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The dynamics of the Syrian war have been surrounded by discursive moves of delegitimisation and legitimisation of the parties involved – above all, the Syrian government. Here, on the one hand, Western countries such as France, the United Kingdom and the United States have discursively attempted to delegitimise the Syrian government and its position within the international community. On the other hand, Syria, Russia and China have discursively rejected these processes and discursively reaffirmed the Syrian government's legitimacy as sovereign – understanding sovereignty as the nature of a legitimate government. These opposite positions gave rise to discursive clashes in the United Nations Security Council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an investigation into a triple homicide in the French Mandate of Syria in 1925. It first suggests that the official decision to single out the murder of three French land registry employees in the midst of the Great Syrian Revolt, a two-year war against French imperial rule, is revealing of the Mandate's attempts to legitimize its dominion over Syria. It then argues that the capacity in which the three slain agents operated, as employees tasked with the break-up of mushâ' properties, is central to their demise. Indeed the Mandate advertised the individualization of mushâ' holdings (based on a rotation of land use rights) as a rational measure meant to improve living standards in rural Syria. But Syrian rebels also perceived such interventions as an attempt by French authorities to circumvent the Mandate-imposed restrictions to their authority through the construction of what is here called 'material sovereignty.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes the application of international law to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the use of the law of armed conflict (LOAC) in the detention and prosecution of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters by the SDF. Topics discussed include the conflict between the SDF and ISIS over the ISIS-controlled territory in Syria, implication of the consideration of SDF operations as unlawful by the Syrian government, and ways to ensure the long-term detention of ISIS fighters.

The absence of an internationally-mandated peace process for Syria has allowed the Syrian regime to embark on a post-conflict reconstruction process unperturbed by international norms and actors. The emergent illiberal peace in Syria extends the conditions of war and violence into the post-conflict period through the creation of new citizenship regimes that bifurcate Syrian society into the reconciled and settled, on the one hand, and the unsettled and cast out, on the other. The post-conflict citizenship regimes in Syria are generated through a series of new laws around property ownership, military desertion, absenteeism, and political amnesty that are informed by a discourse of abandonment, betrayal, and desertion that casts some Syrians as loyal and worthy of citizenship, and others as disloyal and worthy of being cast out of citizenship. The bifurcation of Syrian society into the loyal and disloyal occurs through government-led processes of 'reconciling' with former rebel fighters and 'settlement' with civilians. In both cases, fighters and civilians have to prove their loyalty to the homeland in order to secure an albeit precarious return to citizenship and rights. Those denied settlement or reconciliation are simply denied citizenship rights and legal identity in Syria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia has been accused of revisionism in its foreign policy, understood as an effort to undermine a 'rules-based' international order. This essay analyses the normative dimension of such revisionism. It examines Russian legal discourse in the period 2014–2019, based on case studies of Russian interventions in Ukraine and Syria. It finds little evidence of sustained Russian legal revisionism—an effort to modify international law—despite Russian assertion of legal exceptionalism in the CIS region. It confirms previous research that Russia has deployed legal rhetoric strategically and instrumentally. Moscow understands it cannot easily gain international support for new rules, yet still seems to aspire to revise the structure of regional power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines translation activity in modern Syria and its intersections with original works as a middle ground between world literature and postcolonial studies. It argues for a return to the multiplicity residing within a postcolonial national setting as a way of understanding poetic production in interaction with foreign poetries. Syrian translating as practiced in the state-endorsed literary periodical Al-Adab Al-Ajanbiyya (Foreign Literatures) is studied as a site of tension between a political rhetoric maintained by a growingly invasive state and the narrowing field of individual enterprise. How would world literature figure from the perspective of a state-backed, professedly Arab-socialist culture? How would this construction then be contested by agents struggling to carve out spaces for individual expression? What role does translation play in this struggle? The parameters of postcolonial experience and representation are themselves fought over in an unequal playing field between state power and beleaguered authors on the literary margins. Translations originating in politicized agendas then become constitutive of non-ideological engagements with world literature sanctioning deviations from state hegemony and promoting civilian agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the approaches and challenges to Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Accommodation of Kurdish rights via autonomy arrangements has a long history as an idea but negotiating actual autonomy agreements was often a fruitless task. However, the weakening of state power in Iraq since 1991 and in Syria since 2011 has created opportunities for Kurdish movements in these states to develop and consolidate their autonomous administrations. Consequently, in recent years, the debate on Kurdish autonomy in the Middle East has taken center stage in the regional political discourse. This article first discusses the literature on approaches to autonomy to set out the main models and assess their strengths and weaknesses. It then provides accounts of the models of autonomy that are either practiced or proposed by Kurdish actors or entities in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. The final section assesses the ability and suitability of the proposed or practiced models for the accommodation of Kurdish rights and demands and develops insights into how the current difficulties preventing the accommodation of Kurdish rights in the Middle East may be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Note places wartime activity in Syria such as real property seizures and mass demolition within the theoretical framework of urbicide. The wanton, widespread destruction and seizure of homes or public spaces in Syria is a distinct, intentional form of violence against the built environment of the country's cities, one which is intended to forcibly impose an urban politics of separation and homogeneity. The Assad regime's tactics in Syria and urbicidal conduct more broadly should not be seen as discrete destructive events--or even series of events--occurring during periods of direct hostilities, but ought to be interpreted expansively: as ongoing processes in which postwar reconstruction is not the solution to urban destruction but rather the continuation of such violence. A failure to account for the logic underlying urbicidal wars may result in post-conflict authoritarian practices of economic patronage and the selective recognition of property assets in ways that are themselves urbicidal in purpose and effect. This Note argues that current reconstruction orthodoxy and the international community's focus on property restitution as a means to facilitate the return of refugees and internally displaced persons ("IDPs") is misguided; "traditional" models of post-conflict property restitution fail to properly consider the linkages between methods of destruction and possibilities of future conflict, thus permitting urbicidal reconstruction and the persistence of authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The initiation of military or economic punishment generally on states requires significant justification, lest it be judged an act of aggression. In 2018 two separate incidents invoked similar rationales for such acts of reprisal, specifically that they were responding to attacks using chemical weapons. The incidents were an alleged sarin gas attack by the Syrian government on political opponents, which led to military strikes from the United States, and an alleged poisoning via novichok nerve agents by the Russian government on a Russian ex-spy and his daughter, which led to economic sanctions from the United Kingdom. In both cases, however, evidence of culpability fell short of what legal standards typically require. Despite this, media coverage has failed to examine alternative scenarios or to offer effective critical assessment of the weak rationalizations offered by US and UK governments. The result, precipitate and incautious policy, driven by hasty conclusions rather than careful analysis, represents a failure on the part of both media and government institutions to present the public with an even-handed and neutral assessment of matters vital to their national interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the regional and international implications of peace in the Syrian Civil War, including in regard to Russia and Iran's support of the Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad. An overview of the U.S.'s policy towards the Syrian Civil War, including former President Barack Obama's call for Assad to step down, is provided.

Arguably his profoundest and gloomiest pasquinade, "King Pest the First: A Tale Containing an Allegory" has always baffled readers. In "King Pest," Poe depicts an endless myriad of plagued and rotting bodies to such baroque excess that even one of the protagonists, Hugh Tarpaulin, cannot help but erupt into "a long, loud, and obstreperous roar of very ill-timed and immoderate laughter." The primary purpose of this article is to examine this gross slice of Poe's humor and to explore the ways that it might disrupt and/or lend itself to his principles on aesthetic effect. The article uses the terms and conclusions of this reading, furthermore, to allegorize Poe's laughter in one of the most plagued regions of the early twenty-first century: the death world of war-torn Syria manufactured by a coalition of sovereign pests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Syria's armed conflict as a case study to illustrate the processes of normative contestation in international relations, this article is interested in re-examining the typology of Russia as a 'rising power' to account for 'rise' in a non-material dimension. The article integrates the concept of 'rising power' with the literature on international norm dynamics to reflect on the rationale for Russia's engagement in Syria despite adverse material preconditions. It will argue that Russian norm divergence from alleged 'Western' norms illustrates Moscow's ambition to co-define the conditions for legitimate transgressions of state sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes patterns of global migration during the last five years, often associated with the "European refugee crisis" since summer 2015, documented by the World Bank Bilateral Migration Matrix data (BMM). Based on crossnational data, gathered and documented for this analysis, the article also provides first quantitative analyses of the predictable effects of the rising migration from the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) countries on the societies of the host countries. With around a third of the total immigrant population originating from OIC countries, the growing future Muslim presence in European politics and economics is not a fantasy but a reality. The European Union has become the world's leading magnet of global migration, with around a fifth of global migration now flowing into the EU countries. Europe seems to have found--as yet--no coherent answer to this. It takes little imagination to realize that the expected monumental shifts in the underlying demographics of Western countries, caused by Muslim mass migration, may have very serious and even dramatic effects on the future support for the state of Israel and on its backing among the populations of the leading Western military and economic powers. The article shows that in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, rich Arab immigration-hosting countries, hitherto the main recipients of OIC migration, became more restrictive in their immigration policies, while a considerable proportion of OIC migration now turned to Europe, accelerated by the instabilities wrought by the civil war in Syria. Contrary to the assumptions of the dominant "welcome culture" in the media and the academia of most West European countries, the negative social and political consequences of this mass migration, especially for gender relations and the overall inequality dimensions, cannot be overlooked and are spelled out in this article, relying on multivariate analysis of the relevant international cross-national data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partnerships between organisations in humanitarian crisis situations generally are challenging, but at the apex are those established as part of remote management in a context of extreme insecurity. To date, little systematic research has been conducted on arrangements between local organisations that have access to crisis‐affected populations and international organisations that hold the purse strings. This paper presents the findings of nine months of qualitative research conducted with five Syrian local organisations and their international partners engaging in humanitarian action across the Turkey–Syria border, and presents insights into the components of successful partnerships. It redefines capacity along organisational and operational lines, and unpacks how monitoring and evaluation and donor requirements create tension and, at times, place local organisations at risk. The paper highlights the centrality of trust in successful partnerships, and describes the personalisation of the conflict by local organisations. Based on a historical case study of civil society in northern Iraq, it closes with some suggestions for long‐term sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on empirical material collected in Lebanon and Turkey in 2014 and 2016, this paper focuses on Syrian activists and social aid networks operating from exile from 2011 onwards. By paying attention to what these activists do and say, to their individual trajectories (namely during the 2011 period and the first months of popular protests), and to their immediate 'environment', I shed light on how they give meaning to their humanitarian activity and on how they relate to politics. I also explore the way in which activists explicitly and implicitly contribute to the changing political dynamics of the conflict, for instance by supporting and constructing Syrian (exiled, displaced and besieged) communities. In so doing, I illustrate how informal networks created in situations of uprising may find an exit strategy by institutionalizing themselves and how they adapt to a context of war characterized by fluidity, the sudden pluralization of the political arena and the need to negotiate space and resources with multiple 'players'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Syrian civil war exacerbated sectarian divisions between the Alawite-ruled Syrian government and Syria's Sunni population, straining also the relations between the Sunni majority and Alawite and Alevi minorities of the neighboring Turkey. The Alawites and Alevis of Turkey were predominantly supporting Syria's president Bashar al-Asad, while the Turkish government greatly supported the Sunni insurgents of Syria. The paper aims at examining how Alawites and Alevis have influenced the relations between Turkey and Syria in the light of the Syrian civil war, the reasons behind the sympathy of Alevis for the Syrian government and the implications that Turkey's Syria policy has had domestically. It finds that the Alevi / Alawite factor has had some restraining effects on Turkey's antagonistic policy towards Syria. In the introductory part, the article touches upon the differences and the similarities between Alevis and Alawites, then it analyzes the developments in regards Turkey's policy towards the Syrian crisis that were also reflected in Ankara's domestic policy vis-à-vis its Alevi and Alawite minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Middle Eastern Studies / Ortadoğu Etütleri is the property of Turkmen Cooperation & Cultural Foundation Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies (ORSAM) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Adab Al-Basrah is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During crises, ideas play a decisive role in shaping radical paradigm shifts in economic governance. However, not all crises immediately produce such 'great transformations'. Why do some ideas result in incremental rather than abrupt change after crisis? To identify mechanisms potentially explaining this variation, I conduct an exploratory process tracing of an understudied case of incremental institutional change: post-independence Syria. Competing political actors in Syria converged on identical policy responses to crisis despite their very different interpretations of its causes. Although power oscillated between these increasingly bitter rivals in the early 1950s, their ideational consensus on economic issues nevertheless led to a decade of steady institutional change that transformed previously fragile government institutions into powerful vehicles of statism. I derive from this analysis the potential causal significance of two new variables - crisis narrative and crisis response - and hypothesise that their configuration can explain variation in post-crisis patterns of institutional change. Ideas can explain not only the new direction of economic governance after crisis, but also the speed and scale of its movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil war in Syria started in 2011 provide an important and rich area of investigation into the study of civil war. The present study is intended to concentrate on the cause of Syrian civil war. The main focus of the paper is on the investigation of why and how civil war in Syria was triggered. Despite the various ways in which Syrian civil war can be addressed, the paper benefited from good/ poor governance theoretical framework to investigate the cause of the civil war. The findings support the theoretical argument that poor governance has led to civil war in Syria. Governance indicators show lack of free and fair elections, low level of rule of law, high level of corruption, lack of voice and accountability, exclusion of different interest groups, inequity and government ineffectiveness in Syria which have been resulted in lasting civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on laws governing decentralized reconstruction in Syria. Topics discussed include interplay of politics with reconstruction in the country; history of Syrian's Housing, Land and Property rights; and challenges and causes of the rapid urbanization and proliferation of informal housing.

In November 2017, photojournalist Susan Schulman visited Syria with the intention of looking at the challenges of reconstruction in Homs and Aleppo – two of the cities that symbolise the devastating seven-year conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the past six years, Syria has been trapped in a deep political turmoil, which has had a grave impact on peace and stability in the Middle East. Amid the rising atrocities committed on the Syrian population by the Syrian government, the rebels and the Islamic state, the Russian Federation decided in September 2015 to provide a military solution while supporting one side of the conflict. The increased use of force in Syria by foreign powers like the US, the UK, France and Turkey as well as the influx of material support from major regional actors including Saudi Arabia and Iran, however, cannot be a substitution for a political process based on diplomacy, negotiation and dialogue. Given that the Alawite community represents the backbone of President Bashar al-Assad's popular support inside Syria, this article analyses the Alawite perspective on the Syrian conflict and proposes a strategy of political engagement between the international community and the Syrian minority group. Cooperation with the Alawites could represent a crucial step for building lasting peace in Syria because the Assad's followers might reconsider their support for the regime in Damascus in exchange for future autonomy and military protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internal conflict in Syria and the legal imperatives of the 'Assad must go' doctrine have brought to the fore the issue of government legitimacy. This article examines the 'de-legitimisation/legitimisation process', meaning the denial of the legitimacy of a government from the perspective of the international community, in favor of the attribution of legitimacy to another entity. The main argument is that government legitimacy is determined on the basis of a combination of objective and legal criteria at the domestic and international level. When the objective criteria are contested by opposition forces to a significant extent, the international community needs to answer the question: who must be recognised as the legitimate government? Having set out the criteria for such a decision, I then examine the de-legitimisation of the Syrian government and the recognition of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people by regional organisations and by Member States of the UN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that U.S. has launched air strikes against a Syrian government Shayrat Airfield against chemical weapons attacks by Syrian Forces. Topics discussed include use of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant by Syrian against the U.S.; use of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles by the U.S. naval for the same; and U.S. President Donald Trump's take on the same.

This paper is about how the Syrian government lost control over its rural and rural-to-urban constituents. From the twin perspective of ethnography and political economy, I show how the same pressures that structured men’s decisions to migrate from the countryside to sell labour power in the city resemble the material foundations for the uprising itself. The dominant narrative of the Syrian uprising is that protests calling for democracy were suppressed with violence, and with that the movement degraded into a sectarian civil and proxy war. Contra this narrative, I describe from a moment of cynicism expressed toward the Baʿth party’s official slogan how the government once relied not only on the ‘repressive apparatus of the state’, but also a politico-economic system that guarded against total impoverishment. Following liberalising reforms in the 1990s—deepened in the 2000s—this arrangement crumbled; agricultural input subsidies were stripped; food price capping was removed; guaranteed pricing on crops was cancelled; and import barriers fell. In attempting to answer challenges thrown up by Syria’s position within global capitalism, the government abandoned its welfare pact. In a context rapidly determined by accumulation by dispossession and mass impoverishment, Syria’s marginalised population vocalised chains of what Ernesto Laclau (2005.On Populist Reason. London: Verso) would recognise as ‘populist demands’. These demands were refused or responded to via transparent propaganda. Against a backdrop of uprisings across the Arab world, the Baʿth party’s remaining thread of a social contract snapped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the 6th anniversary of the conflict in Syria, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, (London) produced a publications titled Western Policy Towards Syria: Applying Lessons Learned in March 2017. The report written by a team of writers of the Middle East and North Africa Programme state that western policy-makers must consider long-term solutions to a stable and effective governance in Syria. To do this policy-makers in western countries must close the gap between rhetoric and action and must have the vision to act. This should not necessarily be through military means but political and diplomatic efforts and incentives and economic development. The review article provides a summary of the full report that is scathing at times of western policy but provides a detailed situation of the conflict that unveiled in Syria since February 2011. This review as pointed out in the report shows there has been no political will on the part of western powers which has been beset by an absence of strategic vision and inability to adopt long-term solutions on the community and national state levels through top-down and bottom-up measures and establish parameters to form a baseline for policy development as the West must seek to craft a more effective strategy in dealing with the Syrian conflict. The Chatham makes no bones about the complexity of the conflict that developed into "multiple wars" warring parties, emergence of ISIS and other extreme groups fighting amidst civilian conurbations. But they stated also the West can no longer frame their policies in terms of counterterrorism but has to go beyond that through a political settlement, involving external actors such as Iran and Russia who are have directly become involved in the conflict; as well as Turkey and other Arab countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]