On 8 December 2024, Bashar al-Assad fled Syria to take refuge in Russia. After 13 years of war, the revolution seemed to have finally achieved its main goal: the fall of the regime. A highly complex political transition process then began, with a host of challenges: how to (re)unite a fragmented country? What to do with the various armed factions? How to provide security throughout the country? How to revive the economy after a decade of sanctions and a war economy? Against this backdrop, calls for transitional justice have gradually grown, especially after the massacres of the Alawite community on the coast in March 2025. In this talk, I would like to reflect on the Syrian transition through the prism of the Tunisian transition, examining its successes and failures and looking closely at the question of transitional justice, a central element in both countries.
Laura Ruiz de Elvira is a tenured research fellow at the French Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), based at the Ceped center. She is a political sociologist and her research interests focus on collective action, doing-good practices and social policies, and authoritarianism and revolutionary processes, namely in Syria and Tunisia. Since September 2022, she is the PI of the ERC StG project »The subsequent lives of Arab revolutionaries« (LIVE-AR).
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https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88619827819?pwd=isvHsSpbHEP9Y1ndnFRPdl2XMS0ma6.1
Meeting ID: 886 1982 7819
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This talk is part of the lecture series “Syria at a Crossroads”, a collaboration between the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europea (EUME), and the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis.