Ideological Pragmatism Or Deradicalisation? A Four-Dimensional Assessment Of Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham’s Transformation, 2017–2026

Abstract

The trajectory of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from an al- Qaeda affiliate to the governing force of a state recognised by the international community poses a problem that existing analytical vocabulary handles poorly. Between July 2025 and August 2026 the organisation and the state it governs Received: 10-05-2026 were removed from every major terrorist designation regime, yet the empirical Accepted: 28-05-2026 basis on which those decisions rested has not been systematically examined. Published: 09-06-2026 This article argues that the vocabulary of “deradicalisation” misdescribes what has occurred, and proposes an alternative analytical instrument: a spectrum of pragmatic adaptation, disaggregated into four independently observable dimensions – rhetorical, institutional, doctrinal and behavioural. Applying this framework to the period 2017–2026, the study finds that HTS’s transformation has Copyright: © 2026 by the authors. been sharply asymmetric. Change is deep and stable in the rhetorical dimension, Submitted for open access publication substantial but incomplete in the institutional dimension, minimal in the doctrinal under the terms and conditions of the dimension, and contradicted in the behavioural dimension by the documented Creative Commons Attribution mass violence against Alawite civilians on the Syrian coast in March 2025 (CC BY) license and against Druze communities in Suwayda in 2025. The article theorises this (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ pattern as a two-tier legitimation strategy: a secular-statist outer layer addressed by/4.0/) to external audiences, and an unreformed doctrinal core retained for internal cohesion. It follows that the indicators on which delisting decisions have relied – public statements and formal commitments – are precisely the cheapest and most reversible signals available to an armed actor, and are therefore the least reliable. Four alternative monitoring indicators are proposed. The article closes with the implications of the model’s diffusion potential for Central Asian security, drawing on the unresolved status of Uzbek foreign-fighter formations in Syria.