In early 2016, the level of physical destruction of the urban fabric in Syria is high. It explains to a certain extend the magnitude of the displacement of millions of Syrians seeking refuge both within the country and outside its borders. More generally, the territorial organisation of the country has changed dramatically over five years of conflict: some areas have been destroyed and to a large extend emptied; some others have been used as shelters; new political, economic and social orders have established themselves in each of the areas controlled by one of the actors of the conflict, including in regime-held ones, with many overlaps, fuelling an economy of war and survival; and the borderlands areas of Syria’s neighbours have been deeply reshaped by the Syrian conflict as well. The argument of this paper is that these characteristics of the Syrian conflict cannot be considered as the classical collateral effects of warfare. Their typology indicates rather that physical destruction and human displacement are used as instruments in and of the warfare, serving different purposes and aims. The forms of violence to which the Syrian society is subject are therefore not random: they are part of a new regime of violence and (dis)order, to which the economy of war belongs as well. In the paper, it is argued that violence is linked with the underlying logic of power, and that it is grounded in the prevailing social and distributional order of Syria; It was present all the more in the pre-2011 Syrian society as the Asad regime had weak institutions of conflict management and had, over the last decade, accentuated social and territorial divided, and the polarisation of the rents within the hands of a small elite. In that sense, regime stability hid potential instability, and possibly the violence that is since at stake. This paper is based on an extensive survey and analysis of the information sites produced within Syria, on interviews of Syrians (businessmen, activists, normal people that are today refugees in France, UK, Lebanon, Egypt), on the analysis of satellite imagery of the country, on secondary sources (data, reports, newspapers, etc).