![]() ![]() Each of these four categories will be tackled separately before their correlations and linkages are considered. The war economy in Syria will be examined from four different axes encompassing the government, the population at large, the opposition and other armed groups, and traders and investors. ![]() How has the Syrian government coped with the war economy? Have its preparations and plans worked? What about the armed opposition? How has it created its decentralized economic system? How have ordinary Syrians coped with the war economy, regardless of their position-whether as supporters of the ruling regime, the opposition, or silent neutrality? This publication will attempt to answer a number of questions. ![]() This is the war economy that we have always been preparing for.” 2 In a 2013 seminar with journalists, then Syrian deputy prime minister Qadri Jamil boasted, “We have always had basic and reserve bakeries and enough wheat reserves for two years. In addition, the publication will shed light on the new methods that civilians have increasingly employed to meet their daily basic needs.Ī study by the Arab Encyclopedia of the Syrian presidency showed that the war economy and the militarization of the economy have long prevailed in Syria, even before the outbreak of the crisis: “Defense expenditures have significantly surpassed allocations that Syria could have earmarked for development since 1990.” It is thanks to this ongoing economic militarization that the diverse components of the Syrian economy have been relatively able to cope with the crisis and avert sudden collapse. It will also document the destruction of the formal economy against the backdrop of thriving black markets, as well as the recourse by the conflict’s parties to new means and methods to sustain their survival. This publication seeks to track Syria’s war economy after the conflict has entered its fourth year and to show how the features mentioned above apply in practice there. and exploit labour.” Also according to them, “War economies are highly decentralised,” and combatants “thrive on cross-border trading networks.” The war economy, as once described by the scholar David Keen, is the “continuation of economics by other means.” 1 Its distinctive features, particularly in civil wars that pit governments against rebels, include, as listed by the authors Karen Ballentine and Heiko Nitzschke, “ The destruction or circumvention of the formal economy and the growth of informal and black markets,” as well as “pillage, predation, extortion, and deliberate violence against civilians is used by combatants to acquire control over lucrative assets. This piece was drafted in September 2013 and updated in 2015. This piece was prepared as part of the 2013–2014 Syrian Economic Reconstruction Project run by the Carnegie Middle East Center, which sought to help map the social, political, and institutional dynamics that will be generated when postconflict reconstruction begins in Syria.
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