Constitutional Change and the Organization of Political Power in Syria (1920-2025)

Abstract

This thesis examines constitutional change in Syria between 1920 and 2025. It treats constitutions not as legal documents alone, but as political moments in which authority was claimed, reorganized, stabilized, or left unresolved. When does constitutional change signal an actual reorganization of power, and when does it merely codify what already exists? The argument I develop is that constitutional change becomes politically transformative only when constitutional form aligns with the carriers of power and redistributes effective control over the instruments of rule: coercion, appointments, and resources.

To capture this relationship, I develop a Text–Power Alignment Framework and apply it across seven major constitutional episodes: 1920, 1930, 1950, 1958, 1973, 2012, and 2025. I also read these constitutions as maps of constitutional anxiety — texts that reveal what each order feared and tried to contain, whether incomplete sovereignty, external constraint, military intervention, or the uncertainty of post-collapse reconstruction. The 1950 Constitution produced Syria's strongest parliamentary settlement but failed to bring coercive power under civilian authority. The 1973 Constitution gave legal form to a party-military rupture that had already taken place. The 2012 Constitution adjusted the existing order without redistributing power within it.

I read the 2025 Constitutional Declaration as an open-ended transitional episode, not as a constitutional settlement equivalent to 1973. Unlike the 1973 Constitution, which codified a prior party-military consolidation, the 2025 Declaration is a provisional framework that tries to reconstruct authority before coercion, appointments, and resources have been durably reassembled. Its executive-centered design may help rebuild state authority, but it also risks hardening provisional arrangements before any permanent constitutional settlement is negotiated.

Syrian constitutional history, I argue, is best understood through the shifting relationship between legal form and organized power. Constitutions matter not because they create power from nothing, but because they reveal whether authority has become organized enough to be carried, enforced, appointed, financed, and reproduced as a durable structure of rule.