Since February 2011, protests and demonstrations have erupted in Syria, some of them organized by young activists who have used various tools, such as local contacts or social media networks, while others were spontaneous rallies. These events have taken place in small towns of about 100,000 inhabitants and in some large urban centers in both coastal and inland areas, while the largest cities, those with more than 1 million inhabitants, have remained untouched by the unrest.
The most violent episodes have taken place in peripheral cities, such as Deraa, then Douma, which suffer primarily, especially Deraa and the cities in Rif Dimashq, from multidimensional marginalization, oppression by local authorities, and repression by an arbitrary central government, with limited benefits from economic growth. These cities suffer low human development indicators, high rates of unemployment and poverty, and high age-dependency.
However, the common feature that these protests share with Damascus youth movements is that the people involved are in the 15-24 age group, or the extended 15-35 age group, who are the most vulnerable groups and take initiatives more than any other. These groups suffer the highest unemployment rates, and include new youth groups which interact with "the winds of revolution" sweeping other Arab countries.
The current protests in Syria broke out in Deraa, which has the country's second highest population growth rate. This explains the increase of the population density in urbanized areas to about 300 persons per square kilometer and high urbanization pressures on land resources, with the urbanized area forming 79 percent of Deraa's total area. The population and urbanization pressures are particularly acute in Deraa as it is considered the metropolitan center of the region. This also explains the expansion of its slums, now constituting 12 percent of its total area , and the increase in social mobility, which is, according to Karl W. Deutsch (a leading American political scientist), a social case characterized by a change in geographic location (internal migration) and occupational status on the one hand, as well as rapid interaction of ideas, their dissemination and intensive connectivity on the other .
Human development indicators in Deraa are similar to the low and worrisome indicators prevailing in the eastern parts of Syria (e.g. Raqqa, Deir al-Zor, and al-Haskeh, as well as the rural area east of Aleppo). Due to the scarcity of public and private development projects, Deraa is among the governorates with the highest flows of long-term circular migrations, due both to low rates of agricultural return for small and micro plots of land, and to fragmented land parcels caused by inheritance laws. Unemployment has increased because of the fall in crop production caused by the filling in of groundwater wells with soil (a violation of the law) and rising costs associated with increasing fuel oil prices due to privatization. Thus, the growing labor force can no longer be absorbed except by internal or external migration. This is accentuated by a dropout rate for basic education that has risen to 4 percent, whereas the national average rate is 2.8 percent. These dropouts join other job seekers and are often employed in the informal sector. Such problems are exacerbated by early dropouts from basic education among girls and their early marriage, as not less than 30 percent of girls are married before eighteen, compared with the national average of 11 percent, which automatically increases both the total fertility rate and the marital fertility rate. Nevertheless, the local social fabric, including important forms of solidarity and co-operation, provides relative protection against vulnerability, marginalization and lack of social security.
