14 March 2025
09:00 Europe/Oslo
SYRIA: The toppled statue of Hafez Al-Assad in Aleppo, Syria, The image marks the aftermath of the city's liberation in 2024.
Event
Breakfast seminar: How the former jihadis who took over Damascus embraced politics and toppled the Assad regime
The Assad-family has ruled over Syria for more than 50 years. In December, it took opposition groups less than two weeks to overthrow the regime.
Language: English
NUPI, Rosenkrantz' gate 22, 0160 OSLO
Seminar
Jerome Drevon recently published the gripping monograph From Jihad to Politics: How Syrian Jihadis Embraced Politics, offering a rare, in-depth look into contemporary Syrian developments. Based on extensive fieldwork in Idlib and beyond, Drevon gained rare access to key rebel groups that were instrumental in overthrowing the Assad regime in December 2024 and are now shaping Syria’s future. Through this research, he conducted in-depth studies and interviews with these groups, while also investigating jihadist factions that rejected their political ambitions. In this seminar, Drevon will share insights from his research and discuss opportunities and challenges facing Syria’s new rulers.
Jerome Drevon works for the International Crisis Group as a senior analyst on Jihad in Modern Conflict. He obtained his PhD at Durham University in the UK before completing two research fellowships at the universities of Manchester and Oxford. He is also the author of Institutionalizing Violence: Strategies of Jihad in Egypt (Oxford University Press 2022).
Drevon will be joined by discussants Tine Gade (Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, NUPI), Brynjar Lia (University of Oslo, UiO), and Erling L. Sogge (UiO). Morten Bøås (NUPI) will moderate the conversation.
This event is co-hosted by the Jihadist Governance in the Sahel research project at NUPI, the Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies (CIMS) at the University of Oslo and the Consortium for Terrorism Research.
The event will take place at NUPI (New address: Rosenkrantz’ gate 22, 4th floor) and lasts from 09:00 to 10:30. A light breakfast will be served from 08:30.
The event will be streamed to our YouTube channel:
Participants
Jerome Drevon
Senior Analyst, International Crisis Group
Brynjar Lia
Professor in Middle East Studies, University of Oslo
Erling L. Sogge
Senior Lecturer, University of Oslo
Tine Gade
Senior Research Fellow
Moderator
Morten Bøås
Research Professor
Related projects
Research project
2020 - 2025 (Ongoing)
Jihadist Governance in the Sahel (JIGOV-Sahel)
This project is about jihadist insurgent governance in West Africa's Sahel region....
14 March 2025
09:00 Europe/Oslo
Language: English
NUPI, Rosenkrantz' gate 22, 0160 OSLO
Seminar