El devenir del autoritarismo sirio: sociedad civil, acción pública y pacto social a través del estudio de las asociaciones caritativas.

Within the last eleven years, Syria has gone into very important —economical and social — changes that have modified the very nature of the regime. This investigation seeks to explore the Syrian charities in order to seize, through them, the transformations of authoritarianism in Syria under the presidence of Bashar al-Asad. The main hypothesis here is that shrinking state resources together with the regional and international political conjuncture have led the baathist regime to promote certain segments of the Syrian civil society among which charitable projects are the most important. These new politics regarding the associative sector have taken place in the context of a readjusting state where the redefinition of public policy is both based in the partial privatization of social welfare and in the so-called logic of partial "off-loading" by the State. Both factors reflect a clear rethinking of the previous social pact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]