Syria: The Wars Within a War

Faten Ghosn, an Associate Professor of International Relations at UA is presenting “Syria: The Wars Within a War“.

To understand how to end a conflict effectively, we must be aware of what led to the conflict in the first place. Who are the actors involved, and what strategies can we use, if any, in order to end the conflict? The mainstream narrative is that the situation in Syria is a simple story of democracy, protests and regime crackdown, which led to the eruption of violence. We also heard that had the US just intervened early on, the rebels would have won. Unfortunately, it was much more complicated than that. As conflict management scholars and experts, our job is to dig deeper and look beyond the narratives of regimes and groups, and understand the political, economic, and structural elements be they domestic, regional or international that may have facilitated the outbreak of the civil war and therefore, which we would need to address in order to end the conflict and ensure that there is no recurrence of violence.