Creating Consent in Ba‘thist Syria

Women and Welfare in a Totalitarian State

The challenge of maintaining dictatorial regimes through control, co-optation and
coercion while upholding a façade of legitimacy is something that has concerned
leaders throughout the Middle East and beyond. Nowhere is this more evident
than in the Syria ruled by the Asads, both Hafiz and his son Bashar. Drawing on
the example of the General Union of Syrian Women (founded in 1967), Esther
Meininghaus offers new insights into how the Syrian Ba?thist regimes attempted
to move beyond mere satisfaction with the compliance of the citizenry and to
consolidate their rule amongst the local population. Meininghaus argues that this
was partially achieved through providing welfare services delivered by the Union as
one of the state-led mass organisations. In this way, she suggests, these regimes
did not only aim to undermine opposition and to create the illusion of consent, but
they factually catered to local needs and depended on consent. Based on archival
material, interviews and statistics, Creating Consent in Ba?thist Syria will shed
new light on mass organisations as a crucial institution of Ba?thist state building,
the construction of the Asad regimes more broadly, and the implications of these
findings for the current war.