The authors of “Charting Syria’s Future: A Strategic Framework for Recovery and Renewal,” released in July, are not seasoned diplomats, veteran analysts, or globe-hopping journalists.
They are master’s and doctoral students at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs whose thoughtful policy recommendations for a country in transition were so well researched, thought-provoking, and practical, they were published as a book.
“It is always an honor to take lessons learned in the classroom and practically apply them to the real world,” said Thomas Hinds MPA ’27, one of the nine students in Salam Fayyad’s spring 2026 course “Topics in IR: Designing a Framework for Syria’s Future.” “Syria is emerging from one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century, yet the country also has an overwhelming number of opportunities.”
The fall of the Assad regime less than two years ago has left Syria in a state of flux, with conditions changing rapidly as the country attempts to transition to a constitutional republic. For the students, the situation made an ideal opportunity to make policy recommendations far removed from the abstract environment of textbooks and theory.
Tracking events as they happened in real time, the students examined how the country is handling many of its most daunting challenges, including establishing stability, rebuilding security, resettling displaced citizens, absorbing refugees, implementing reconciliation, rebuilding infrastructure, ending drug trafficking, and adopting counterterrorism.
Fayyad, the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in Public Policy and Daniella Lipper Coules ’95 Distinguished Visitor in Foreign Affairs, observed that unlike, for example, tabletop exercises staged by thinktanks, “This is the real one.”
“A situation is unfolding,” Fayyad said. “This is Syria in transition, after the new regime took over. Things are happening just about every day, literally.”
At the beginning of the semester, each student chose a topic from the list of issues the course would examine. They met once a week for three hours, with Fayyad lecturing on good-governance principles meant to guide the students as they worked on how to address their respective policy considerations. Between classes, there were numerous Zoom meetings and Canvas conversations to discuss the dizzying changes as they happened.
“It was constant communication throughout the semester,” Fayyad said. “I ran it more like a policy lab than a structured course.”
Among the course’s guest speakers were some of the world’s leading policy authorities on Syria, including former U.S. ambassadors, officials from the State Department and USAID, and thinktank experts.
“The experts’ feedback was indispensable to shaping this book into a work that will make a real and positive impact on policy decisions,” said Hinds, author of the chapter “Security Sector Reforms.”
Each student wrote a paper, 15 to 20 pages long, recommending specific policy solutions for the area he or she had chosen, and then gave a presentation to the rest of the class.
“As soon as I started getting papers, I thought they were really amazing,” Fayyad said. “I immediately knew we had a critical mass of something that would be good enough as a product to take to the outside world.”
Fayyad brought the students to Washington, D.C., for a seminar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where they presented their work to experts from a variety of thinktanks and institutes. After returning to Princeton and incorporating the feedback they had received, they combined their final reports into a single, cohesive document.
The manuscript, edited by Fayyad, made its way to the TellerBooks imprint Time Books, which focuses on works dealing with society, ethics, and public policy.
“What makes this book unique is that it examines questions others overlook — rebuilding digital public infrastructure, leveraging Syrian sanctions, repatriating Syrian refugees, and reintegrating persons with disabilities into Syria's economy,” said Martín Palomo MPA ’27, who wrote the chapter “Designing a Disability Justice Framework.”
According to John Balouziyeh, a doctoral student in Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, “Charting Syria’s Future” offers the country’s policymakers practical advice for achieving security, stability, and prosperity.
“We show how Syria can finance its reconstruction costs, estimated at more than $200 billion, by enlisting international institutions at no cost to the state: the IMF to build government officials’ capacity, and the United Nations Mine Action Service to clear the mines left across post-conflict Syria,” said Balouziyeh, who wrote the chapter “Leveraging Syrian Sanctions.” “We further propose mobilizing the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS to provide military training and security assistance as Syria commits to combating domestic terrorism, and soliciting budget support from regional partners invested in its stability, on the model the Arab Gulf states set in Sudan in 2020.”
Among the course’s guest speakers was Charles Lister, a senior fellow and the director of the Syria Initiative at the Middle East Institute, who said that the book “should be read widely.”
“A huge amount of work went into this book — and rightly so, as Syria poses an extraordinarily complex set of challenges, but also presents a genuinely historic opportunity to support something potentially transformative for the Syrian people and the region beyond,” Lister said.
Fayyad notes that one of the book’s strengths is the “how” component of public policy. It deals not only with “the what or why of public policy,” he said, “but how to actually get it done.”
“There is a good deal of the statements of principles, objectives, and what we'd like to see happen and all that,” Fayyad said. “But good effort went into trying to answer the question of How do you get from A to B, which is really good as we help prepare students for real-world policymaking.”
Book cover courtesy of TellerBooks.
