Question

Introductiom to political instability in syria...
(big answer)

Answer 1

The instability was deepened by the fact that rural Syrians had moved to cities in large numbers in recent years, driven in part by droughts linked to climate change.

Answer 2

The Syrian conflict is hardly the first complex civil war to scar the modern world, though. Indeed, the study of civil wars is arguably the richest current research program in all of political science. So what does the political science literature on civil wars and insurgencies have to say about Syria’s evolving war?

To find out, I convened a workshop last month at George Washington University’s Project on Middle East Political Science and invited more than a dozen of the leading scholars of civil wars to write memos applying their research to the Syrian case. I expected a few of them at best to be available and willing to write a non-peer reviewed article — but instead, virtually every single scholar eagerly accepted the invitation (even if schedules ultimately kept a few away). These scholars were joined by a number of Syria specialists and a range of current and former U.S. government officials whose work focuses on Syria.

The memos prepared for the workshop are now available here in a free PDF download in the POMEPS Brief series. The conclusion of most of the contributors’ findings coincide with the deliberations in the recent Foreign Policy-sponsored "PeaceGame": The prospect for either a military or negotiated resolution to Syria’s war is 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 Syria’s 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.

At the same time, many features of Syria that seem unique really aren’t. The fragmentation and internal battles of the opposition are entirely typical. So are the pernicious effects of uncoordinated external support to armed insurgency factions. The targeting of civilians for tactical reasons and the politicization of humanitarian assistance are grimly familiar. There is nothing unusual about the emergence of political economies of war, the consolidation power by local warlords and profiteers, or the relentless slide toward extremism. Syria’s bad fortune is to have inherited all these dynamics — and don’t forget that in comparison to some of history’s other bloody civil conflicts, at less than three years running, Syria’s war is still young.

Even the intensity of the violence against civilians and the enormous scale of displacement are typical of this type of conflict. The Syrian regime’s use of force is so intense and barbaric because it aims not only at militarily defeating its opponents, but also to block rebel efforts to build legitimate alternative governance structures. As Vassar College’s Zachariah Mampilly pointed out, rebels have a strong political incentive to demonstrate that they can provide services and stability in areas they control — while the regime has just as strong a reason to undermine those efforts through indiscriminate rocket fire, denial of humanitarian aid, and other seemingly irrational military acts.

Meanwhile, the fragmented nature of the insurgency means that it’s no surprise to see rebel groups often fighting against each other more than against the regime. Rebel groups do want to overthrow the hated Assad regime, but they also fear that their rivals within the opposition will seize the fruits of victory. MIT’s Fotini Christia has documented in cases from Afghanistan to Bosnia that rebel groups which lack a legitimate and effective institutional structure almost always suffer from the sort of rapidly shifting alliances and "blue on blue" violence that has plagued Syria.