Redrawing Boundaries: Policy, Discourse, and the Restructuring of Syria’s Journalistic Field

This project investigates how the Syrian journalistic field is being restructured in the aftermath of authoritarian collapse and protracted conflict. As transitional authorities in Damascus—led by the Islamist movement HTS—begin consolidating control, media policy reform has emerged as a key instrument of governance. In post-conflict contexts, such as in Syria, new media regulations, licensing frameworks, and public communication strategies are often used to assert legitimacy and control public discourse. These top-down interventions, however, are met with diverse and often resistant responses from journalists, media professionals, and civil society actors. These bottom-up dynamics in the Syrian case are shaped by years of displacement, opposition activism, and exilic media practice. This project examines the interaction between these competing forces—formal media governance and bottom-up contestation—as a process that is redefining the role of journalism’s role in the post-conflict state. It does so through a qualitative, multi-method approach combining media policy analysis, metajournalistic discourse analysis, and interviews and focus groups with Syrian journalists and relevant stakeholders. The project asks how symbolic, institutional, and professional boundaries of journalism are being redefined in the post-conflict fragmented media landscape, and under what conditions journalistic legitimacy and authority are being reconfigured