What if women ruled Syria?

Some time ago I heard of the concept of cognitive load, and it stayed with me ever since. I had begun to feel an invisible weight pressing on my mind like a nightmare: a constant preoccupation with what others were saying rather than with what I myself wished to think about or contemplate.

The idea is that constant absorption in life’s details, the demands of moment-by-moment survival, accumulating pressures, and the endless torrent of news on social media erode the mind’s flexibility, its capacity for free reflection, and its ability to produce new ideas. Instead of being a space for imagination, questioning and innovation, the mind turns into a machine managing what is fed into it.

Many people, I suspect, live in this state without naming it. So I have tried, as much as possible, to reclaim my mind and my relationship with free thought: to leave room for my mind to drift, and to train myself in critical thinking by constructing and dismantling ideas - even absurd ones.

Today, while cooking, I asked myself: what if women ruled Syria? Would the country have been different? Would it be better now?

The question itself cannot be tested, but it opens a broader issue: the relationship between the identity of the political actor and the structure of the system in which that actor operates. Thinking through it required my mind to move along two parallel tracks at once, weighing arguments for and against the hypothesis.

One could argue that women in leadership might reorder the state’s priorities, making it more attentive to society’s needs and to vulnerable groups. Historically, women have often been pushed into roles centred on care, education, health, family stability, and the management of everyday survival rather than competition for formal power and influence.

In Syria, women carried multiplied burdens throughout the war: displacement, poverty, supporting families, and managing daily life in the absence of husbands or fathers. Had these experiences reached the centre of political decision-making, the state might have become more sensitive to people’s immediate needs. In other contexts, greater female participation in politics has been associated with stronger investment in education, broader social protection, and greater attention to public health and human development.

This does not mean women possess some innate political virtue. Social experience alone does not automatically produce better politics. But different life experiences can produce different hierarchies of priorities. One could therefore argue that a genuine female presence in Syrian decision-making might have pushed the state more toward building people first and institutions second, rather than deepening the logic of hard control.

Supporters of this view might also argue that women in societies scarred by prolonged crisis often develop negotiation and adaptation skills shaped by managing contradictions within families and communities. In a country such as Syria, where war has torn apart social bonds, this style of leadership might have encouraged more conciliatory and inclusive forms of politics.

Yet despite the appeal of this argument, another camp  insists that tying the quality of rule to the sex of the ruler alone is fundamentally flawed. Women, like men, are not a homogeneous bloc, nor do they necessarily share a common vision of justice, democracy, or reform. A woman may be reformist; she may also be authoritarian. She may challenge an existing system, or simply reproduce it through the same tools and logic.

Here lies the central objection: Syria’s problem was never merely the identity of those in power, but the nature of the political system itself: concentrated authority, weak institutions, the absence of accountability, and the transformation of the state into a closed space that allowed little genuine participation.

Within such a structure, changing the ruler’s sex might have little substantive effect. A woman operating inside a centralised and authoritarian system could easily end up using the same instruments as the men before her, because political structures shape those who operate within them as much as leaders shape the structures themselves.

Some rhetoric celebrating women’s leadership also falls into the trap of political romanticism, treating women as the automatic moral opposite of masculine power. That argument is ultimately unconvincing. Politics is a field shaped by interests, alliances, institutions, and balances of power. Different social experiences alone cannot guarantee good governance.

The belief that women would necessarily govern better simply because they are women mirrors the old assumption that men are naturally more fit to rule simply because they are men. Both ideas reduce politics to biology and ignore the deeper role of institutions, laws, and political culture.

This is perhaps why debates around women’s political quotas remain complex. Opening political space to women may help disrupt the closed reproduction of political elites, yet representation alone cannot guarantee transformation. Male-dominated systems are capable of incorporating symbolic forms of female participation while preserving their deeper logic, promoting those who adapt to the system. The issue, then, is not only whether women enter politics, but under what conditions participation can become meaningful enough to reshape power itself.

I argued with my mind for an hour. We fought. But in the end, we could agree on something: Separation of powers matters profoundly. A political system cannot rely on the presumed virtue of rulers - whether men or women - but must build accountability into the structure itself. Only if power itself is based on a proper constitution and organised in a way that allows society to restrain, question, and reshape it, transformative newcomers can make a true difference.