Description
There is a literature gap in conceptualizing the interconnectedness between the global hegemonic order and conflict-affected polities with fragile social structures. Hegemonic states along with their local armed agents are increasingly shaping the emerging dynamics rather than the unitary state actors. Web of Influence (WOI) theory showcases how multiple hegemons seize the opportunity of political change to mobilize agentive primordial loyalties and divide their overlapping influence within the same polity. This paper explores under what conditions the Web of Influence has emerged in contemporary Syria in the 2015-2020 timeframe with critical narrative and causal analyses as the overarching research methodologies. This interconnected WOI produces a relational social structure that is actors-centered with patterns of interaction at both ends of the agent-principal arrangement. WOI is a conceptually modified version of the Spheres of Influence (SOI), which recognizes that neither the epistemology nor the conceptual framework of the SOI concept encompasses the complex dynamics of how multiple local agents and their hegemonic enablers divide the influence pie in a polity with a disintegrated state.
