Download or read book Changing Regime Discourse and Reform in Syria written by Aurora Sottimano and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving from the revolutionary rhetoric prominent in the early days of President Hafez al-Assad¿s regime to the present stance of the country¿s economic reformers and rising business class, this new study traces the evolution of Ba¿thist ideological discourse in Syria. The first part of the book focuses on the trend, over the course of the first Assad presidency, away from the idea of revolution toward the ¿disciplining logic¿ that stressed the need for production, sacrifice, and social peace. Turning to the current regime, the second part highlights the ongoing tensions between those that favor the encouragement of entrepreneurship and their opponents, who are championing a new form of Social Darwinism.
Download or read book Syria from Reform to Revolt written by Raymond Hinnebusch and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Bashar al-Asad smoothly assumed power in July 2000, just seven days after the death of his father, observers were divided on what this would mean for the country’s foreign and domestic politics. On the one hand, it seemed everything would stay the same: an Asad on top of a political system controlled by secret services and Baathist one-party rule. On the other hand, it looked like everything would be different: a young president with exposure to Western education who, in his inaugural speech, emphasized his determination to modernize Syria. This volume explores the ways in which Asad’s domestic and foreign policy strategies during his first decade in power safeguarded his rule and adapted Syria to the age of globalization. The volume’s contributors examine multiple aspects of Asad’s rule in the 2000s, from power consolidation within the party and control of the opposition to economic reform, co-opting new private charities, and coping with Iraqi refugees. The Syrian regime temporarily succeeded in reproducing its power and legitimacy, in reconstructing its social base, and in managing regional and international challenges. At the same time, contributors clearly detail the shortcomings, inconsistencies, and risks these policies entailed, illustrating why Syria’s tenuous stability came to an abrupt end during the Arab Spring of 2011. This volume presents the work of an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Based on extensive fieldwork and on intimate knowledge of a country whose dynamics often seem complicated and obscure to outside observers, these scholars’ insightful snapshots of Bashar al-Asad’s decade of authoritarian upgrading provide an indispensable resource for understanding the current crisis and its disastrous consequences.
Download or read book Syria from Reform to Revolt written by Leif Stenberg and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Syria’s anti-authoritarian uprising and subsequent civil war have left the country in ruins, the need for understanding the nation’s complex political and cultural realities remains urgent. The second of a two-volume series, Syria from Reform to Revolt: Culture, Society, and Religion draws together closely observed, critical and historicized analyses, giving vital insights into Syrian society today. With a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, contributors reveal how Bashar al-Asad’s pivotal first decade of rule engendered changes in power relations and public discourse—dynamics that would feed the 2011 protest movement and civil war. Essays focus on key arenas of Syrian social life, including television drama, political fiction, Islamic foundations, and Christian choirs and charities, demonstrating the ways in which Syrians worked with and through the state in attempts to reform, undermine, or sidestep the regime. The contributors explore the paradoxical cultural politics of hope, anticipation, and betrayal that have animated life in Syria under Asad, revealing the fractures that obstruct peaceful transformation. Syria from Reform to Revolt provides a powerful assessment of the conditions that turned Syria’s hopeful Arab spring revolution into a catastrophic civil war that has cost over 200,000 lives and generated the worst humanitarian crisis of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Syria from Reform to Revolt written by Leif Stenberg and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Syria’s anti-authoritarian uprising and subsequent civil war have left the country in ruins, the need for understanding the nation’s complex political and cultural realities remains urgent. The second of a two-volume series, Syria from Reform to Revolt: Culture, Society, and Religion draws together closely observed, critical and historicized analyses, giving vital insights into Syrian society today. With a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, contributors reveal how Bashar al-Asad’s pivotal first decade of rule engendered changes in power relations and public discourse—dynamics that would feed the 2011 protest movement and civil war. Essays focus on key arenas of Syrian social life, including television drama, political fiction, Islamic foundations, and Christian choirs and charities, demonstrating the ways in which Syrians worked with and through the state in attempts to reform, undermine, or sidestep the regime. The contributors explore the paradoxical cultural politics of hope, anticipation, and betrayal that have animated life in Syria under Asad, revealing the fractures that obstruct peaceful transformation. Syria from Reform to Revolt provides a powerful assessment of the conditions that turned Syria’s hopeful Arab spring revolution into a catastrophic civil war that has cost over 200,000 lives and generated the worst humanitarian crisis of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Syria s Economy and the Transition Paradigm written by Samer Abboud and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the recent trajectory of Syria¿s economy, the authors consider the utility of the transition paradigm¿developed to study change in the former communist states¿as an explanatory approach. In the first part of the book, Samer Abboud examines Syria¿s shift to a ¿social market economy,¿ focusing on similarities in and differences between the Syrian and Chinese cases. In the second part, Ferdinand Arslanian compares empirical indicators for Syria with those from the aggregate of transition countries to predict Syria¿s economic performance and the rate of liberalization. A foreword by Raymond Hinnebusch provides context for the study.
Download or read book Syria written by Samer N. Abboud and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syria was once one of the Middle Easts most stable states. Today it is a country on its knees. Almost 200,000 people are estimated to have died in its bloody internal conflict and, as the violence intensifies, Syrias future looks bleak. In this timely book, Samer Abboud provides an in-depth analysis of Syrias descent into civil war. He unravels the complex and multi-layered causes of the current political and military stalemate - from rebel fragmentation to the differing roles of international actors, and the rise of competing centers of power throughout the country. Rebel in-fighting and the lack of a centralizing authority, he contends, have exacerbated Syrias fragmentation and fragility. This, in turn, has aided the survival of the Assad regime, contributed to the upsurge of sectarianism, and led to a major humanitarian crisis as nine million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes. A resolution to the Syrian conflict seems unlikely in the short-term as the major actors remains committed to a military solution. As this situation persists, the continued fighting is reshaping Syrias borders and will have repercussions on the wider Middle East for decades to come.
Download or read book Exchange Ideologies written by Paul Anderson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exchange Ideologies documents the social world of Aleppo's traders before the destruction of the city, exploring changing conceptions of commerce in Syria. Syria's traders have been seen as embodying a timeless culture of "the bazaar," or an ahistorical Islamic culture of trade. Other accounts portray them as venal figures, motivated only by profit, and commerce as a purely instrumental pursuit. Rejecting both approaches, Paul Anderson traces the diverse social structures, and notions of language, through which Aleppo's merchants understood and construed commerce and the figure of the merchant during a period of economic liberalization in the 2000s. Rather than seeing these social structures and representations as expressions of a timeless bazaar culture, or as shaped only by Islamic tradition, Exchange Ideologies relates them to processes of politically managed economic liberalization and the Syrian regime's attempts to ensure its own survival in the midst of change. In doing so, Anderson provides an account of economic liberalization in Syria as a social and cultural process as much as a political and economic one.
Download or read book The Origins of the Syrian Conflict written by Marwa Daoudy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a new conceptual framework drawing on human security to evaluate the claim that climate change caused the conflict in Syria.
Download or read book Cycle of Fear written by Leon Goldsmith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early 2011 an elderly Alawite shaykh lamented the long history of oppression and aggression against his people. Against such collective memories the Syrian uprising was viewed by many Alawites, and observers, as a revanchist Sunni Muslim movement and the gravest threat yet to the unorthodox Shi'a sub-sect. This explained why the Alawites largely remained loyal to the Ba'athist regime of Bashar al-Asad. But was Alawite history really a constant tale of oppression and was the Syrian uprising of 2011 really an existential threat to the Alawites? This book surveys Alawite history from the sect's inception in Abbasid Iraq up to the start of the uprising in 2011. The book shows how Alawite identity and political behaviour have been shaped by a cycle of insecurity that has prevented the group from achieving either genuine social integration or long term security. Rather than being the gravest threat yet to the sect, the Syrian uprising, in the context of the Arab Spring, was quite possibly a historic opportunity for the Alawites to finally break free from their cycle of fear.
Download or read book Syria and the Neutrality Trap written by Carsten Wieland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Syrian war has been an example of the abuse and insufficient delivery of humanitarian assistance. According to international practice, humanitarian aid should be channelled through a state government that bears a particular responsibility for its population. Yet in Syria, the bulk of relief went through Damascus while the regime caused the vast majority of civilian deaths. Should the UN have severed its cooperation with the government and neglected its humanitarian duty to help all people in need? Decision-makers face these tough policy dilemmas, and often the “neutrality trap” snaps shut. This book discusses the political and moral considerations of how to respond to a brutal and complex crisis while adhering to international law and practice. The author, a scholar and senior diplomat involved in the UN peace talks in Geneva, draws from first-hand diplomatic, practitioner and UN sources. He sheds light on the UN's credibility crisis and the wider implications for the development of international humanitarian and human rights law. This includes covering the key questions asked by Western diplomats, NGOs and international organizations, such as: Why did the UN not confront the Syrian government more boldly? Was it not only legally correct but also morally justifiable to deliver humanitarian aid to regime areas where rockets were launched and warplanes started? Why was it so difficult to render cross-border aid possible where it was badly needed? The meticulous account of current international practice is both insightful and disturbing. It tackles the painful lessons learnt and provides recommendations for future challenges where politics fails and humanitarians fill the moral void.
Download or read book Creating Consent in Ba thist Syria written by Esther Meininghaus and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenge of maintaining dictatorial regimes through control, co-option and coercion while upholding a facade of legitimacy is something that has concerned leaders throughout the Middle East and beyond. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Syria ruled by the Asads, both Hafiz and his son Bashar. Drawing on the example of the General Union of Syrian Women (founded in 1967), Esther Meininghaus offers new insights into how the Syrian Ba'thist regimes attempted to move beyond mere satisfaction with the compliance of the citizenry and to consolidate their rule amongst the local population. Meininghaus argues that this was partially achieved through providing welfare services delivered by the Union as one of the state-led mass organisations. In this way, she suggests, these regimes did not only aim to undermine opposition and to create the illusion of consent, but they factually catered to local needs and depended on consent. Based on archival material, interviews and statistics, Creating Consent in Ba'thist Syria will shed new light on mass organisations as a crucial institution of Ba'thist state building and, more broadly, the construction of the Asad regimes.
Download or read book New Media and Revolution written by Billie Jeanne Brownlee and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arab Spring did not arise out of nowhere. It was the physical manifestation of more than a decade of new media diffusion, use, and experimentation that empowered ordinary people during their everyday lives. In this book, Billie Jeanne Brownlee offers a refreshing insight into the way new media can facilitate a culture of resistance and dissent in authoritarian states. Investigating the root causes of the Syrian uprising of 2011, New Media and Revolution shows how acts of online resistance prepared the ground for better-organised street mobilisation. The book interprets the uprising not as the start of Syria's social mobilisation but as a shift from online to offline contestation, and from localised and hidden practices of digital dissent to tangible mass street protests. Brownlee goes beyond the common dichotomy that frames new media as either a deus ex machina or a means of expression to demonstrate that, in Syria, media was a nontraditional institution that enabled resistance to digitally manifest and gestate below, within, and parallel to formal institutions of power. To refute the idea that the population of Syria was largely apathetic and apolitical prior to the uprising, Brownlee explains that social media and technology created camouflaged geographies and spaces where individuals could protest without being detected. Challenging the myth of authoritarian stability, New Media and Revolution uncovers the dynamics of grassroots resistance blossoming under the radar of ordinary politics.
Download or read book Statecraft in the Middle East written by Imad Mansour and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role do ideas play in state-building and state activity? Thisbook argues that government policies in both foreign relationsand domestic politics must always be situated within a broaderideational and societal context. Imad Mansour analyses how governments in thecontemporary Middle East have governed internally and acted externally basedon societal narratives, which bring together a variety of ideas about a society'shistory and place in the world. He argues that there is a dominant societalnarrative that acts as a primary building block of statecraft, where statecraftis understood as an ongoing set of local, regional and global state-buildingprocesses. Mansour investigates the ways in which statecraft in the Middle Easthas been guided by narratives through a close historical reading and comparativediscussion of the political activity of six states - Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey,Saudi Arabia and Iran - in the second half of the twentieth century and the earlytwenty-first century. His book demonstrates the analytical power of narrativesin understanding statecraft and explains why governments' decisions need to beunderstood in complex ways.
Download or read book Syria on the Path to Economic Reform written by Samir Seifan and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an overview and assessment of the first five years of President Bashar al-Assad's program for economic reform. This book also examines the forces for - and obstacles to - reform in Syria and outlines how the regime's goal of transition to a 'social market economy' might best be achieved.
Download or read book Actors and Dynamics in the Syrian Conflict s Middle Phase written by Jasmine K. Gani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-18 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers the "middle" time period of the Syrian uprising, roughly from 2012 when Syria’s peaceful protest began to mutate into a violent insurgency and civil war until roughly 2018 when the conflict took on features of a "frozen conflict". The middle period was important as one of key junctures or turning points when the struggle could have reached rather different outcomes. Non-violent protest failed to drive democratization and turned into violent insurrection but revolution from below also failed as did regime counter-insurgency, leaving protracted civil war the default outcome. Second, the consequences of civil war became evident with six themes: failing statehood coexisted with regime resilience; rebel governance emerged as a viable challenge to the regime; social forces were sharply polarized; external actors exacerbated internal divisions; a predatory war economy emerged; and intense violence led to massive displacement of the population. Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that seeks to capture the full complexity of the phenomenon, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the Syrian conflict, therefore it will be of interest to academics, students, journalists and policy-makers interested in the Syrian civil war.
Download or read book An Elusive Hope written by Amer Nizar Ghrawi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series Studies on Modern Orient provides an overview of religious, political and social phenomena in modern and contemporary Muslim societies. The volumes do not only take into account Near and Middle Eastern countries, but also explore Islam and Muslim culture in other regions of the world, for example, in Europe and the US. The series Studies on Modern Orient was founded in 2010 by Klaus Schwarz Verlag.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics written by Larbi Sadiki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 795 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on various perspectives and analysis, the Handbook problematizes Middle East politics through an interdisciplinary prism, seeking a melioristic account of the field. Thematically organized, the chapters address political, social, and historical questions by showcasing both theoretical and empirical insights, all of which are represented in a style that ease readers into sophisticated induction in the Middle East. It positions the didactic at the centre of inquiry. Contributions by forty-four scholars, both veterans and newcomers, rethink knowledge frames, conceptual categories, and fieldwork praxis. Substantive themes include secularity and religion, gender, democracy, authoritarianism, and new "borderline" politics of the Middle East. Like any field of knowledge, the Middle East is constituted by texts, authors, and readers, but also by the cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts within which diverse intellectual inflections help construct (write–speak) academic meaning, knowing, and practice. By denaturalizing notions of singularity of authorship or scholarship, the Handbook plants a dialogic interplay animated by multi-vocality, multi-modality, and multi-disciplinarity. Targeting graduate students and young scholars of political and social sciences, the Handbook is significant for understanding how the Middle East is written and re-written, read and re-read (epistemology, methodology), and for how it comes to exist (ontology).
