Arab Spring: Unfinished business or tragic legacy?
The uprisings of the Arab Spring seemed to represent a dramatic turning point in history, the sudden collapse of regimes and political systems few expected to be so fragile. But… Read more »
Category: Syria
Arab Spring revisited: Did the West ‘miss a date with history’?
Ten years ago, as protests flared across the Arab world, Western governments failed to meet a date with destiny and help nurture dreams of democracy, missing an unprecedented chance to… Read more »
Turkish attack endangers Kurds’ resilient ‘democratic experiment’
The Turkish attack on Syria endangers a remarkable democratic experiment by the Kurds, argues James L. Gelvin, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Syrian… Read more »
Syria’s civil society faces ‘a disaster in the making’?
The United States has begun withdrawing troops from northern Syria in advance of an expected Turkish military offensive against Kurdish forces in the area, the Washington Post reports. The move… Read more »
How computer networking protects activists in dangerous environments: a Syrian case
One of the most significant issues facing civil society and democracy activists has been how to use digital technology to assist their movements, writes Sana Kikhia, co-founder and executive director… Read more »
Shared vision, ideology drive Iran’s non-state partnerships
The evolution of Iran’s regional strategy post-Arab Spring and its means to execute it – the ‘axis of resistance’ – is the subject of a new CSIS analysis. It explores… Read more »
Jihadist propaganda offline
Insurgent strategic communication has rarely posed as great a threat to regional and international security as it does today in Syria, where jihadists are using it to aggressively advance their… Read more »
Return of ideological conflict underpins authoritarian resurgence
The forces of democracy and the moral gains of the liberal world order have given way to great-power conflict and the new autocracy, while the Syrian war reveals the unsettling return… Read more »
Charting sectarianism in Syria
Nearly seven years of war are often blamed for hardening local ethnic and religious hostilities in Syria, but sectarianism is nothing new in that scarred land — its cornerstones were… Read more »
‘Islamic State not finished’ – governance key to preventing resurgence
As the campaigns to wrest the Islamic State from the territory it held in Iraq and Syria near completion, new conflicts may arise if old political arrangements prevail, according to… Read more »