Fadel Abdulghany wrote a chapter in this book. The chapter, entitled “Transitional Justice in Post-Assad Syria: Frameworks, Mechanisms, and Challenges,” deals with building an analytical-normative vision of the path of transitional justice in Syria following the moment of political transformation, which the text frames as a watershed moment that followed the collapse of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024, highlighting the extent of the legacy of abuse as the starting point for any realistic institutional design for justice. The chapter presents transitional justice as a model for societal transformation and sustainable peacebuilding, through a comprehensive approach that combines prosecutions, truth-telling, reparations, memorialization, and institutional reform into one interconnected system.
The chapter starts from a quantitative and qualitative diagnosis of the extent of violations as a “defining context for the design,” highlighting numbers indicative of the expansion of systematic violence, such as the numbers of civilian casualties, arrests, enforced disappearances, and deaths under torture, as indicators of the nature of a state that used repressive apparatuses as a system of governance and not as a security exception. The text then demonstrates that the Syrian challenge is not merely holding individuals accountable, but rather dismantling structures of impunity and re-establishing public trust in institutions, because the violence was “bureaucratic,” organized, and based on overlapping security networks.
At the theoretical level, the chapter anchors the structure of transitional justice on four mutually reinforcing pillars: criminal accountability, truth and reconciliation, reparations/memorialization, and institutional reform. He emphasizes that these pillars act as elements within a single architecture that produce their impact when designed and implemented in a rational integration and sequence, while highlighting the centrality of the “victim-centered approach” as a criterion for the legitimacy and effectiveness of the process.
The chapter devotes space to analyzing the Syrian specificity as a case of deep social divisions, with the overlay of economic devastation and large-scale displacement, producing what the text implicitly calls the paradox of the extreme need for justice at a moment of limited resources and capabilities. It appears here that the design of justice mechanisms is inseparable from the conditions of the post-conflict political economy, nor from the effects of security fragmentation, the multiplicity of armed actors, and external interventions, which complicates assigning responsibilities and increases the cost of building justice institutions capable of working in a fragile transitional environment.
In the aspect of “establishing the legal framework,” the chapter adopts a foundational approach that favors the constitutional and legislative immunization of transitional justice mechanisms, and links this to what it calls “legislative dignity” and the inclusiveness of stakeholders, as a guarantee against executive unilateralism and the politicization of justice. In this context, he presents a clear critique of the risks of establishing transitional justice institutions through executive decisions that may produce institutional fragmentation and competing competencies, and cites the case of establishing a body for missing persons outside the comprehensive umbrella of transitional justice as an example of the risks of institutional dismantling of paths of truth and accountability.
The chapter also develops a practical vision of implementation mechanisms: from a “prosecution strategy” that takes into account realistic constraints and balances the priority of the senior leadership with the breadth of crimes, to models of hybrid courts and international cooperation, all the way to the structures of truth and documentation commissions, especially the file of missing persons, mass graves, and the protection of evidence. He places all of this within a complementary logic: truth fuels accountability, institutional reform opens the way for non-selective accountability, and compensation restores consideration to individual and collective harm, while ensuring non-recurrence remains the ultimate test of the success of transitional justice as a transformation in the structure of the state and not as a circumstantial response.
