The chaos (fawḍà) Bashshar al-Asad warned against – Damascus University 10th November 2005 – and present-day Syria

On Friday 21 February 2025, Professor Johannes Waardenburg gave the Middle East Centre’s Friday seminar Biography: Professor JST Waardenburg teaches the general history of the Arab world at the IULM in Milan. As a historian, he specialises in the period of the Ba‘th party in power in 20th century Syria. In 2021 he published two volumes with the Nallino Institut in Rome, ‘La Siria contemporanea : ridisegnando la carta del Vicino Oriente’, in which he describes the transformations of the state economy in Syria and the diverse international backing the As‘ad family has enjoyed. Abstract: With the fall of the al-Asad dynasty in Syria in the early hours of Sunday 8th December 2024, nearly fourteen years after the start of the Arab Spring, a question arises: Has the warning given by Bashshar al-Asad in his speech at Damascus University in the autumn of 2005 come true? Have his departure and the breakdown of al-muqāwamah wa-l-ṣumūd – identified commonly as the strategy of resistance – really brought chaos to the region? If that is not the case, why did the decisive actors keep him in power in Syria for approximatively another 20 years after he made that presentation? Imagining al-Asad bluffed while he felt the whole international community was after him in the 2005 follow-up to the murder of Rafīq al-Ḥarīrī, the Prime Minister who oversaw Lebanon’s reconstruction*, why did no one at the time call his bluff out? Rather, looking at the remarkably rapid reintroduction of Bashshar al-Asad to the international scene after 2005, this presentation will try to assess critically what the chaos was that everyone was afraid of in the event of the al-Asads falling then. Why does this same chaos seem manageable now? Have Western actors together with Turkey and the Gulf countries simply studied the regional setup better, or might the incidence of Israel’s forever war strategy have been a decisive factor for others to make a shift unthinkable until recently, for the sake of the future of the region. *To clarify: at 23:03 & 24:08 in the recording, the specification of Rafīq al-Ḥarīrī's title (of Prime Minister) should not be understood as referring to his institutional role at the time of his assassination on 14th February 2005. As he didn't occupy that office anymore back then. al-Ḥarīrī had resigned on 20th October 2004 and a government led by ʿUmar Karāmī had been set up less than a week later on 26th of October.