On Resilience and Escalation: The Syrian Impasse

within the series Hegemonies and Alliances
curated by Walter Posch, Senior Fellow at Institute for Peace Support and Conflict Management (IFK)

Welcome:
Hannes Swoboda, International Institute for Peace, Vienna
Wadah Khanfar, Al Sharq Forum, Istanbul

Framing:
Walter Posch, Institute for Peace Support and Conflict Management, Vienna

Panelists:
Joost Hiltermann, International Crisis Group, Brussels
Ellen Laipson, Stimson Center, Washingtron, D.C.
Vladimir Sazhin, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow
Soli Shahvar, University of Haifa
Nicola Pedde, Global Studies Institute, Rome and Brussels

Moderation: Gudrun Harrer, University of Vienna, Senior Editor Der Standard

The MENA region does not lend itself to quick analysis. Widening and increasingly intersecting conflicts are having a deleterious impact on the region’s social fabric and its people. As a result, what happens in the region is no longer confined to it: radiating crises have started to infect relations between regional and global powers, forcing policymakers in world capitals to respond in pursuit of their nations’ strategic interests. The challenge is to untangle the knot of conflicts analytically: to understand how various historical strands have interacted to create the bewildering composite of conflict drivers and actors that pose myriad threats to local, regional and even global stability and then to articulate policy responses that chart paths toward de-escalation and, eventually, more sustainable arrangements for states’ and communities’ peaceful coexistence.

Grasping the roots and primary characteristics of the region’s swift-changing complexion requires a new way of looking at it. We can no longer simply study conflicts in isolation, such as the Israeli-Arab conflict. We need to add new dimensions: how a single conflict has yielded secondary conflicts to form conflict “clusters”; how conflicts within a cluster have started to bleed into conflicts in another cluster; and how individual conflicts in the MENA region have broadened to suck in, first, regional powers and, then, global actors as a result of power and security vacuums created in the chaos of war.