whether it is equally successful in advancing the political principles on which that engagement continues to be justified, and in achieving its stated humanitarian, development and political objectives, is another matter.

If political effectiveness – including a genuine discussion of what that actually means, what the objectives are and how they can realistically be achieved – is not what the incentive structure of international governance rewards, business as usual will continue. Broadly speaking, this means governments continue to scratch the surface while, willingly or not, help consolidate realities created by those who establish facts on the ground through force. There are notable exceptions. Germany, for example, has invested resources in analysing networks and better understanding the political landscape.

Overall, however, capitals are rarely agile environments. Analysis in foreign ministries tends to amount to consulting a handful of sources before settling on conclusions that broadly fit policy priorities of a given government – which, in much of Europe, revolve around migration. It would therefore be misleading to interpret the large number of workshops, coordination meetings and planning exercises across the humanitarian, development and governance sectors as evidence of a sustained effort to identify the politically most effective ways of supporting Syria. Much of this is to show activity, which generates legitimacy in its own right, and to fitting programmes into the new script of engagement.

If humanitarian assistance continues largely through the established UN and (I)NGO architecture while funding envelopes shrink, and if larger development programmes remain delayed by repeated needs assessments and planning exercises instead of testing the ground and engaging Damascus in honest discussions about implementation, the international governance system will repeat many of the mistakes of the past. Chief among them are confusing political recognition with political legitimacy, failing to make use of existing leverage, allowing ambitious language to substitute for political strategy, and overlooking the fact that a UN mandate carries obligations.

UN member states and donors often argue that they address the political dimension of the transition through their support for civil society and the UN. Yet this is difficult to reconcile with the reality that the UN lacks a political strategy for Syria. Political strategy in this context does not require a mediation mandate of the kind Resolution 2254 provides. It requires a framework through which the UN can exercise political oversight over the activities of its agencies, and hold them accountable to whether their activities collectively advance clearly defined political objectives. But a framework alone is not enough. It also requires leaders with foresight and political courage to use the organisation’s weight, and to risk access, perceived relevance and institutional comfort rather than making self-preservation their overriding concern. That weight should be directed towards, inter alia, an inclusive constitutional process that, once agreed, provides a legitimate point of reference for accountability for Syria’s path forward.

This brings us back to the logic of organisational reproduction of international governance and the problems that come with it. It is no coincidence that Deputy Special Envoy Claudio Cordone has not invoked Resolution 2254 since taking office. His primary objective appears to be organisational: avoiding friction with Damascus – which regards the resolution’s provisions as a threat to its authority – and secure the move of the Office of the Special Envoy from Geneva to the Syrian capital, even though any tasks it would be allowed to perform there are already covered by the UN Resident Coordinator.

Conversations with diplomats in New York and several European capitals reveal remarkably little clarity about what role the Office would actually play in Damascus that would distinguish it from other UN entities, or indeed what concrete political objectives the Special Envoy would be expected to achieve. Relocation has instead become an end in itself. By suppressing the mandate to preserve the Office, the reason for preserving it is steadily eliminated – while setting a dangerous precedent for future UN missions globally if political missions can so easily be confined to technical support. Member states appear to have largely accepted this situation. Closing a political office during a transitional period would undermine their own claim that they are supporting Syria’s political transition through the UN. At the same time, however, they appear reluctant to see the UN exercise a genuinely political role.

The longer this inconsistency persists, the more Resolution 2254 - and ultimately the principles embedded in the UN Charter - are buried as optional. Without a common point of accountability for everything from life-saving aid to technical support for state institutions, the conditions are in place for the same bouquet of shortcomings that characterised international governance on Syria between 2011 and 2024 to bloom again.

This analysis has argued that while the diplomatic script surrounding Syria has changed since Assad’s fall, the underlying incentive structures of international governance have not. Access and presence continue to be treated as achievements in themselves, even when those involved cannot demonstrate how they advance the political objectives they publicly endorse. Judged against both the principles embedded in the UN Charter and the political objectives governments claim to pursue, this amounts to a form of business as usual that ultimately fails both Syria and the international governance system itself.

Judging from public reporting on António Guterres’s visit, together with insights from diplomats, Syrians, and UN officials briefed on the visit, it is difficult to identify any political objective that was advanced. That is remarkable given Guterres’s long familiarity with Syria, first as UN High Commissioner for Refugees and then as Secretary-General. His scheduled address before the People’s Assembly – expected to put weight behind the idea of power sharing – was cancelled without explanation. The only institutional request the Secretary-General carried to Damascus concerned moving the Office of the Special Envoy. Damascus, unmoved by the charm offensive, turned it down.

If the Secretary-General himself does not break the organisational logic dominating the UN and international governance as a whole by insisting on clear political objectives, and by being prepared to disengage when engagement serves little purpose beyond validating itself, it is difficult to see why others within the system would behave differently.

Creating an international governance system whose incentives reward political effectiveness rather than organisational continuity is a monumental challenge. One place to start is the growing emphasis on technical support for Syrian institutions, which deserves greater scrutiny – scrutiny that must run both ways. There is no such thing as apolitical institution-building. Every effort to strengthen ministries, draft legislation, support elections or build state capacity redistributes power and legitimacy. In political systems where checks and balances are weak, strengthening institutions also means strengthening the actors who control them.

International actors are hardly innocent of political calculation either. Every international presence can double as an intelligence-gathering platform, and every offer of technical assistance may be pretext for getting a foot in the door. Technical cooperation is political twice over, and the Syrian authorities therefore naturally approach such offers with caution. One might therefore expect the political theory of change to come first, not be reverse-engineered to justify programs already under way.