For years, rights-based language, drawn from the vocabulary of civil society and non-governmental organizations, has dominated Syrian political discourse. On the surface, this shift appears necessary and understandable in the context of a prolonged war and the widespread violence that accompanied it.

But this dominance is not limited to filling a linguistic or moral void. It is accompanied by a gradual neutralization of the substance of political speech itself. The issue here is not the validity or legitimacy of rights-based language, which is beyond dispute, but rather the consequences of its expansion in displacing core functions that the political sphere is meant to perform.

In principle, the human rights field and the political field are supposed to enjoy a degree of relative autonomy. Each should operate according to its own internal logic and tools, with boundary lines regulating their points of overlap. This conception is close to what the French political sociologist Michel Dobry proposes in his book Sociologie des crises politiques, in which he builds his analysis on social sectors as distinct spaces that function effectively only when their internal logic is respected.

When one of these sectors comes to dominate another, this does not enhance its effectiveness. Rather, it disrupts both, producing a distorted form of knowledge that is neither fully political nor properly rights-based.

This dysfunction is clearly visible in the discourse circulating today among the publics of the warring sides along sectarian and ethnic lines. The exchange of accusations of violations has become the common language among these audiences, whether in addressing opponents or in practicing self-criticism within each camp. This language does not emerge spontaneously alone; it draws its reference points from trans-identity human rights actors who have come to constitute an almost official source for generating vocabulary and standards.

In contrast, political discourse—concerned with projects, systems of governance, conflict management, and political identity—has receded, becoming an auxiliary discourse that borrows its tools from the human rights field and adapts itself to its logic.

This retreat entails the loss of an independent political discourse and the loss of the capacity for political naming. By its nature, human rights language is a language of description and documentation: it defines acts as violations and classifies events according to normative standards. But it does not produce political names for the conflict, nor does it designate actors as forces competing over power or governance. What occurs instead is the displacement of political naming in favor of accumulated moral descriptions that fail to coalesce into a unifying political narrative. In this sense, the political conflict is obscured and redefined through a language that does not allow it to be understood as a struggle over power or over the form of rule.

In this context, the positions of political actors themselves are also affected. As Dobry notes in his analysis of political crises, moments of sectoral breakdown lead to confusion in actors’ positions and weaken their ability to grasp their roles and limits. When a political actor adopts a logic alien to their own sector, they lose their practical compass.

In the Syrian case, the politician gradually turns into a human rights actor, and the opposition into a body focused on documentation and appeals. The tools of organization and struggle are replaced by tools of monitoring and denunciation. This shift does not occur through a conscious decision, but as a result of the collapse of sectoral reference points that once defined what political action meant under conditions of lesser fluidity.

Here, Dobry helps us understand this dynamic through his analysis of crises as moments of fluidity between sectors. Major crises, such as wars or extreme violence, do not merely weaken the boundaries separating social fields; they also reorder the hierarchy among them. In the Syrian case, this fluidity has led to the rise of the human rights field to a relatively dominant position, driven by its moral superiority and by its high capacity for internationalization, funding, and translation into a universal language intelligible to international actors. In this sense, rights-based dominance becomes a structural outcome of the crisis trajectory, rather than a mere moral choice or a deviation in discourse.

However, the transfer of a sector’s logic into another does not only lead to functional dysfunction; it also results in a misreading of reality itself. Dobry emphasizes that projecting the analytical tools of one sector onto another distorts the understanding of events. In the Syrian context, political dynamics are read as a sequence of reciprocal violations, rather than as a structure of struggle over power, a contest over forms of governance, or the distribution of force. This mode of reading produces technical or moral solutions focused on investigation, documentation, and accountability, while marginalizing thinking about political settlements or the reconstruction of the political space itself.

This dominance is not confined to language; it extends to practice. Political institutions among the parties to the conflict begin by borrowing the discourse of the human rights field, then by reordering their priorities and programs according to its logic. The release of detainees or abductees, the investigation of violations, the formation of investigative committees, and the delivery of aid are all legitimate, urgent, and directly connected to the Syrian reality. Yet when these demands move to the forefront of the political field, amid the weakness of that field in producing coherent conceptions of governance, power, and conflict management, politics is reshaped into a stable normative space.

Here another element discussed at length by Dobry comes into view: the issue of strategic uncertainty during crises. Political crises open moments of ambiguity in the balance of power and create spaces for repositioning and initiative. The dominance of rights-based discourse, however, tends to fix realities in declarative forms and definitive judgments, narrowing the scope for engaging with this uncertainty as a political resource. Politics, in this sense, requires working with probability and the unknown, whereas human rights discourse tends to stabilize and close the narrative.

This intersects with a problematic redefinition of political legitimacy. Legitimacy becomes tied to the absence of violations, or to their reduction, rather than to representation, mandate, or the capacity to govern. Politics is thus reformulated within a stable moral logic that offers symbolic clarity in a moment of chaos, but constricts the space of unresolved political struggle. This discursive stability, enabled by the human rights field, partly explains the attraction of actors and groups to it, as a language that morally reorders the world at a moment of collapse.

This trajectory is reinforced by another structural factor: funding and the accumulation of sectoral capital. Over the past decade, civil human rights NGOs have been among the Syrian actors most likely to receive international funding and support. This funding was not merely financial; it accumulated expertise, networks, legitimacy, language, and the capacity to impose standards.

By contrast, the Syrian political field, particularly at the local level, was not afforded the opportunity to accumulate comparable political capital. Political parties and currents remained weakly organized, resource-poor, and deprived of cross-border legitimacy. Even research centers and independent media outlets, funded through the same channels, adopted rights-based discourse and disseminated it across the knowledge and media spheres.

This disparity in capital accumulation helps explain how the human rights field came to function as a quasi-arbitral reference in political disputes. In many instances, political actors began to be assessed solely through their record of violations, rather than through their projects or their social representation. This does not mean justifying or denying violence, but rather describing a shift whereby the function of arbitration moved from the political field to another field, one equipped with different tools and governed by a different logic.

The failure of local societies to build political institutions with legitimacy cannot be separated from this context. Responsibility does not lie with local actors alone, but with the structure of a protracted crisis that obstructed the accumulation of politics as both practice and discourse. What occurred was an inflation of the human rights field alongside an atrophy of the political field, at a moment when new forms of organization and representation should have been taking shape.

Added to this is a crucial temporal dimension. Dobry shows that crises reshape the relationship to time, pushing actors to focus on the immediate present. Human rights discourse, by its nature, is centered on the moment: it documents violations as they occur and archives them. Political discourse, by contrast, requires an extended temporal horizon, an ability to imagine the future, and the construction of narratives that transcend emergency. The dominance of the former deepens life in a permanent present and weakens the capacity to envision long-term political trajectories.

All of this leads to a suffocating political crisis lacking clear political expression. A crisis rooted not only in the weakness of actors, but in a distorted relationship between fields. Reclaiming the political from the rights-based requires redrawing the boundaries between them, allowing each field to operate according to its own logic, and restoring to politics its language, its function, and its capacity to produce meaning and action at the same time.