Charities and Politics in Bashar al-Asad’s Syria
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A01=Laura Ruiz de Elvira
Author_Laura Ruiz de Elvira
authoritarianism
Bashar al-Assad
Category=JKSN1
Category=JPB
Category=JPVH
Category=NHG
charities
civil society
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
regime
social contract
state
state-society relations
Syria
welfare provision
Product details
- ISBN 9781399528214
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Charities and Politics in Bashar al-Asad’s Syria analyses the renewal and revival of the role of Syrian charities during Bashar al-Asad’s first 10 years in power (2000-2010) in order to understand the political engineering deployed by the Syrian regime in the decade prior to the uprising. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2007 and 2010, as well as on more than 50 interviews and other secondary sources, this book is the first comprehensive study of the country’s poorly known sector of associations and charitable organisations at the beginning of the 21st century. It provides first‐hand accounts of crucial issues that did not receive scholarly attention before the uprising – such as the shift in state–society relations, the opening of the civic arena, the partial outsourcing of welfare provision and social responsibilities and, eventually, the unravelling of the old social contract, which the protest movement dramatically brought to the forefront in 2011. By carrying out a unique analysis of the management of civil society by state institutions and the First Lady’s government-operated NGOs, it also provides keys to understanding both the resilience of Bashar al-Asad’s authoritarian regime in the 2000s and the simultaneous weakening of its credibility amongst the population.
Trained as a political scientist and as an Arabic philologist, and having resided for years in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, Laura Ruiz de Elvira is a research fellow at the IRD (Ceped, Université Paris Cité). She received her PhD with distinction from the EHESS (Paris) and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2013. A specialist in charitable practices, social policies, social movement studies, and authoritarianism, particularly in Syria and Tunisia, she is the Principal Investigator of the ERC StG project LIVE – AR (The Subsequent Lives of Arab Revolutionaries). She has co-edited Les mondes de la bien-faisance (CNRS Editions, 2021) and Clientelism and Patronage in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2018). She is also the author of Vers la fin du contrat social en Syrie (Karthala, 2019) and Civil Society and the State in Syria: The Outsourcing of Social Responsibility (Lynne Rienner, 2012; with Tina Zintl). Keith Hodson is a translator and proof reader. He has worked with numerous French scientific research institutes and his translations include The Theory of Change and Response by Véronique Petit and Yves Charbit, Labour: A Heterodox Approach by Jean Vercherand and The conditions of efficiency of a PPP for public finances by Alain Bonnafous.
