Whose Justice, Where? Long-term Displacement and Transitional Justice in Post-Assad Syria
Iliana Moridou, Independent Researcher in Transitional and Restorative Justice
Introduction
“Syria is free!”
From Damascus to Berlin, Aleppo to New York, this was the rallying cry that erupted across streets and social media on December 8, 2024. Fourteen years after the start of the Syrian Civil War, the Assad regime—after over five decades of authoritarian rule—was toppled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in coordination with elements of the Syrian National Army. Across Syria and within diaspora communities worldwide, Syrians flooded the streets in celebration.
This moment of euphoria has yet to fade. In the months since, as long-standing international sanctions begin to lift and previously sealed borders cautiously reopen, a fragile yet palpable sense of hope has started to take root. For many Syrians, the regime’s fall represents not just political change, but the first real breath of freedom after years of repression. Yet alongside this collective exhale comes a cascade of urgent questions about how to rebuild a nation shattered by war, displacement, and division.
Even before the regime’s collapse, opposition-held areas had begun laying foundations for a political transition—momentum that only intensified in its aftermath. Reconciliation centers were established in several regions, operating as platforms for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR). On May 17, 2025, interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa issued Presidential Decree No. 20, formally creating a National Commission for Transitional Justice and for the Missing—marking the official launch of Syria’s transitional justice process. While the speed of this initiation was welcomed by many, it also raised critical questions: What should transitional justice look like after decades of mass atrocity? Who gets to define it, participate in it, and ultimately benefit from it?
With over half of Syria’s population still displaced—internally and across borders—these are not only logistical concerns, but conceptual ones. This commentary argues that displacement is not merely a backdrop against which transitional justice must operate, but a condition that transforms how justice is imagined, pursued, and practiced. Drawing on the Syrian case, it contends that traditional state-centric models of transitional justice are inadequate in contexts of mass forced migration. In their place, justice must become mobile, plural, and responsive to the lived realities of displaced communities if it is to contribute meaningfully to a durable and inclusive peace.
The Transitional Justice-Displacement Nexus
Transitional justice (TJ) refers to the full range of judicial and non-judicial processes through which societies attempt to reckon with large-scale past abuses—seeking accountability, justice, and reconciliation. These processes typically include criminal prosecutions, truth-seeking initiatives, reparations, and institutional reform, each tailored to the specific needs of countries emerging from conflict or authoritarian rule.
Yet this widely institutionalized framework—championed by international organizations and post-conflict regimes—assumes a cohesive national community: a polity that has experienced violence, emerged from it, and now seeks to transition to peace through a unified justice process. In this model, the nation-state is both the container and the executor of justice. But what happens when that container has shattered, and when more than half the population it once held now lives outside its borders?
Syria embodies this dilemma. Fourteen years after the outbreak of civil war, more than 13 million Syrians remain displaced, many of them unable or unwilling to return. The collapse of the Assad regime in late 2024 and the appointment of Ahmed al-Sharaa as interim president marked a political milestone—but not territorial or institutional consolidation. Authority remains fractured: the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) controls the northwest; the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) dominate the northeast; and the Suwayda Military Council speaks for many Druze communities. Syria today is not a single polity, but a fragmented landscape of rival sovereignties.
In this fractured terrain, the interim government’s issuance of Presidential Decree No. 20 in May 2025—establishing two commissions for Transitional Justice and for the Missing—was heralded as a landmark moment. Yet beneath this procedural architecture lie deep conceptual tensions about whose justice is being pursued, and for whom. The transitional justice commission’s mandate focuses almost exclusively on crimes perpetrated by the Assad regime, sidelining violations committed by armed opposition groups—some of which are now integrated into transitional governance structures. This selective framing risks reproducing a logic of victor’s justice: accountability for the vanquished, impunity for the victorious.
Equally troubling is the absence of any formal mechanism for engaging Syrians in exile. Despite making up a majority of the country’s population, displaced communities have been structurally excluded from shaping the transitional justice process. With no established channels for testimony, consultation, or participation, millions remain disenfranchised from a process that claims to address the violence that uprooted them. This is not a bureaucratic oversight—it is a conceptual limitation embedded in dominant models of transitional justice, which remain tethered to the territorial boundaries of the nation-state.
Syria’s case illustrates that justice processes confined within sovereign borders cannot meaningfully address the consequences of mass displacement. When violence has severed the social and geographic fabric of the nation, transitional justice must evolve to meet new spatial and political realities. It must become portable, inclusive, and pluralistic—capable of engaging with displaced populations not as peripheral stakeholders, but as central protagonists in the pursuit of justice.
Justice Beyond Borders: Syrian Exile as a Site of Accountability
Although Syria’s formal transitional justice efforts remain in their infancy, displaced Syrians have long been mobilizing for justice across borders. From refugee camps to European courtrooms, they have constructed new, mobile terrains of accountability that travel with them—redefining exile not as a pause in justice, but as one of its principal sites. Through legal claims, documentation initiatives, and memory work, Syrians in exile have actively resisted erasure and demanded recognition. These efforts are not ancillary to formal mechanisms; in many cases, they are the primary terrain where justice is being pursued.
This reflects what transitional justice scholars describe as prospective justice: efforts by diasporic and exiled communities to lay the groundwork for accountability in the absence of a viable transition at home. Rather than reforming institutions from within, these actors work prefiguratively—gathering evidence, archiving testimonies, and building coalitions in anticipation of a moment when justice might become possible. In doing so, they shift the center of justice-making from state institutions to transnational spaces.
One of the most visible arenas for this has been the rise of universal jurisdiction trials in Europe. Countries like Germany, France, and Sweden have prosecuted high-ranking Syrian officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the conflict. The landmark 2022 conviction of Anwar Raslan in Germany—the first time a Syrian intelligence officer was held accountable in a court of law—signaled a historic moment in global justice. It also marked a geographic shift: justice for Syria was no longer confined to Syrian soil.
Yet the 2024 trial of Majdi Nema, former spokesperson for Jaysh al-Islam, currently underway in Paris, offers a more complicated picture. While human rights organizations celebrated the prosecution as a breakthrough, the trial has been marred by the withdrawal of key witnesses, many of whom cited fears stemming from Jaysh al-Islam’s affiliation with factions in Syria’s transitional government. Unlike the Raslan case, which offered a rare moment of legal clarity, the Nema trial underscores the entanglement of past abuses with present political alignments. It highlights how exile-based justice, while powerful, remains vulnerable to the shifting dynamics of transitional power politics. The line between past perpetrator and present stakeholder is often blurred.
These complexities speak to a deeper critique—one advanced by scholars of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)—about the coloniality of international justice. Trials in the Global North, dominated by Western legal frameworks, risk universalizing liberal legalism as the only valid mode of accountability. This legal humanitarianism may inadvertently marginalize other political imaginaries of justice emerging from the Global South. For displaced Syrians, being positioned as witnesses in European courts rather than co-architects of transitional processes can reproduce dynamics of dependency and exclusion. Justice becomes something done to them or on their behalf, rather than something shaped by them.
Outside formal courtrooms, exile-based memory and documentation work has grown in scale and sophistication. Organizations such as the Syrian Archive, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), and the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) have created vast repositories of evidence and testimony. These initiatives are not only legal in orientation but also symbolic and political—acts of narrative resistance that challenge state denial, historical erasure, and silencing. Diaspora art exhibitions, digital memorials, and survivor storytelling platforms reclaim agency through visibility and voice. These are not substitutes for formal justice but alternative modes of it—rooted in participation rather than delegation, and in dignity rather than deterrence.
What emerges from these efforts is a translocal model of justice: one that traverses courtrooms, camps, digital platforms, and diaspora communities. It reflects not only the dispersion of people, but also a redistribution of political agency. In shaping the moral and evidentiary terrain of future accountability, displaced Syrians are not simply reacting to past violence—they are actively defining the contours of what justice must look like in a post-Assad future.
On the Reconciliation Continuum
As Syrians enter the early stages of political transition, a deeper question looms: to what extent can transitional justice rebuild a society fractured by violence, exile, and mistrust? If Syria’s emerging legal and political order fails to grapple with this, it risks institutionalizing the very exclusions it purports to overcome.
Signs of this danger are already emerging. In early 2025, targeted attacks against Alawite and Druze communities in the provinces of Homs and Suwayda reignited fears of sectarian retribution. While the interim government swiftly condemned these acts, the incidents underscored the fragility of Syria’s civic fabric. Alawites, long associated with the Assad regime, face growing suspicion and marginalization, while Druze communities—historically subjected to discrimination—remain vulnerable amid transitional uncertainty. Without inclusive, community-centered transitional mechanisms, these groups risk being scapegoated or further excluded from Syria’s reimagined national identity.
This violence is not merely a failure of security provisions. It reveals a conceptual flaw in dominant transitional justice approaches: the overreliance on punitive, trial-centered models at the expense of social repair. In Syria’s case, a justice process narrowly focused on prosecutions risks bypassing deeper, unresolved layers of trauma, grievance, and intercommunal distrust. Reconciliation—often reduced to the physical return of displaced persons—must instead be understood as a long-term, relational process of rebuilding trust, restoring coexistence, and renegotiating civic belonging.
To navigate this terrain, it is helpful to distinguish between minimal and maximal reconciliation. Minimal reconciliation involves basic nonviolence, mutual tolerance, and respect for rights. Maximal reconciliation, by contrast, entails more substantive forms of social repair: mutual recognition, civic reintegration, and the restoration of intergroup trust. In Syria, even the most basic conditions for minimal reconciliation have often failed to materialize. Many returnees face dispossession, surveillance, or detention—clear evidence that physical return does not equal meaningful reintegration or repair.
What is needed, then, is a broader justice horizon—one that centers restorative and reconciliatory approaches not as symbolic complements to legal accountability, but as foundational pillars. Restorative justice is not a softer substitute for retributive measures; it is a concrete methodology for repairing social harm through truth-telling, dialogue, and participatory redress. It enables those who have been harmed to articulate their suffering, shape the terms of redress, and confront perpetrators in ways that emphasize reintegration rather than exclusion. It also allows those unjustly implicated—particularly members of marginalized or politicized communities—to participate in societal healing.
In a society emerging from systemic violence and displacement, reconciliation is not optional. Without it, justice risks becoming a zero-sum game—one in which legitimacy is claimed through exclusion rather than inclusion. This is the hallmark of victor’s justice: a process where the winners define the terms, set the timelines, and select which victims matter. While this may offer short-term catharsis, it cannot produce a shared political future.
If displacement has fractured Syria’s population, then transitional justice must act as a bridge—not a blade. It must connect those inside and outside the country, the harmed and the implicated, not through forced equivalence or amnesia, but through participation, recognition, and pluralism. Whether these bridges will hold—or collapse under the weight of vengeance, mistrust, and institutional neglect—remains the defining question of Syria’s transition.
Conclusion
The collapse of the Assad regime has opened a rare and fragile window for national reckoning. Yet Syria’s transitional justice process cannot proceed as if it were emerging from a unified territory or a cohesive post-conflict state. With more than half of the population displaced—internally or across borders—justice must respond not only to past atrocities, but to the profound dislocation they produced. Exile is not a backdrop to Syria’s transition; it is one of its primary terrains. A justice process that treats displacement as external or temporary risks, excluding the very communities most impacted by the regime’s violence.
As this article has argued, transitional justice in Syria must be reimagined to account for displacement not merely as a logistical challenge, but as a structural condition that transforms how justice is pursued, where it is practiced, and who is included in its making. Legal efforts in exile—universal jurisdiction trials, documentation initiatives, memory work—are not peripheral to justice; they are on its front lines. But these efforts must be met with inclusive, restorative processes inside Syria that confront the legacy of authoritarianism, social fragmentation, and communal distrust.
Exile should not be seen as a space of absence or delay, but as a site of political agency and creative justice-making. Justice does not begin or end at the border. It migrates, evolves, and endures.
This article is part of a series of articles commissioned under the ‘Resilience and Inclusive Politics in the Arab Region’, generously funded by the Carnegie Corporation.