Syria

Could protracted conflict in Syria be in the national interest of the United States?

April 1, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Eugenio Lilli:

In a recent talk I chaired at King’s College London, a prominent American expert on US foreign policy described the crisis in Syria as a ‘no good option crisis’ for the United States.

Similarly, in a February piece on the web magazine War On The Rocks, the authors argued that,

‘With chemical weapons off the table, Assad’s external opposition in disarray, Islamists dominating the insurgency, and an American public unhappy with foreign wars, the Obama administration feels it has few options other than taking steps to prevent the civil war from destabilizing Syria’s neighbours and harming U.S. security.’

There seems to be general agreement in western foreign policy circles about the fact that the complex nature of the Syrian crisis has left the United States with limited leverage to bring the violence to an end. In other words, the United States does want to stop the fighting but international and domestic factors have prevented it from doing so.

What if, instead, Washington was actually benefiting from the protracted confrontation in Syria?

The mainstream debate has not seriously contemplated the possibility that, in fact, the Obama administration has come to the conclusion that the US best option in Syria is to let the confrontation continue. This is not to say that Washington’s concern about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the country is not sincere. The United States has indeed repeatedly tried, especially through diplomatic means, to stop the ongoing violence. However, both the failure of successive diplomatic initiatives and developments on the ground might have changed the perception of the Syrian crisis in the minds of US officials. Over time, humanitarian concerns might have been superseded by security ones. While blunt, it is a fact that the history of international relations is filled with examples where states’ concerns about the protection of lofty principles were sacrificed on the altar of the pursuit of strategic interests. In this regard, the post-WWII foreign policy of the United States toward the Middle East is a case in point: i.e. the 1953 US/British coup to oust the democratically-elected Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadeq and replace him with the dictatorial regime of the shah, or the US/Western blind eye to Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds while Saddam was fighting the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980s).

Could the Syrian crisis be yet another example of this trend? And if it is, what US strategic interest would be best served by the continued conflict in the country?

The answer to these questions lies in understanding the contentious relationship between the United States and the actors involved in Syria. Russia, Iran, the Assad regime, Hezbollah, and a variety of Sunni extremist groups (some of them admittedly linked to al Qaeda) represent active parties to the conflict. Prior to the 2011 uprising, these actors were competing in different ways with the United States for influence in the region of the Greater Middle East. President Putin wanted to reassert Russia’s regional power status and have a say in Middle Eastern affairs. Leaders in Tehran clashed with the United States and its local allies to increase Iran’s sway across the region. President Assad and the Shiite party-cum-militia Hezbollah were a continued threat to the security of Israel, ostensibly Washington’s principal Middle Eastern ally. Finally, the profound anti-Americanism of some Sunni extremist groups, especially of those local franchises of al Qaeda such as Jabhat al-Nusra, was not a secret.

The outbreak of the Syrian uprising markedly changed these regional dynamics. While none of the aforementioned actors has ceased to represent a challenge to US influence in the Greater Middle East, the relations among such actors have been significantly affected. Before 2011, Russia, Iran, the Assad regime, Hezbollah, and Sunni extremist groups were by no means allies and were not part of a united anti-US front, however, they were not at war with one another. Today, after three years of bloody confrontations in Syria, a clear divide exists among those fighting on the side of the Assad government and those fighting against it.

On the one side, Russian and Iranian open support for the Syrian regime against a mostly Sunni uprising has tarnished the two countries’ image in the eyes of Sunni Arab communities. The Assad government and Hezbollah’s violent repression of the Syrian uprising has come at the expense of their reputation as regional defenders of all Arabs against US and Israeli oppression. On the other side, Sunni extremist groups are now avowed enemies of the pro-Assad camp that they now perceive as being an anti-Sunni camp. Sunni Hamas, for example, broke its ties with the regime in Damascus in February 2012, while the Sunni, al Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades has claimed responsibility for a number of recent attacks against Iranian targets in Lebanon. Significantly, for the purpose of this article, it is important to notice that the Syrian civil war has also resulted in profound fissures among different Sunni groups within the anti-Assad opposition, especially between the more extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the relatively more moderate Islamic Front (IF).

In other words, developments in Syria have significantly diverted these actors’ attention from challenging the United States to fighting among themselves. The Obama administration might have reasoned that the old Roman strategy of the divide et impera could well apply to the current Syrian crisis and eventually benefit the United States. In fact, whatever the future outcome of the crisis, the sharp polarization of the actors involved in the Syrian conflict has weakened their regional influence. This is not only due to the high human, economic, and political costs of sustaining the war but perhaps primarily to the effects that the protracted crisis has on their image and legitimacy across the Arab world.

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Eugenio Lilli is a PhD Candidate at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. His research focuses on US foreign policy toward the Greater Middle East, in particular on the Obama administration’s response to the Arab Awakening. Eugenio is also the founding chairperson of the King’s College London US Foreign Policy Research Group.

‘It’s the brotherhood, stupid.’ Values and the Arab Spring

March 27, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Jill S. Russell:

I attended last week a very interesting panel discussion on the Arab Spring [1], its meanings and the response it deserves. A theme that was shared across the panel was that the West [2] owed the movement its support because the latter was promoting the values held to be sacred by the former.

Before going any further, I have to confess here that I am an unrepentant Kennanist and have a hard time letting go of his standard that interest and not values (or the morals which sustain them) must drive foreign policy. His summary of the essential problem for such a policy framework assays the fullness of the issue, and I think it a wise explication of the flaws and worth quoting here at length:

But at the heart of [a foreign policy based on morality] would lie the effort to distinguish at all times between the true substance and the mere appearance of moral behaviour. In an age when a number of influences…all tend to exalt the image over the essential reality to which that image is taken to relate, in such an age there is a real danger that we may lose altogether our ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal, and, in doing so, lose both the credibility of true moral behaviour and the great force such behaviour is, admittedly, capable of exerting. To do this would be foolish, unnecessary and self-defeating. There may have been times when the United States could afford such frivolity. This present age, unfortunately, is not one of them. [3]

Functionally I cannot argue with his formula that values abroad do not necessarily serve the responsibilities of the government in either domestic or foreign policy. Nor can I ignore the ghastly spectre of how such a basis for foreign policy could be horribly perverted. But I am willing for the sake of argument to live briefly in a world where Kennan might be wrong. [4]

Even in that world, I am troubled that the values of the Arab Spring on the ground, and in the swelling centres of grass-roots power, do not match my own. As it is a question of my support, not of the movement’s legitimacy, my values matter.

As the beacon of this piece, let us first consider the Muslim Brotherhood and its rise and – has it fallen or is this just ‘rise interrupted’? – in Egypt. How can you expect me to believe this group shares my values? From the outset the name excludes me. Insofar as they accept women, that role has been marginalised by the imposition of restraints based in the recourse to a traditional culture which define a woman’s role in public life. Even as women are even now on the front lines of the political struggle against the military junta [5], one worries (expects) that this sacrifice will be forgotten in the case of victory. Seriously, Egypt has been past such strictures upon women for decades. So whose culture is this? And if the Muslim Brotherhood is in fact the legitimate heir to Egyptian political culture it becomes extremely difficult to argue that my values are represented.

Moving abroad from Egypt, I worry even more that the conflict in Syria has been terminally overtaken by fundamentalists [6], and that should they oust Assad the future for women in Syria will be unpleasant. The status quo ante was brutal, but as far as women are concerned what could come next might be even worse, with political, legal, and social repression a distinct possibility. This would be the same perversion as in Egypt, where the service of women in the struggle will not translate to real power in the aftermath. I am reminded of the similar bait and switch played upon the African slaves who served honorably in the American War for Independence -8 years a soldier and a slave came well before 12 years a slave.

Finally, what of the initial Tunisian protest that has been enshrined as the spark of this movement? What of the revelations that the fateful act, the offending slap that is said to have driven Mohamed Buazzizi to self immolation in protest, never occurred that day in Tunisia? What if it was not a rejection of tyranny but a man angry at a woman in a position of authority, the police officer Fedia Hamdi? [7] If the latter were true, then what would this change in its origins mean for the terms of this revolution? What if the heart of the rebellion is really aimed at secular norms and not corruption? It is certainly the case that the rise of the Taliban was in part the result of their reversal of corrupt practices in governance. But that was only a small part of what they sought to ‘reform’. Nevertheless, and quite importantly, even as this information on the event has been in the public domain for nearly three years, the apocryphal slap remains in the legend. An indictment of the former system’s corruption does not require this detail, so why does it figure so prominently in the retelling still?

And so, as I sat in the audience, one of only a handful of women, and part of an even smaller group that eschewed a head scarf, I felt distinctly odd. I am not unused to the predominance of men in my professional life. Nor am I unfamiliar with men who think I should not be there. I do not begrudge them their dislike of me. But in the West, the accepted value is that legal sanction based on gender is not an option. The Arab world, across its broad political and religious spectrum, does not fully hold to this belief. And it is important, if the question is whether to support the Arab Spring on the matter of values, to recognize that these are also our values, and they are what make ‘democracy’ something more than tyranny by vote.

Looking only at this one issue it becomes clear that selling the Arab Spring on a perversion of Western values merely for the sake of gaining the latter’s support will not, in the end, serve the cause. Attracting the West on the basis of interest – mutual interest – is the approach that will best serve both sides. That it has been defined as crass, and demonized as selfish, is unfortunate and serves no ultimate purpose.

Jill S. Russell is a regular contributor to Strife, Kings of War and Small Wars. She is currently a doctoral candidate at King’s College London, researching military history.

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Notes

[1] I had a long discussion with colleagues as to the validity or usefulness of the collection of these many events under a single banner. I absolutely take their point that events on the ground in each theatre must be addressed singly, specifically and uniquely. And while I am likely in agreement that no single name could describe the individual events well, it is certainly the case that there now exists, in the world’s consciousness, an idea, an event, known as ‘the Arab Spring’. It could aptly be considered as the foreign policy/diplomatic international face of the movement. It packages the ideals, broad message and news to the world.
[2] And here we have more problems with mass or meta categories. The matter of what constituted “the West” arose, and for the purposes of that evening’s discussion the understanding was that it was meant to denote the states of the EU, North America, and the Anglophone Pacific.
[3] George Kenann, ‘Morality and Policy’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 205-218.
[4] At the worst extremes of the moral spectrum I am happy to ignore Kennan completely. I am not a monster.
[5] Enas Hamed, ‘Egypt’s ‘Muslim Sisterhood’ moves from social work to politics‘, AL Monitor, 20 November 2013; Bulletin of the Oppression of Women, “Muslim Brotherhood” Category . Also worth a view, Mona Eltahawy’s appearance on Al Jazeera’s program, ‘Head to Head: Do Arab Men Hate Women?‘
[6] Let us be clear, I am no fan of Christian fundamentalism. This is not about Islam or Muslims, it is about extremism.
[7] Elizabeth Day, ‘The Slap That Sparked a Revolution’, The Observer, 15 May 2011.

Interview with Giandomenico Picco and Gabrielle Rifkind, authors of "The Fog of Peace: The Human Face of Conflict Resolution”

March 25, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Joana Cook, Managing Editor, Strife

Giandomenico Picco served for over two decades as a UN official. Among other work, he led the UN efforts which brought about the release of many of the Western hostages from Lebanon and the agreement which ended the Iran-Iraq war. He has been a consultant in the private sector as Chairman of GDP Associates, a USA based company. He has published articles and co-authored books on matters related to the larger Middle East, among other subjects.

Gabrielle Rifkind is the Director of the Middle East programme at Oxford Research Group. She is a group analyst and a specialist in conflict resolution immersed in the politics of the Middle East. Rifkind combines in-depth political and psychological expertise with many years’ experience in promoting serious analysis and discreet dialogues with groups behind the scenes.

Joana Cook: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. Let’s begin with the title itself, why have you chosen ‘The Fog of Peace’?

Giandomenico Picco (GP): This is the other side of the coin of the famous book The Fog of War that former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara wrote about the war in Vietnam. This is to say that war is a very complex business, and we are suggesting that unfortunately for all of us, peace is also a very complex business.

Gabrielle Rifkind (GR): McNamara had said: ‘We didn’t understand empathy, we didn’t understand the mind of the enemy. We were fighting different wars: they were fighting a war of independence, we were fighting the Cold War.’ For both Picco and me this is how we wanted to frame the book and show, how to be more effective at solving conflict you have to get into the mind of the enemy. What are their red lines? How do they think differently to you?

What is original about your approach to conflict resolution and the book itself?

GP: The approach that I contribute is derived from my history as a conflict resolution individual negotiator over a few decades. I look at my human journey as a conflict resolution individual, from two specific levels. First, the very personal individual role I played and second, trying to walk through time, and therefore being aware that history moves on, and tomorrow is never like yesterday. Basically it is elements taken from my human journey as somebody who has gone through negotiations in a very unorthodox way; I was kidnapped, I was the object of attacks by dictators and all the rest. It was not a history of a simple kind of journey, it was a history of somebody who went through what is usually considered inappropriate. You may not have noticed, there is one word in that book which has been avoided by myself and by my co-author as well, and that word is ‘impartiality’. Impartiality is the illusion of those who never understand that conflict resolution is known and never valued let alone successfully. Impartiality is just a myth which was used as a very useful route after World War Two for a specific purpose, in a specific region, in a specific culture; in practical terms it has never served any purpose.

GR: I come from a psychological background, and have worked in conflict resolution in the Middle East for the last 15 years. I believe that often when you are trying to resolve conflict, you can not just do it with guys in grey suits, or those who just think like us. It’s comfortable for us to engage with those who see the world in the same way as us, who share our values, but this is one of the reasons we aren’t successful, because the nature of conflict is changing and most wars are not between states, but asymmetrical. Often this means, the side with the power is not often directly involved on the ground fighting the group. The groups which are weaker – Hamas or the Taliban would be examples of this – have often experienced members of their family, or those close to them being killed, and will have suffered eight levels of trauma. Its all the more important to get into their heads and understand how their experiences have shaped who they are and how they think.

You mentioned the phrase ‘unorthodox methods’ in your approach to conflict resolution. What do you mean by this? How do you teach these kinds of methods to the next generation of negotiators when many of them will be able to access such work through international institutions, such as the UN?

GP: My only advice would be walk in the streets. Learn as much as one can about the official history of a country and a place, but not to forget to speak to the people you meet in the streets, and you will learn more. You mentioned earlier what have been my guiding pillars, in doing what I did in wars and beyond, the individual narrative and the national narrative; that to me is a fairly practical, not just a theoretical, thing. The first time I was taken hostage in Beirut [negotiating hostage release with Hezbollah], I was blind-folded and locked up in a car only to be taken out and asked if I was prepared to enter negotiation. I realised very quickly that it was not the great treaties or the great books of Professors in Harvard or King’s College who write about how to negotiate that could teach this; how to negotiate when someone has blindfolded you, practically naked amongst masked individuals. What kind of theory would teach you how to deal with that? Theories will not teach you that; your knowledge of their history, your attempt to understand their narrative and your own narrative will provide some answers. If you’re lucky you survive, and if you’re luckier yet, you find a solution to the negotiation you’re involved in.

Empathy is a key theme of your book and there is this growing awareness of the importance of empathy in international relations in negotiations. But when engaging in negotiations means putting yourself in situations like the one you described in Beirut, how can you be empathetic and how do you think greater empathy can be cultivated amongst foreign policy professionals more broadly?

GP: Empathy should not be confused with a sympathy, or understanding, or agreement, or even impartiality. Empathy means that you have a person in front of you, an individual who comes from a particular human journey. For example, the first of four times I was taken in Beirut, this masked man asked me: ‘Why do you risk your life to save the lives of people who are not members of your tribe?’ And I will never forget that, for me it has been such an incredible point of reference in my life. His condition, his culture, his history, his human journey is so different from mine, and it was difficult to answer. This is empathy in the sense of trying to enter the mind of the person in front of you; empathy to me is not only to understand the present mind but to see where it comes from. There is also a fundamental difference in the way we deal with the world now than, say, during the Cold War. The number of variables today is so high that negotiations are becoming more difficult.

GR: How do we go about ensuring that empathy doesn’t come off seeming idealistic or naïve? The last thing you want to do in war is empathize. It’s unrealistic to ask enemies to have empathy. However, we call for the role of credible third party mediators. You don’t come from your own values and what you think is right, but understanding why the sides are thinking as they are. What happens at the kitchen table is not so different from what happens at the mediating table. Understanding what happens when you humiliate people, or make them feel powerless, or marginalized, and the link with violence; this is what we all understand in our own self-knowledge and this is very powerful to understand how conflict begins and how it may end.

How do you get into the mind of the enemy?

GR: Often the enemy is not going to say the things we want to hear. Partly, because of the consequences of endless trauma and conflict they are not in the state of readiness to resolve conflict. What’s important is that you need to build this trust, quietly, behind the doors and off the record, often unknown to the public. When there has been violence from Hamas against Israel, Israelis were not in the state of mind to resolve conflict, but it’s still important to engage in this dialogue so you understand if there is, over time, a readiness to end violence, and building real relationships.

Another argument you make in the book is how we lack the ability to understand others due to our ‘lack of imagination’. Can you elaborate on this?

GR: Imagination can help take us into the future and that’s where we can have hope. Often where there has been conflict and trauma for generations, people get attached to traumas from the past. One of the roles of trying to support peace processes, and these groups, is to try and stimulate hope and a way through. For example, in Gaza, many people walk around wearing the keys from the homes they were expelled from in 1948 around their neck. At one level, you can understand this and the idea that they will return, but if this seems very unlikely in the peace process and you are working with these groups on the ground you have to start asking them about their vision for them and their children for the future, spark their imagination.

Earlier you mentioned there are variables changing the nature of negotiations; which would you specifically point out as distinctly changing the nature of negotiations?

GP: The number of variables is much larger and the relationships between individuals and institutions, otherwise said as between individuals and the nation state to which they belong, are quickly changing. In the last two decades, the power of the individual has grown tremendously vis-à-vis the power of institutions, and the institution is also the nation state. Never in human history has the individual been so powerful vis- à-vis the institution, as he or she is today. The very nature of the nation state is not only changing, but morphing into something different, and we don’t yet know what.

Speaking more broadly, I immediately know when someone has never done negotiations, let alone successfully, when they say, ‘how do you negotiate with Iraq, how do you negotiate with Norway?’ You don’t negotiate with a country you always negotiate with people. If I had negotiated with President Rafsanjani of Iraq that same way I had negotiated with President Khatami of Iraq I would have failed. They were Presidents of the same country, living in the same culture and yet there were two different individuals. There is a difference between a theory of negotiation and the practice of negotiations.

Is there a difference between how an individual, and an individual representing an institution, would approach negotiations?

GP: There is a clear difference between an institutional approach and my individualistic approach. If you expect that in an institution you will solve the conflicts, think again, particularly now as institutions are getting weaker and weaker in respect to individuals. In a seminal book which I quote, by John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, Ralston writes something which has always been with me. When leaders came together to discuss the changes required for nation-states established in Westphalia in 1648, Ralston noted, ‘the institutions would no longer be allowed to marry to genius but only to mediocrity’. That was two centuries ago, and that is why conflict resolution is not done by the institutions, but by the individuals who have the good fortune, the luck to enter the mind of the person in front of them. This is what it is; it’s really the individual meeting with another mind. How could you agree with someone who takes hostages? One of my masked kidnappers from Hezbollah told me: ‘Do you think I do not know that taking hostage civilian innocent persons is wrong? Of course I do, my point is I do not have another weapon.’

I want to discuss Syria, another example from your book. Applying your ‘Fog of Peace’ lens to the number of international actors currently involved in Syria, as you mentioned Iran and Saudi Arabia for example, how did we get it wrong? What role could informed/informal negotiation have in finding an end to this conflict?

GP: Two years ago it took Gabrielle and myself a long time to get a newspaper which would publish an article where we wrote that the time has come to stop using the expression ‘civil war’ for Syria. This is not a civil war, this is the third chess game in 30 years between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Syria is a manifestation of what I’ve being saying for some time, which is the entire region is morphing into something else. The nation state per se, not just there but all over, is weakening, the individual identities are getting more and more localised, the borders are less and less significant. The two chess players, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are now communicating for the purpose of going beyond what is happening today in Syria. We need an understanding that is not a treaty or a formal agreement. Syria can be dealt with, in my view, by having at the very basis an understanding of sorts between Saudi Arabia and Iran to be further strengthened, if possible, by an understanding between Washington and Moscow. Under the cover of these two understandings, the first one being much more important, the Syrians of all denominations can probably sit with more profit together.

GR: Syria is a good example [of where we got the psychology wrong and the conflict has been prolonged]. There are now over 130,000 dead, over 6.5 million displaced, and 2 million refugees. Western governments always demanded Assad to go, and from a human rights perspective this may have seemed correct; but what’s morally right doesn’t necessarily save lives. What would have been perhaps more sagacious is for governments not to take sides at the beginning, but instead to put all their efforts into creating a ceasefire and stopping the flow of weapons. If we would have managed this more constructive ambiguity, it is possible that we, Western governments, could have worked with the Russians more closely, much earlier on, as this has been one of the core reasons we haven’t been able to get back to Geneva II. Calling for Assad to go doesn’t solve the problem; he has always had a group of supporters in Syria who remain so, not least because they feared for their own lives. This is also not often how wars end. One of our primary objectives with this book was to question how you end this violence.

One of the other terms you come up with in this book and promote is the idea of ‘minilateralism’ rather than multilateralism. Could you explain the concept further and how it is influencing world politics?

GP: If you look at the history of the last twenty-two years – 1992 to 2014 – every single conflict which has been some way partially or totally resolved has not been resolved by multilateral approach, but only by a ‘minilateral’ approach or bilateral approach, namely a few countries. That was the case from Yugoslavia to Eastern Africa and further. Multilateralism has failed for one simple reason: the multilateral worked during the Cold War because it was a fake multilateralism, hidden by the great bipolar world. Institutions of a multilateral nature cannot solve conflicts in the way that they are these days, and the last twenty years demonstrate what I have just said. Then there is, of course, also the other issue, a question of individuals. Traditional institutions will not accept the role of the individual and that’s what we’re talking about in conflict resolution – multilateralism has proven to be over. Let’s be honest, how many leaders have today led without enemies? Leaders do not lead without enemies. The leaders who can lead without enemies are the real leaders of history; the others are mediocre they won’t want an enemy to lead. Let’s get rid of leaders who can’t lead without enemies, then we will have a better world.

You make a recommendation in the book to create an international institution for mediation. What would this look like? Who should lead this?

GR: This is one of the strongest recommendations from our book, the idea that we should get much smarter around early intervention. It is the idea of embedded mediators on the ground working on three levels: locally to try and prevent an outbreak of sectarian violence; at the government level where you already have very experienced mediators with strong working relationships with governments, but quietly, off-the-record, behind the scenes; and at regional/international level. In Syria we saw clearly early on, that it was a proxy war between Syria and Iran for Sunni-Shi’a regional dominance. If we had systems of mediators who were experienced, who had pre-existing relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran, early on, there could have been processes to bring them together and find a way to stop the violence, and find out what is between them, what some kind of accommodation might look like. We don’t have a blueprint for this institution yet, but I would like to work further with a group with the expertise to work out how we can locate something like this. It must be serious. You must have mediators in different regions of the world, working at all the different levels. This would cost a fraction of what it could cost militarily, but we have to change minds about making this kind of long-term investment. Why doesn’t the UN do this? They would perhaps be well-placed there, but they must be agile and nimble and never get caught in a bureaucratic quagmire which is sometimes the case with the UN. One could consider it as something similar to the ICC, where people would buy into because they see the advantage of early warning.

How can we train our minds to relate to others in ways that go beyond the barriers you mention, such as racism, nationalism and the need for an enemy?

GR: It’s a very natural thing to do, to look for an enemy. It creates social cohesion and you can bind yourself together through this, if there is someone you hate on the outside. A lot of this is the politics of self-awareness and though this may sound antithetical, the idea that politics is even constructed in this way, but so often countries in conflict, particularly in the Middle East, know who they stand against, but not what they stand for. And in the end, conflict is about learning how to collaborate, and how you don’t split the world into enemies. One of the ways through, I believe, is to have more women trained in these roles and, without sounding like I’m caricaturing too much, I think that because women are so used to multitasking, they are less prone to a bipolar view of the world, where people are only good or bad. I do believe though, that it would be positive to include more women in these roles. While it has to do with the individuals in negotiations themselves, and not necessarily gender, it has to do with the ability to listen and to tune into cultural differences, and not come in with decisions already made. You must have a willingness to get into the mind of the enemy, why they are thinking as they are.

How do you see this happening with groups which may have a very hard-line view, like the Taliban, who may have very specific views on gender?

GR: We explore this in the book. If you look into the background of the Taliban you see many of them were orphaned during the civil war, and lost both parents, then were put in madrasas which were very austere institutions and only had contact with men, which may have made them afraid of women. Where fear may be unacceptable, they may have turned this into hatred, which may lay the seeds of their policies. This means you may not have female negotiators, but you have to be sensitive to being able to think of why they think in ways we may view as unpalatable.

Do you have any final words on what the new human face of conflict resolution looks like?

GP: Conflict resolution is not a theory, conflict resolution is life and if we don’t enter that life then there is no point in inventing stories. We have to enter the narrative of the individual and the narrative of the nations [we are working with].

Thank you very much.

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The Fog of Peace: The Human Face of Conflict Resolution was released in March 2014 by I.B. Tauris. You can find more information on the book at http://www.fogofpeace.com.

Who will rule in Syria? Fragmented sovereignty and the problems of transition

March 21, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Nicholas Barker:

Blog entry for Strife revised 20.03.2014 — Zones of control in Syria

‘Who rules when the fighting stops? … When political groups resort to war, it is because they cannot agree on who gets to call the tune in peace.’[i]

The Geneva II peace talks have foundered on the questions of a political transition and what will replace Assad and his regime. Determining who will control the instruments of state power – and thereby monopolise the use of force – is the greatest challenge in negotiating an end to a civil war: overwhelming existential fear and mistrust between the warring parties limits the chances of reaching an agreement and then committing to and implementing it.[ii] But these questions of who rules, where, and how cannot be answered only at the national level. The war in Syria is a war for control of the state but it is also intensely local, made up of multiple small wars. ‘Several struggles are rolled into one’, according to the International Crisis Group. What began as ‘an internal conflict pitting the regime against a broad popular uprising with multiple, separate flashpoints has broken into several battlefields and front lines, shaped by local characteristics’.

These dynamics are common in civil wars: political authority fragments, control of territory and people is divided between competing armed groups, and mutually exclusive claims of the right to rule create conditions of ‘multiple sovereignty’ and the formation of ‘states-within-states’.[iii] Rebels must secure territorial and social control to further their military objectives. They face a ‘territorial imperative’ to establish a stronghold, but civilian support – or acquiescence – is essential to all sides, so the population under their control must be ruled effectively in order to prevent defection. Consequently, civil wars are not exclusively destructive phenomena but are violent processes of ‘competitive state building’,[iv] forming and transforming political, social and economic relations between armed groups and civilians. This not only shapes the course of the war, but will also shape the subsequent peace.

War, governance and the struggle for control

Reports from Syria portray a fractured polity with violent competition between the government, rebels, and civilians for control of territory and the right to rule. A diverse range of political actors now control different parts of Syria, with varying degrees of coercion, effectiveness, and legitimacy, and with ongoing battles to seize contested territory. The effort to control the population is as much a part of the war as military combat. In the town of Shadadi, for example, Jabhat al-Nusra provided extensive services to the population, including food, electricity, water, healthcare, and ‘the promise of swift justice, delivered according to sharia law’. In Raqqa – under rebel control since March 2013 – rebels have competed with the regime and with each other for control over civilians, and for their loyalty. Reports from activists tell of the government cutting supplies of electricity to ‘punish’ armed groups when they began taxing the populations’ electricity use, and jihadists compete with each other to provide local services, with local governance a ‘prime site for the battle for Syrian hearts and minds’.

There is a strategic logic driving these efforts. ISIS has consolidated control over Raqqa by closing down media outlets and the foreign exchange office, and taking control of food supplies in order to create a dependent population. Their aim is to change dependence ‘into loyalty and gain popularity among the community’ and thereby expand their control of territory in eastern Syria and Iraq. ISIS have also adopted a strategy of sectarian cleansing, with violence against Christians increasing as ISIS took control, leading to a majority of the city’s Christian population fleeing.

The Assad regime has adopted a similar approach. Sunni civilians in Alawite areas tell of threats and intimidation, and being driven from their homes in fear of sectarian cleansing, and claim that the Assad regime is trying to ‘to reshape the area’s fragile ethnic mix’ to an extent that exceeds the consolidation of a loyal stronghold. Furthermore, wartime population displacement has led to sectarian segregation in cities, and instances of sectarian cleansing in the countryside, shattering the historic tolerance that once existed between Syria’s sects.

These wartime transformations will have consequences that last beyond the fighting, and the actors on the ground know their political actions may have greater impact than any tactical victory. ‘I have been fighting for two years and a half’ one rebel leader is quoted as saying. ‘Tell me: what have I achieved? In all this time did I ever think of establishing governance? Did I consider working with the civilians in the areas under my control to get electricity or provide anything? The jihadis are better: they provide governance. In two and a half years, I have built nothing. Kill me, and my battalion collapses. Kill the jihadis, and the institutions they have founded will survive.’ It will be years before we know the full implications of these wars within wars over governance, but the transition to peace will have to take account of the enduring effects of institutions forged in war.

Prospects for peace?

Some analysts argue that governance of rebel-controlled areas is key to the resolution of the war. Baczko et al claim that the ‘solution’ to the crisis is to build a state in territory held by the rebels that can eventually replace the Assad regime. They propose strengthening national institutions rather than more parochial actors and armed groups through establishing ‘coordination committees’ and argue that the main priority should not be assisting the military progress of the opposition, but effective institution building in ‘liberated’ areas. Others also emphasise the importance of legitimate governance in rebel-held, or ‘liberated’ territory. Moustafa et al argue that building a democratic post-war Syria depends on establishing civilian police to provide protection and law and order in such areas, which should be controlled by civilian councils that have been democratically-elected.

Such proposals are not without their risks, though, and creating legitimate governance in rebel-controlled territory presents enormous challenges. Civil wars elevate ‘specialists in violence’ to positions of political authority, militarising local governance, and many studies have explored how these violence entrepreneurs are generally unwilling to relinquish wartime gains in power and status once the fighting has stopped. Rebels who become politicians and bureaucrats do not just relinquish wartime practices or institutions, which can be sustained even when the armed conflict has come to end. The same is true of the government, and the Syrian regime has adapted in ways that will affect how post-war Syria is governed. The demands of waging war have forced the Assad regime to ‘reconfigure its social base, tighten its dependency on global authoritarian networks, adapt its modes of economic governance, and restructure its military and security apparatus’.[v] If these adaptations are entrenched the chances of a post-war transition to democracy are slim.

The problem is that, ‘[a]s with most civil wars, those who will emerge empowered from the turmoil [in Syria] will likely be those who, having accumulated power through force but also ideological and sectarian mobilisation, will be most reluctant to cede it’.[vi] The longer the conflict continues, the more deeply entrenched these wartime power structures will become and the more profoundly they will shape the political order that emerges from the war. This will make the relationship between the main, national conflict and the multiple local conflicts crucial to how the transition to peace unfolds. There can be both sharp divergences and close connections between the national ‘cleavage’ and the local conflicts of a civil war. Even with a national settlement, these local conflicts may run on,[vii] with local warlords ruling over fragments of Syria, clinging on to power and privilege accrued through violence and the control of people and territory, making the peace as fragmented as the war.

Nicholas is currently a London-based independent researcher with postgraduate degrees from Birkbeck, University of London and Central European University. His research focuses on the termination and aftermath of civil wars, and British foreign policy. He has worked at an international affairs think tank, and as a commissioning editor for an international relations website.

NOTES

[i] Richard K. Betts, ‘The Delusion of Impartial Intervention’, Foreign Affairs 73, no. 6 (November 1, 1994): 21, doi:10.2307/20046926.
[ii] Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002); Caroline A Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie, Crafting Peace: Power-Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated Settlement of Civil Wars (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).
[iii] Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1978), 192; Stathis N Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12; Paul W. T. Kingston and Ian Spears, eds., States-within-States: Incipient Political Entities in the Post-Cold War Era, 1st ed (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
[iv] Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 218; See also Paul Staniland, ‘States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders’, Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 02 (2012): 243–64, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000655.
[v] Heydemann, ‘Syria and the Future of Authoritarianism’, 60.
[vi] Emile Hokayem, Syria’s Uprising and the Fracturing of the Levant, Adelphi Series (Abingdon: Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2013), 11.
[vii] This is what Autesserre has called ‘local violence, national peace’ in the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Séverine Autesserre, ‘Local Violence, National Peace? Postwar “Settlement” in the Eastern D.R. Congo (2003-2006)’, African Studies Review 49, no. 3 (2006): 1–29, doi:10.1353/arw.2007.0007.

From Syria to Sochi: The increasing role of women in terrorism

January 31, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Joana Cook

As the opening ceremony to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi quickly approaches, the security of both athletes and attendees remain at the forefront of international scrutiny in the wake of three recent bombings which killed 37 people.

Last weekend in Geneva, peace talks began in an attempt to negotiate an end to the three-year Syrian civil war that has culminated in a humanitarian disaster which has left over 130,000 dead.

What these two seemingly unconnected events have in common is the recent prominence of women, specifically in carrying out or supporting activities, related to terrorism. Examining the roles that women are taking in Syria and Sochi provides two unique and independent case studies that broaden the investigation of the positions that women are taking up in connection to terrorism, and how this is playing out in wider prevention and response.

In Russia, following three separate bombings in the town of Volgograd since October 21, 2013, information has started to surface on those responsible for the attacks and their motivations. The suicide bombers referred to as black widows, or shahidka’s, have seemingly returned. A female was cited as the perpetrator in the October attack on a public bus, and though reports released January 30, 2014 indicated it was two males that carried out the two subsequent attacks on a public trolley bus and train station, women were initially suspected in these cases. Police are also distributing posters seeking three other women at large in Sochi who were trained to ‘perpetrate acts of terrorism’.

Active in Russia since 2000, these largely Chechan and Dagestani female suicide bombers have been responsible for a significant portion of attacks in the Northern Caucasus since. A 2013 article by The Daily Beast stated that 46 women over the last 12 years have been involved in suicide attacks in the region. While fundamentalist Islamic motivations are often publicly cited, other sources point to independence aspirations, personal traumas, or revenge of the deaths of their sons, brothers or husbands and even romanticising love with ‘Islamic warriors’.

In the British media, over the last week there have been two separate cases involving a total of four female individuals detained en route to Syria. Two women aged 26 and 27 were charged with making funds available to terrorism after being caught with €20,000 cash, trying to leave Heathrow airport travelling to Turkey. Perhaps more shockingly, two girls aged 17 who were allegedly ‘inspired by jihad’ were also intercepted boarding a plane to Syria in a separate case. Recent reports have also indicated that there are growing numbers of women who are seeking al-Qaeda fighter husbands amongst British men in Syria.

While there are distinctly different roles presented here, that of suicide bomber, financier, jihadist fighter and potential wife, what this does point to is increasingly visible and potentially diversifying functions of women in terrorist organisations.

There are three key areas of particular concern when assessing gender in terrorism: actions, motivations and approach. While these areas certainly affect both men and women, it is worthwhile to ask if, and how, they may differ in their responses.

Do the actions of these women differentiate them from their male counterparts in terms of tactics, or ease with which they are able to carry out their activities? For example, are women screened less when travelling abroad and targeted by groups for these actions? What are the motivating factors that drive these women to become supportive of, attracted to, or involved in terrorist activities? How are these factors differentiated by their sex, age, life events or other factors? How do you effectively deter and prevent engagement in these illicit activities when trauma or romanticising of fighters is involved? Do we understand the social constructions and contexts associated with one’s gender and how these may cause one individual to act differently than another?

It is far beyond the scope of this article to ‘genderise’ how we approach security, nor is it the intent. It would, however, be apt to note the traditional descriptions of security, and arguably more specifically counterterrorism, are largely dominated by traits often viewed as masculine. Strength, heroism, bravery and protection are words that would comfortably fit into everyday public narratives which surround security. This then begs the question: have traits or actions associated with femininity yet had their due examination in the security sector which these cases have highlighted? This consideration should be used to call attention to gendered aspects of security, rather than challenge how security is structured more broadly.

We should use these two recent examples from Sochi and Syria to examine the robustness and depth of our understanding of, and approach to, security and specifically its impact on preventing terrorism. How and why terrorism appeals to different groups has critical implications to the prevention and deterrence of future participation, as well as extensions to the judicial framework and policy practice in place to manage them. If women are being left out of the wider security scope, this would, I suggest, require us to question just how comprehensive our approach to security is, and who or what else is being overlooked. This may also have critical, wider impacts on how our security approaches discriminate against, alienate or even harm, those it may be seeking to protect.

If we want to ensure that the most pressing security concerns of our day are met with comprehensive, thoughtful and, most importantly, preventative approaches which do not perpetuate situations which may encourage further acts, we need to take a closer look at how terrorism is perceived by and reacted to all groups, including women.

Joana Cook is a PhD student at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London researching the role and agency of women in counter-terrorism in Yemen. She is also a researcher at the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS). You can follow her on Twitter @Joana_Cook

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