Last month I convened a workshop through the Project on Middle East Political Science (which also sponsors the Middle East Channel). I invited more than a dozen of the leading scholars of civil wars to write memos applying their research to the Syrian case. These scholars were joined by a number of Syria specialists, and a range of current and former U.S. government officials with responsibility for Syria. This special POMEPS Brief collects the memos prepared for that conference, along with several articles previously published on the Middle East Channel. The overall conclusion of most of the contributors will come as no surprise: The prospects for either a military or a negotiated resolution of Syria’s war are exceedingly grim. But that’s only part of the story. More interesting, perhaps, are the reasons that Syria seems so resistant to resolution and how international policies have contributed to the problem. The collective brain trust warned immediately about casually throwing around political science findings like negotiated settlements fail 68 percent of the time or external support for insurgents typically makes conflicts longer and bloodier. Those statistical findings typically only really apply if the cases are roughly comparable -- and Syria has proved remarkably unique from many other conflicts. Few if any cases resemble Syrias combination of a relatively coherent regime with strong external patrons controlling the strategic territorial core of the country, while a variety of competing local opposition actors and foreign jihadist factions fight over control of the rest. The closest comparisons -- Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 2000s -- offer absolutely dismal prospects for the coming decade.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 21:40:39 +0000
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