On Wednesday, May 9th 2022, the IFIT Syria Resource Group (SRG) participated in a panel discussion held as part of the Brussels VI Conference´s Day of Dialogue. In the session Giving Voices to Syrians, Sawsan Abou Zainedin, co-coordinator of the SRG, called for the international community to rethink its approach to providing support to Syria, in order to ensure an effective and sustainable response that meets the minimum needs of the Syrian people and facilitates communities to lead their own recovery. 

Representing a coalition of 13 Syrian civil society platforms, Ms. Abou Zainedin urged attendees – who included ministers, policy-makers, donors, international organisations, and other stakeholders – to shift their focus towards more integrated and consistent policies which are guided by the key principles of human rights and sustainable peace.

The intervention served to reiterate the conclusions and recommendations that emerged from an earlier event, Towards More Principled International Support: A Dialogue between Syrians and the International Community, held independently by the SRG and the Syrian civil society coalition at the end of March. In this forum, the coalition presented its vision for international donor support of the Syrian population, focusing on how to achieve more integrated and consistent policies that would support Syrian communities, but without consolidating the war economy; worsening the divisions between different regions in Syria; planting seeds for new conflicts; contributing to more human rights violations; or empowering certain segments of the Syrian population at the expense of others.

Practical examples of how to operationalise the conclusions from this dialogue were discussed in a subsequent side-event to the Brussels VI Conference, Towards More Principled International Support for Syria: Advancing the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus, this time organised by the IFIT SRG in partnership with the Center for Operational Analysis and Research (COAR).