Business Elites, Private Security Companies, and Conflict Management in Syria

• In Event: Power Sharing, Elite Dynamics, and Authoritarianism in the Middle East

Abstract

The Syrian conflict produced dramatic social changes that uprooted patterns of state-business relations and the economic elite networks that formed during the marketization of the economy in the 2000s. Amidst the multidirectional pressures of economic contraction, protracted violence, international sanctions, and capital flight emerged a new conflict elite whose interactions with state and security officials produced altogether new constellations of power that were rooted in the conflict’s ontologies. The social composition of the new conflict elite was markedly different from the pre-2011 elite and they are heavily involved in predatory, extractive activities tied to Syria’s war economies. In this paper, I ask how the post-2011 patterns of state-business elite relations are revealed in the growing private security company (PSC) sector in Syria. In drawing on authoritarian conflict management (ACM) literature, I argue that the commodification of security within an environment of metastasizing violence reflects the regime’s conflict management strategies to both foster a loyalist business elite that was sutured to, and dependent on, the security apparatus, and provide alternative centers of (privatized) violence that could support regime stability. The ownership of a PSC by business elites indexes proximity to state power and elite efforts to acquire a base of support from within the security apparatus. These ties to the security apparatus are a precondition for reaping wartime economic benefits.
I situate these changes in business elite composition and their relevance to PSC growth in Syria within the broader context of the war’s social transformations and the state’s conflict management strategies. I am specifically interested in trying to understand how these transformations produce social networks and forces that are supportive of illiberal political projects. Contra liberal assumptions about wars leading to transitions to peace, liberal democracy, and market economies, alternative views of social transformation accounts for illiberal conflict trajectories and the emergence of political economies, social networks, and elite formations that sustain these trajectories. From this perspective, PSC growth in Syria is not tied to the diffusion of neoliberal ideas or security norms as others have argued about global PSC growth, but rather to the state’s conflict management strategies.

Author

• Samer Abboud, Villanova University