In recent years, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has been attempting to develop its own polity. This process has not been linear and there has been a maturation process over time. Beyond governance though, an important part of nation-building is creating a similar narrative of people’s own history and shared memory. As Benedict Anderson notes in his famous Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, nations or “imagined communities” are socially constructed, since not everyone in a polity knows someone, but are believed to share a similar history and experience. This is no different for HTS, which has since mid-August been publishing “briefs” through its municipal governance structure the “Administration for the Liberated Areas” on different cities, villages, and regions in the areas it controls. Therefore, there is an interplay that HTS is attempting to build between different areas it controls, connecting real world history that will hopefully bring people in its territory together to illustrate their similarities and thus establishing an “imagined community” amongst HTS’s polity.
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