The Regional Role of Russia after Military Aid to Syria

One of the most important goals of Russian foreign policy during Vladimir Putins presidency is to strengthen Russian influence in the Caucasus region and Central Asia, as well as to develop relations with such countries as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The Russian government has always expressed concern about the so-called color revolutions that took place in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, as well as the fact that many of them were supported by Western forces. Russia believes that the events of the Arab Spring are in some way similar to the aforementioned revolutions, and that with the support of the West they could bring Islamists to power, which is a dangerous model not only for the countries of the region and the countries neighboring Russia, but also for Russia itself. For these reasons, in the Syrian conflict, Moscow sought to preserve the Assad regime, because believes that the Western model in solving regional problems can lead to the general chaos, like it was, for example, in the Iraqi and Libyan models. Despite the difficulties faced by government officials in Syria since the beginning of the civil war, and thanks to Russian military assistance and reforms, Syria preserved the legitimate regime and did not allow destroying all state institutions. Participation in the Syrian conflict brought Russia a significant role in the region and allowed it to become a successful mediator in most regional issues, as well as to strengthen its economic and political relations with the most important players in the region, as Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Beyond verification: Flesh witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict news

Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.

SYRIA IN A TORMENT: KEY ACTORS AND GEOPOLITICAL INTRIGUES

Defined as the “worst humanitarian disaster since the end of the cold war,” the Syrian civil war has to date claimed heavy casualties, including over 8,000 documented killings of children under eighteen years of age. In a country of approximately 22 million people, the bloody and prolonged conflict has resulted in 7.6 million internally displaced persons and an additional 3.2 million refugees, as well as approximately 12.2 million people (more than 1 in 2 Syrians) in need of humanitarian aid to survive. This essay is an analysis of the Syrian conflict. Its aim is to depict and underline the various aspects of the conflict in Syria. The internal and external actors alongside the geopolitical intrigues and interests involved in this conflict shall be scrutinized. This essay thrives to rectify subsequent analytical mistakes of scholars who limit the conflict in Syria to one about a confrontation between Russia and the USA, or try to predict the conflict through that lens alone, simply because the most demonstrated rivalry about Syria as a geostrategic epiphenomena relies on the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Above and beyond the internal power struggle, the conflict has acquired the character of a proxy war in which international, regional and sub-national conflicts are fought out. The actors here treat the conflict as a zero-sum game, where success for one is automatically a defeat for the other. One bone of contention is the interpretation and enforcement of international norms, with the United States and other Western states backing the Syrian opposition while Russia, Iran and China support the Assad regime with trade and protection in the UN Security Council and, in the case of Russia, arms deliveries.Defined as the “worst humanitarian disaster since the end of the cold war,” the Syrian civil war has to date claimed heavy casualties, including over 8,000 documented killings of children under eighteen years of age. In a country of approximately 22 million people, the bloody and prolonged conflict has resulted in 7.6 million internally displaced persons and an additional 3.2 million refugees, as well as approximately 12.2 million people (more than 1 in 2 Syrians) in need of humanitarian aid to survive. This essay is an analysis of the Syrian conflict. Its aim is to depict and underline the various aspects of the conflict in Syria. The internal and external actors alongside the geopolitical intrigues and interests involved in this conflict shall be scrutinized. This essay thrives to rectify subsequent analytical mistakes of scholars who limit the conflict in Syria to one about a confrontation between Russia and the USA, or try to predict the conflict through that lens alone, simply because the most demonstrated rivalry about Syria as a geostrategic epiphenomena relies on the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Above and beyond the internal power struggle, the conflict has acquired the character of a proxy war in which international, regional and sub-national conflicts are fought out. The actors here treat the conflict as a zero-sum game, where success for one is automatically a defeat for the other. One bone of contention is the interpretation and enforcement of international norms, with the United States and other Western states backing the Syrian opposition while Russia, Iran and China support the Assad regime with trade and protection in the UN Security Council and, in the case of Russia, arms deliveries.

YEMEN'S POST-ARAB SPRING CONFLICT AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ECONOMY, POLITICS, AND SAUDI ARABIA'S INFLUENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

<p align="center">The ongoing war between the Saudi Arabian coalition and the Houthis has had a significant impact. The participation of Saudi Arabia and its coalition in the middle of the Yemen conflict has a pretext to save the democratically elected official government; however, some argue that Saudi Arabia's participation is more of a sectarian issue. The conflict that is still raging in Yemen at this time is considered very interesting to conduct research, in order to find the true background of the participation of Saudi Arabia and its coalition. Is it true that Saudi Arabia's participation was motivated by a desire to save the official government deposed by the Houthis, or is there another motive at work that is in the best interests of Saudi Arabia and its coalition, such as economic, political, or ideological influence?. In this article the researcher uses a qualitative descriptive methodology, qualitative descriptive research in this study will be carried out with several stages including raising a problem, raising research questions, collecting relevant data, analyzing data, and answering research questions. In the investigation, it was found that Saudi Arabia's participation in the Yemeni conflict was inseparable from political, influence and economic interests. Because of the reality that occurred from Saudi Arabia's contradictory attitude toward the Syrian conflict.</p>

Opposing Discourses of Terror:

The primary goal of the paper is to examine how the Turkish and Russian Governments are using the term terrorist in their diplomatic communication towards the Syrian conflict. Following the introduction, the study outlines the theoretical framework – namely the securitisation theory –, then presents a concept of terrorism, which is focusing on the instrumentalisation of the terrorist label in discursive processes. Henceforward, the paper attempts to accomplish the aforementioned goal by examining the Turkish and Russian security discourses on two interrelated issues of the Syrian war: Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring in October 2019, and the Russian–Syrian offensive codenamed Operation Dawn of Idlib between April 2019 and March 2020. Based on the detailed analysis of relevant speeches and articles given or written by high-ranking Russian and Turkish diplomats, the paper displays how the two states justified their military interventions, defined their own roles, and framed the non-governmental actors involved in the conflicts. According to the conclusion of the author, despite the numerous similarities in their discourses, Turkey and Russia define oppositely, who is, and who is not a terrorist in Syria, which constitutes a major collision point between their geostrategic perspectives.

Hambatan PBB dalam Merespon Mass Atrocity di Suriah pada Tahun 2011-2013

The Syrian conflict is one of the deadliest conflicts that occurred as a result of the Arab Spring. A large number of casualties in this conflict shows how sovereign state and international community had failed to fulfill their responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities. The purpose of this article is to examine what obstacles the United Nations had faced in its effort to protect the Syrian population. The framework that used to analyze this issue is the concept of Global Governance and the Responsibility to Protect. Using descriptive qualitative research methods, data will be collected from books, journal articles, official reports and media publications to explain four obstacles United Nations had faced. The first obstacle related to growing multipolarity that causes difficulty in reaching a consensus during the negotiations. The second obstacle related to UN Security Council permanent member dysfunctional behavior which often causes a deadlock in decision making. The third obstacle is the complexity of the conflict that occurred. The last one is the differences opinion among related organizations that relieves the international pressure to immediately end the mass atrocities.

Measles in conflict-affected northern Syria: results from an ongoing outbreak surveillance program

Background The Syrian conflict has dramatically changed the public health landscape of Syria since its onset in March of 2011. Depleted resources, fractured health systems, and increased security risks have disrupted many routine services, including vaccinations, across several regions in Syria. Improving our understanding of infectious disease transmission in conflict-affected communities is imperative, particularly in the Syrian conflict. We utilize surveillance data from the Early Warning Alert and Response Network (EWARN) database managed by the Assistance Coordination Unit (ACU) to explore trends in the incidence of measles in conflict-affected northern Syria and analyze two consecutive epidemics in 2017 and 2018. Methods We conducted a retrospective time-series analysis of the incidence of clinically suspected cases of measles using EWARN data between January 2015 and June 2019. We compared regional and temporal trends to assess differences between geographic areas and across time. Results Between January 2015 and June 2019, there were 30,241 clinically suspected cases of measles reported, compared to 3193 cases reported across the whole country in the decade leading up to the conflict. There were 960 regional events that met the measles outbreak threshold and significant differences in the medians of measles incidence across all years (p-value < 0.001) and in each pairwise comparison of years as well as across all geographic regions (p-value < 0.001). Although most governorates faced an elevated burden of cases in every year of the study, the measles epidemics of 2017 and 2018 in the governorates of Ar-Raqqa, Deir-Ez-Zor, and Idlib accounted for over 71% of the total suspected cases over the entire study period. Conclusions The 2017 and 2018 measles epidemics were the largest since Syria eliminated the disease in 1999. The regions most affected by these outbreaks were areas of intense conflict and displacement between 2014 and 2018, including districts in Ar-Raqqa, Deir-Ez-Zor, and Idlib. The spread of measles in northern Syria serves as an indicator of low immunization coverage and limited access to care and highlights the Syrian peoples’ vulnerability to infectious diseases and vaccine preventable diseases in the setting of the current conflict.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization towards the war in Syria 2011-2015

The conflict in Syria that started in 2011 has quickly evolved from a local uprising inspired by the events of the so-called “Arab Spring” into a multidimensional and complicated conflict of a civil war character, with many diverse participants and a very significant religious factor apart from political and socioeconomic reasons. Furthermore, the conflict has become internationalized: more and more external parties have gotten involved in it with a view to furthering or safeguarding their own interests. A vast majority of these actors were states (as far as legal entities are concerned). In the context of their activity, operations of non-state entities, such as international organizations, were rather limited and focused on social and humanitarian issues. This also pertains to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Evolving from a typical defensive alliance towards a security organization and, since the end of the Cold War, consistently operating outside the area covered by the Treaty (understood as the territories of member states), NATO as an autonomous entity has not taken any consistent, coordinated, or decisive actions during the first years of the Syrian conflict. This is due to both the specific features of this international organization and the determinants of the international environment with their dynamics.