The protracted conflict in Syria has produced a space of no “safe zone” for feminist work. Following the fall of the Assad regime, under the de facto authorities, the situation has effectively not changed as women continue to navigate compounded systems of surveillance, smear campaigns, intimidation, killings and kidnappings and patriarchal repression. What is often labelled as shrinking civic space is in reality a war on feminist existence.
Syria has not adopted an official WPS-NAP to date and feminist activists did not wait around for one, as any state-endorsed process would have been shaped by the Assad regime. Instead, they produced their own shadow NAP to ensure it adequately reflects the aspirations, ethos and struggles of the Syrian feminist movement that has survived multiple matrices of suppression.
