Higher education and peacebuilding in Syria: undoing the Assad dictatorship

As Syria enters a critical stage following the overthrow of a 54-year dictatorship, higher education (HE) reform plays a crucial role in the country’s political, economic and social recovery. However, HE in Syria has evolved over the past 54 years under a dictatorship that used education for political domination, indoctrination and oppression. While reform suggestions can follow several approaches, this paper takes a historically informed approach. It examines the status of Syrian HE before the Assad dictatorship took control of the country and the mechanisms and strategies that the Assad regime introduced to shape higher education as a site of political oppression. This has involved re-engineering the governance of the sector into an apparatus of authoritarian control; amplifying structural grievances through the production of inequalities; suppressing student civil society; eroding teachers’ agency and entrenching pedagogical practices centred on political control. This paper suggests undoing the Assad dictatorship by reversing the violent mechanisms that Assad implemented in the sector over the past 54 years. Although informed by a historical analysis, this paper situates the suggested HE reform within peacebuilding literature. In this way, we situate the reform suggestions within a historical understanding of Syria and the theories and literature of peacebuilding.