The "Endless" Syrian War: An Assessment

Abstract

With the end of the Cold War, while non-state actors gained importance in international relations, humanitarian crises, environmental problems, and civil wars began to become important. Although civil wars have often been linked to third-world countries, the civil wars in Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s increased the interest in civil war studies within the discipline of International Relations. With third-party interventions in civil wars, the distinction between civil and interstate wars has become increasingly blurred. Since the 20th century, the Middle East has been associated with prolonged ethnic and religious conflicts, political and humanitarian crises, and military interventions. The Arab-Israeli conflict, the Lebanese civil war, and the Iran-Iraq war have made the region unstable and open to foreign interventions. Recently, the uprisings that started in Tunisia in 2010 – although commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring”, have thrust the region into long, dark winter instead. The demonstrations in Syria in 2011 quickly turned into a country-wide civil conflict. Although it began as a civil war for various economic, political, social, ethnic, and religious reasons, the Syrian War has evolved into a proxy war due to the diversity of state and non-state actors involved. This study aims to understand why the Syrian war has lasted for more than ten years. To do this, initially, a conceptual framework is drawn that focuses on civil and proxy wars. How the process leading to the civil war was shaped, and the Syrian war from a historical perspective are then discussed. The reason why the war has continued for more than ten years is subsequently discussed under three headings: regional, international, and Syria itself in the context of third-party interventions in civil wars. The thesis focuses on regional factors, which are considered more important in terms of the diversity of actors and their influence on the dynamics of war.