When Power Is Absolute and Without Limits

The lesson Syria is writing now.

When the doors of Sednaya prison were opened in December 2024, the world saw what Syrians had witnessed and had long been forced to argue in order to prove. The cells were emptied, the survivors walked out, and families walked through corridors they had been told for years did not hold their loved ones. With that opening came a question every society must eventually answer, and which Syria now has to answer for itself: how does a state turn into a prison? And how do ordinary people end up running that prison and turning into monsters?

Psychology has offered one of the clearest attempts to answer this question. Neither Stanley Milgram's studies of "obedience" nor Philip Zimbardo's "Stanford prison experiment" claimed that human beings are evil by nature. They reached something more disturbing: that ordinary people, under certain conditions of authority, role and surrounding circumstance, can be driven towards cruelty far beyond what they themselves would expect. Situations shape people, institutions shape situations, and unaccountable power corrupts the judgement of those who might, in other circumstances, consider themselves decent, good people.

Milgram framed this argument with brutal simplicity. The participants in his experiment believed they were administering electric shocks to a stranger on the instructions of a researcher. In the original setup, 65% of them carried on delivering shocks all the way to the maximum of 450 volts, while every single participant without exception reached at least 300 volts. Many hesitated, sweated, and asked with visible distress whether they should continue, yet they continued, simply because the researcher, "the man in the white coat", told them to. Milgram's conclusion has lost none of its force today: "obedience is capable of reshaping conscience, especially when one feels that responsibility has been transferred to a higher authority."

Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford prison experiment posed a related question from another angle. Male students were randomly assigned as guards or prisoners in a mock prison in the psychology building at Stanford University. The study was meant to last two weeks, but it was stopped after only six days, after the guards' behaviour escalated into brutal abuse and the prisoners suffered real psychological harm. Although Stanford has since faced heavy criticism over ethics, method and the possibility that Zimbardo himself influenced the results, the study still echoes in public debate because it embodied a principle Syrians know in the depths of their being: "give someone a uniform, a military suit, a role, a closed door, and a superior who gives the orders, and you will inevitably change the essence of what that person becomes."

Cinema has carried this warning into the public imagination. In the film The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), Zimbardo recruits students for fifteen dollars a day, and within hours of receiving their batons and sunglasses, young men who arrived as volunteers begin to humiliate other young men who arrived in the same way. The film is disturbing not because "monsters" appear in it, but because none of them was a monster on arrival, they became one gradually. Even Zimbardo, the designer of the experiment, is drawn into the system he himself designed, a warning that unaccountable structures capture not only their subordinates but their designers too.

The film The Experiment (2010) takes this premise further, placing twenty-six men in an isolated facility under constant camera surveillance, divided into six guards and twenty prisoners. As violence escalates between the prisoner "Travis" and the guard "Barris", the cameras keep watching without anyone intervening. This image, "surveillance with no power to deter", is the one Syrians should hold on to well, because oversight that has no power to enforce is not oversight, it is merely a performance or a play.

None of the above is offered as an explanation of Syria's suffering, for Syria does not need laboratory re-enactments. A 2024 report by the UN's "International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism" documented systematic torture and abuse in more than 100 detention facilities of the Syrian government, drawing on more than 300 interviews with witnesses, forensic evidence, and the regime's own documents. The report traced torture, sexual violence, enforced disappearance, medical deprivation, and inhumane conditions across the "institutional backbone" of the state: from the security branches and military hospitals, to the military police and the high command. Separately, Amnesty International reported systematic torture, arbitrary detention and widespread abuse in north-east Syria, where more than 56,000 people are held in at least 27 facilities and two camps, subjected to beatings, stress positions, electric shocks and forced confession.

These figures are not a lesson in psychology, they are the record of an entire country. But the experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo help us understand how human hands could produce such a record, day after day, shift after shift, over decades. Once violence becomes "institutional work", one does not need to imagine oneself as evil in order to take part in it: a guard who is only "following procedure", an officer who is only "obeying orders", an interrogator who is only "protecting the state", an administrator who is only "doing his job", a judge who is only "applying the law", a minister who is only "serving stability". Each of them tells himself a story that lifts the weight off his own shoulders and places it somewhere higher, somewhere far away, somewhere he will never have to answer from.

For this reason, the real lesson for Syria is a constitutional one before it is a psychological one. The solution to what happened is not to hope that future leaders will be more virtuous than their predecessors, but to design a state founded on the honest assumption that human beings are fallible, easily influenced, ambitious, fearful, and exceptionally good at justifying their own actions; and then to build institutions that refuse to let those traits spread until they become official policy.

In concrete terms, this means a state in which every level of authority is accountable to another level. A police force that can be investigated by independent bodies, prisons open to independent monitors without prior notice, intelligence agencies bound by written law and subject to judicial oversight, courts that are transparent in their standards and their appointments, ministers subject to scrutiny by a parliament strong enough to summon them, and a free press and civil society that can expose abuses before they become routine. These are not imported Western ideas, they are the minimum core requirements of any state that does not wish to produce another Sednaya or a new dictator.

The United Nations has repeatedly affirmed that accountability is the cornerstone of the transitional phase in Syria, and that past and present abuses must be investigated independently, comprehensively and transparently. This is not merely a moral demand after the atrocities, it is the practical structure that makes organising future atrocities more difficult. A society that cannot investigate its own conduct cannot correct it, and a state that places any position above accountability will eventually discover that the position has become the state.

The darkest idea in both experiments, and in both films, is that brutality advances in gradual steps: a rule, a role, a uniform, a state of emergency, silence, then a chain of command. In The Stanford Prison Experiment, the abuses grow through routine until collapse becomes inevitable. In The Experiment, the cameras record what they cannot prevent. And in Syria, decades of accumulated abuse have left a society that now needs to rebuild trust from scratch, which is why international investigators place justice, reform and accountable institutions at the heart of any sustainable Syrian future.

Syrians do not need anyone to tell them that power without limits is dangerous. They have paid the full price of that lesson, again and again, in a currency no one should ever be asked to pay. The question now is whether the country will write that knowledge into the heart of its institutions, into the constitution, the penal code, the security law, judicial procedure and the municipal budget, so that no future guard, officer, minister or president can say again, and be believed, that he "was only following orders".

Power must be divided, the executive, legislative and judicial powers must be separated, mandates must be reviewed, and every position must be answerable to someone. Because the line between "order" and "brutality" is not as wide as safe societies like to believe, and once a state crosses it, the cost of coming back is measured in the names of victims that we are still learning to this day.