Syrian Foreign Policy

The central motivator for Hafez al-Assad was sheer survival, given the endemic state weakness of Syria. To maintain control over his fragile, exclusivist regime, he pursued a strategy corresponding to the concept of ‘authoritarian resilience,’ relying heavily on an overdeveloped security apparatus and foreign aid. By cultivating a strategic plurality of alliances – particularly with the USSR and France – Assad was able to artificially animate his regime without addressing Syria’s underlying domestic weaknesses, ultimately setting the stage for state failure under his son, Bashar al-Assad.

Türkiye’nin sınır aşan su kaynakları arasında yer alan Fırat, Dicle ve Asi akarsularından elde edilen suların paylaşımı, 1960’lı yıllardan itibaren Türkiye ile Suriye arasında krizlere yol açan en önemli meselelerden biri olmuştur. Su sorunu, Suriye’nin PKK’ya verdiği destek nedeniyle 1980’lı ve 1990’lı yıllarda terör meselesiyle iç içe geçmiş ve Ankara ile Şam arasında iyi ilişkiler kurulmasını engellemiştir. Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi’nin (AK Parti) 3 Kasım 2002 tarihinde iktidara gelmesinin ardından Türkiye-Suriye ilişkilerinde normalleşme ve iş birliği dönemi başlamıştır. AK Parti’nin komşularla sıfır sorun politikası, Türkiye-Suriye ilişkilerini uzun süre meşgul eden su sorununda yeni bir dönemin kapısını aralamıştır. Bu çalışma, AK Parti döneminde Türkiye- Suriye ilişkilerinde yaşanan normalleşme ve yakınlaşmanın su sorunu üzerindeki etkisini konu edinmektedir. Çalışmada, AK Parti hükümetlerinin Türkiye-Suriye yakınlaşmasını pekiştirmek için su sorununun çözümüne özel önem atfettiği ifade edilmiştir. Bu çerçevede, iki ülke arasında birçok diplomatik adım atılmış, yeni kurumsal yapılar kurulmuş ve sorunun nihai çözümüne yaklaşılmıştır. Fakat Arap Baharının Suriye’de yol açtığı iç savaş neticesinde devlet yapısının çökmesi, su kaynaklarının IŞİD ve YPG gibi terör örgütlerinin eline geçmesine sebebiyet vermiştir. Bu durum, su sorununu devletler arası bir mesele olmaktan çıkartarak çözüm arayışlarını çıkmaza sokmuştur.

This article analyzes foreign policy behaviors of Syria under Bashar al-Assad in times of three crises: the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005 and the outbreak of Arab Spring in 2011. These three crises, which Bashar al-Assad has faced since he rose to power in 2000, have stemmed from international, regional, domestic environments respectively. The article posits that the Baath regime's security and survival concerns rather than external factors have primarily shaped Syrian foreign policy conducts in times of crises. In the article, it is pointed out that Syria as a weak state has been able to survive these crises that seriously threatened the very existence of the Baath regime thanks to its foreign policy strategies. In this context, the article underlines that President Assad's alignment policy helped Syria as a weak state survive despite domestic and external threats.

Local and Collective Models of Justice Comrade Fand 181 Comrade Fand (born Yusuf Salman Yusuf) built the Iraqi Communist Party into a popular, nationwide organization in the 1940s, before he was executed in 1949. The party still honors him annually on February 14, the date of his death, and with paintings like this one, from 2004. (Iraqi Communist Party) in government. Others blame the conditions of the Cold War. They believe that Qasim refused communist support because he feared the United States. Although the ICP had virtually no ties to the Soviet Union, Americans were not inclined to take chances in a region at the heart of world oil supplies.8 From a longer perspective, we can see that the rise and fall of Iraqi communism was yet another response to the collapse of Ottoman justice after World War I. The thousands of workers who followed the ICP were part of a wave of movements for social justice-like the Muslim Brotherhood-that arose amid the privations of World War II to challenge the undemocratic regimes that Europeans had imposed after World War I. But the ICP's tolerant pluralism contrasted sharply with the projects of homogeneity pursued by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, Banna in Egypt, and its opponents in Iraq, the Baath Party. Iraqi communists created a brief but important opening for a popular culture of democracy. They achieved this in part through the support of what Antonio Gramsci might have called organic intellectuals. Fand's underground network of worker-teachers spread a new moral economy among Iraq's poor. Like the peasants in 1858 Lebanon, they coupled their demands for bread with demands for rights. THE ROOTS OF THE ICP Iraqi communism had multiple roots, but its origin as a mass movement lay in the revolutionary spirit and bleak poverty of the southern provinces. To understand how a secular ideology imported from the Soviet Union captured the hearts of Iraqi Muslims, Christians, and Jews, we must begin in the humid marshlands and palm groves around the ancient city of Basra. Comrade Fand was born Yusuf Salman Yusuf in 1901, in Baghdad. His parents were Christian Arabs from the north, and his father sold pastries from a street cart. For unknown reasons, he moved the family 300 miles south to Basra in 1908. The city of 40,000 was the region's gateway to the Persian Gulf. To the north lay vast salt marshes, where rice was grown. To the south, hot, flat desert stretched into the Arabian Peninsula. Basrawis were not yet Iraqis. They had more ties with neighboring tribal families in Kuwait and with merchants who sailed to India than with Baghdad. Most Arabs in the region were Shii Muslims. Their religious sympathies extended to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and to Persians across the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Yusuf's family presumably lived in the small Christian enclave of the city. He attended the Syrian Church school and, at age thirteen, the American mission school. Two years later, his father fell ill and he was forced to quit. Yusuf left behind a classmate, a wealthy boy named Bahjat Atiyyah, who snubbed him as low class. They would meet again thirty years later when Atiyyah, as chief of the political police, arrested Yusuf (by then Comrade Fand) and sent him to death row. At age fifteen the young Yusuf was not yet a revolutionary. Family photos show him as a handsome young man with dark penetrating eyes and a strong chin. His brothers and sisters gathered around him, dressed in suits and flouncy country dresses. The Salman family was poor, but not desperately so.9 Yusuf worked in a small ice factory and then at the port, where he viewed the changes in Basra since the British occupation.

The early 20 th century witnessed the ideological triumph of Arab nationalism and pan-Ara-bism in the Middle East with the cultural and literary renaissance that rose in the region leading to a collective consciousness as to the Arab identity among Arab intellectuals. It was the Arab nation-identity rather than the individual Arab states' identity that shaped the political discourse of the then-Arab regimes. In addition, the political juncture with the advent of anti-colonial movements in the region following the Second World War set the stage for the radicalization trend of the military regimes which aimed to unify Arab nations under one state and carry out sweeping economic programs of modernization and centralization. On the other hand, the defeat in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 was a defining historic moment in the reconfiguration of Arab politics in the Middle East. Since the war, Arab states moved into a post-nationalist stage in which strict ideological control and authoritarian policies were replaced with a set of limited political and economic openings and the Arab-Israeli treaty. This article investigates the birth and rise of the Arab nationalist movement along with the ideological origins of the radicalization trend of the ruling regimes in the Middle East. The article suggests that pan-Ara-bism, Arab socialism and anti-imperialism gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s with a number of political developments under Egypt's President Abd-al Nasser. Nevertheless, the eventual decline of the radical regimes was witnessed with the 1967 Arab defeat that inflicted a mortal blow to the Arab nationalist movement. From 1967 onwards, the regimes lost both their capability and aspirations to realize Arab nationalist goals and in this era, state nationalism came to the forefront.

Questo elaborato mira a chiarire le relazioni politiche ed economiche della repubblica araba di Siria e della Comunità Economica Europea nel contesto politico ed economico del Medio Oriente con particolare attenzione al contesto della Guerra Fredda e alla luce degli eventi che segnano la storia dei paesi arabi medio orientali e della politica estera europea del piano per l'integrazione globale del Mediterraneo durante gli anni Settanta e Ottanta.
Questo lavoro è il frutto dell'esame di storia contemporanea LM legato alla cattedra europea Jean Monnet, corso gestito e curato all'Università degli studi di Trento dalla professoressa Sara Lorenzini.

After a troubled decade, Vladimir Putin ascended in 2000 to the presidency of the Russian Federation with the intention to restore its lost great power status, as a consequence of the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Shortly, Putin conferred a pragmatic and assertive tone to Russian foreign policy, as a means to reaffirm Russia as a relevant actor in the international arena. Within this framework of regaining Russia’s great power status, and through the conduction of a more assertive foreign policy, Putin also sought to challenge the unipolar American system, stablished after the end of the Cold War, by defending the importance of a multipolar international order – in which Russia would constitute one of the poles of world power –, capable of giving a greater strategic balance to the international system. However, Moscow’s attempts to assume a more assertive stance in the international chess, have collided several times with Washington’s interests, contributing to the deterioration of relations between both States. Consequently, this dissertation delves into Russian foreign policy and the responses it triggered in the US (United States) foreign policy agenda between 2000 and 2017, in order to demonstrate how relations between Moscow and Washington have gradually became “colder”, culminating into a seemingly New Cold War. Through the lens of neorealism, this dissertation argues that Russia’s military interventions in Georgia (2008), in Ukraine (2014) and in Syria (2015) were attempts to obtain relative power by protecting its national interests and to maintain the strategic balance of power on a regional and global level. Russia’s military intervention in Syria, – the first conducted outside the post-soviet space since the end of the Cold War – in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, will constitute the case study of this dissertation, which argues that the conflict has turned into a proxy war between Moscow and Washington, reflecting the logic of a zero-sum game and being, to some extend, reminiscent of the Cold War period. The polarization of the Syrian conflict in two major blocs, as well as its growing international dimension indicates the return of a new geopolitical rivalry and competition in the Middle East between Russia and the US, which desire a different outcome for a war that remains active since 2011.

2017 was a watershed in the evolution of the prolonged Syrian conflict, as Russia has led vigorous moves to garner the support of both Iran and Turkey, the two most influential parties in the internal Syrian equation from its point of view. However, Moscow's relations with these countries are based on the balance of threat, that's why the fate of Syria in 2018 is arguably tied to keeping such balance between these powers. This analysis discusses the expected moves by Russia, Iran and Turkey over the next year to safeguard their interests in the political settlement in Syria. It first presents the dimensions of Astana negotiations as an essential step in shaping the future of Syria, and then examines the impact of these determinants on formulating a political settlement by reviewing a range of issues related to this balance on the Syrian map. Settlement fundamentals Russia has called for negotiations in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, to bring together the Syrian regime and the Syrian opposition groups under its auspices, as well as Iran and Turkey. The objectives of these negotiations, which took place on 24 January 2017, were crystallized in the final statement by the Foreign minister of Kazakhstan, Kairat Abdrakhmanov, as follows:

International parties that intervened in the crisis in Syria seek to perpetuate the Turkish-Kurdish conflicts to drain Ankara’s military power and curb its influence in the country. The aim is to exclude Ankara from equations for sharing spheres of influence in post-conflict Syria. At the same time, Turkey seeks to get a foothold for its forces inside Syria and seize control of areas along the Syrian border from the Kurdish People's Protection Units while also establishing sustainable military supply lines to back Syrian factions loyal to Turkey.

This article assesses the dimensions of Turkey’s intervention, now in its fourth week, and tackles the goals of its current operation and the most prominent political consequences as well as factors affecting its future.

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.

A temática que se propõe abordar ao longo deste exercício  prende-se com a necessidade de responder às razões que levam a Rússia a defender o regime  de  Bashar  Al-Assad  e  qual  o  impacto  que  isso  teve  até  aqui  no desenrolar do conflito sírio. A relevância deste tema está relacionada  com a necessidade de entender melhor a relações entre estes dois Estados, como forma  de  também  entender  melhor  o  que  tem  ajudado  o  governo  sírio  a manter-se  no  poder  até  aqui  e  o  que  impossibilitou  uma  intervenção externa no conflito em favor dos rebeldes que se opõem a Al-Assad. Apesar de  ser  um  tema  bastante  comentado  em  termos  de  comunicação  social, carece  de  análises  mais  cuidadas,  tendo  sido  até  aqui  pouco  abordado  em termos académicos. Daí o interesse deste estudo nesta área  em concreto e que se espera que possa elucidar algo mais acerca da Guerra Civil Síria.

In Turkey, it is obvious that there has been a huge academic gap in Syrian studies and scholars dealing with Syrian politics and foreign policy generally do not go over the pre-Baath period. The main objective of this book is to analyze a neglected period of Syrian foreign policy during the so-called pre-Baath period from 1946 to 1963 in a historical perspective.

In the book, it is argued that foreign policy behavior of Syrian politicians regardless of their class, ideology and political orientations depended on historically rooted pragmatism in which interest calculations, shifting alliances and external patronage had special importance. In this respect, the book yields insights into the roots of Syrian foreign policy in the decades preceding the al-Assad dynasty.