Towards a New Social Contract in Syria: Mediation, Reconciliation and the Path to Civic Peace

Syria's transition has begun to build a national architecture for reconciliation. The National Commission for Transitional Justice has been established and, within it, the National Reconciliation and Peacebuilding Committee is developing a national reconciliation strategy. These are substantial commitments, and they also define the harder question they cannot answer on their own: institutions can set a framework, but they cannot produce agreement between communities, or between communities and the state, and it is on that agreement that the new social contract depends.

This makes mediation a political instrument in Syria's transition rather than a technical one. Years of conflict left divisions that will be addressed through sustained dialogue and locally owned mediation. Syria can draw here on a significant reservoir of insider mediation capacity that already exists across the country; the task is to connect local settlements to a broader national compact.

This panel, part of the Forum's day on mediation, takes that logic in three steps: how a national reconciliation strategy can emerge from sustained consultation; how local mediation and civic peace efforts connect to that national framework; and what political, technical and financial accompaniment, including from Geneva's mediation and convening architecture, can strengthen national ownership without substituting for Syrian-led efforts.

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