Dr Shamel Azmeh
LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series | 06
Abstract
More than three years after the outbreak of protests in a number of Arab countries, the role of socio-economic factors in these events is attracting more attention. One of the cases that needs more research is Syria. More than three years into the Syrian uprising, the socio-economic roots of the protest movement that became one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the history of the Middle East need to be examined. While it has been observed that the Syrian uprising, contrary to some ‘Arab Spring’ countries, has been an uprising of more marginalised social groups with a strong role played by poorer segments in the society, particularly rural and rural-to-urban migrants, the socio-economic explanation for this is still underdeveloped. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of this issue by examining the political and socio-economic compromise that underlined the rule of the Ba’th party in Syria for four decades and unpacking how a combination of internal and external shifts that started in the 1990s and intensified in the 2000s led to the erosion of this compromise, providing the background to the events that began in 2011.
About the Author
Shamel Azmeh is a Fellow at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a Visiting Fellow at Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. He works on issues related to globalisation, international political economy, and political economy of development with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa region. He is a consultant to a number of international and UN agencies. Prior to his PhD, he worked as an Economic Assistant at the European Commission (EC) Delegation to Syria.