Academic literature on the topic 'Syrian Communist Party'

During the Cold War, information in Western open sources about Bulgarian Land Forces’ war plans, organisation, and order of battle was absent or very general, until the last years of the 1980s. Yet there is much more information now available after 30 years, and this is a very valid topic for research. Bulgaria was drawn into Soviet war planning for the elimination of capitalism. Bulgaria’s planned part in this was helping to seize the Turkish Straits, either with or without the use of tactical nuclear weapons. It now appears that there would have been two Fronts advancing in this area, one predominantly Soviet Odessa Military District forces to seize the Turkish Straits, and the other more heavily Bulgarian in composition attacking towards central Greece. Both would have been supported by tactical air forces and, if the circumstances dictated, nuclear weapons. Later, with the commitment of strategic reserves, it was hoped to develop the offensive in depth towards the Syrian border. The forces formed to carry this mission out were reorganized repeatedly from 1945-55, as the Communist Party tightened its control over the country. The organisation of the Land Forces was much more settled after the early 1960s. Bulgarian history will be better served by more open debate over these issues.

Africa's largest country, Sudan, is first and foremost part of the Arab world, sensitive to the political tides which sweep the Arab peoples from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Like other members of the Arab League, Sudan was taken by surprise by the defeat of 1967. It was shaken by the tidal wave that later engulfed Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria; and on 25 May 1969, a military regime took over in Khartoum. Its ideology was Arab nationalism infused with socialism; its social base, the army and the urban classes; and its model, the Nasserist experiment.

AbstractThis paper seeks to develop a new typology of revisionism based on the nature of the aims (territorial/normative/hierarchy of prestige), the means employed (peaceful/violent), and the level of action (regional/global). This will then be used to explain the escalation of Russia's foreign policy from regional to global claims with reference to its military interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria and to identify the type of revisionism involved in each of the three Russian military interventions undertaken both inside (Georgia and Ukraine) and outside (Syria) the post-soviet space. The paper is divided into three parts. The first examines the concept of revisionism and suggests a new classification of six types in relation to the means, nature, and level of the claims put forward by revisionist powers. The second discusses the interventions carried out by Russia within its regional area (in Georgia and Ukraine). The third analyses the intervention in Syria and highlights the escalation of Russian claims from the regional to the global level.

The collective monograph “Comintern and the East: To the 100th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Comintern” focuses on the activities of the Comintern in the Eastern countries. Based on the newly discovered documents and materials from Russian and foreign archives, the collective of authors proposes to look at the events of the early 20th century from the perspective of the 21st century, and to expand the understanding of the place and role of the Communist International in the context of internal political, geopolitical, economic, national liberation processes as well as the main directions of its policy. Presented monograph is based on the talks of the international academic conference “The Comintern and the East: To the 100th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Comintern”, organized by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The book consists of five sections. The first section opens with the studies on the relationship of the Comintern and the first Middle Eastern Communist Parties in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The second section researches the relationship of the Comintern with the countries of the Far East: Japan, China, and Korea. The third section analyzes the role of the Comintern in the history of Russian / Soviet-Mongolian relations in the 1920s — early 1930s. The fourth section extensively covers materials on the liberation movement in India, where M. N. Roy, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and others played prominent roles. The fifth section contains studies about the relationship between the leaders of the Comintern and the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920–1924.

The June 1967 war between Israel and the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan had an important impact on the Argentine left, which sided with the Arab countries. The Communist Party of Argentina (PCA), which had a significant influence on the Jewish community, defended the policy of the Soviet Union, while Política Obrera (PO) and the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (PRT), two Trotskyist currents, were critical of the Soviet policy and saw in the political process of the Middle East an ongoing national revolution that could develop into a socialist revolution. Even though the three parties openly repudiated anti-Semitism and denounced the calls to expel the Jewish population from Israel/Palestine, they were not exempt of the use of anti-Semitic (and Orientalist) tropes. They described Israel as a mere ‘pawn of US Imperialism’ devoid of agency and, with the exception of the PCA, ignored the existence of the Palestinians as a distinct national group. The debate of the Israel/Palestine question at the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana in 1966 influenced the left as a whole, and seems to have informed the positions of PO, organization that became the first Marxist party in the world to have called for the political destruction of the State of Israel, which was to have been carried out by the revolutionary alliance of the Arab and Jewish masses of the Middle East. Both the PCA and PRT defended Israel’s right to exist instead.

Many scholars have attempted to tackle the question of why democracy has seemingly failed to take root in the Islamic milieu, in general, and the pre dominantlyArab Middle East, in particular, while the rest of the world has witnessed the fall of"pax-authoritaria" especially in the wake of the demercratic revolution triggered by the failure of communism. Some view this resistance to the Third Wave, as being rooted in the Islamic cultural dynamics of the region, whereas others will ascribe it to the level of political development (or the lack thereof). An anthology of essays, Challenges to Democracy in the Middle East furnishes the reader with five historical casestudies that seek to explain the arrested socio politico-economic development of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and the resulting undemercratic political culture that domjnates the overall political landscape of the Middle East. The first composition in this omnibus is "The Crisis of Democracy in Twentieth Century Syria and Lebanon," authored by Bill Harris, senior lecturer of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Haris compares and contrasts the political development of Syria and Lebanon during the French mandate period and under the various regimes since then. He examines how the two competing forms of national­ism, i.e., Lebanonism and Arabism, along with sectarianism, are the main factors that have contributed to the consolidation of one-party rule in Syria, and the I 6-year internecine conflict in Lebanon. After a brief overview of the early history of both countries, the author spends a great deal oftime dis­cussing the relatively more recent political developments: Syria from 1970 onwards, and Lebanon from I 975 to the I 990s. Harris expresses deep pes­simism regarding the future of democratic politics in both countries, which in his opinion is largely due to the deep sectarian cleavages in both states. The next treatise is "Re-inventing Nationalism in B􀀥thi Iraq 1968- 1994: SupraTerritorial Identities and What Lies Below," by Amatzia Baram, professor of Middle East History at the University of Haifa. Baram surveys the Ba·th's second stint in power (1968-present) in lraq. Baram's opinion is that a shift has occurred in B􀀥thist ideology from an integrative Pan-Arab program to an Iraqi-centered Arab nationalism. She attributes this to Saddam's romance with the past, on the one hand, which is the reason for the incorporation of themes from both the ancient Mesopotamian civiliza­tion and the medieval Abbasid caliphal era, and, on the other hand, to Islam and tribalism, that inform the pragmatic concerns of the Ba'thist ideological configuration ...

It was revealed that in 1966-1991 years the Kabardino-Balkarian branch of the Soviet Committee for Cultural Relations with Compatriots Abroad (KBB), with the support of the authorities of Ka-bardino-Balkarian Republic, conducted activities to promote socialist ideology in foreign Circas-sian diasporas to increase among them supporters of the USSR and adherents of the socialist sys-tem. During the period of perestroika (1985-1991), the work of the KBB comprised explaining to foreign compatriots the essence of reforms in the USSR and attracting investors from among them. The activities and methods used by the KBB turned out to be quite effective: in the foreign Circassian diasporas the share of supporters of the USSR, persons maintaining ties with organiza-tions and citizens of the autonomies of the North Caucasus, members of the communist parties of Syria and Jordan, youth democratic organizations, the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party increased. The activities of the KBB contributed to the strengthening of friendly relations between the USSR and the countries of residence of compatriots, mainly with Jordan and Syria. Contacts (exchanges of delegations and tourist groups, education of youth of foreign compatriots in the universities of the KBASSR, organization of recreation for children of foreign compatriots in pioneer camps and sanatoriums of the republic, systematic correspondence of the KBB and residents of the republic with foreign compatriots) of representatives of foreign Circassian diasporas with their historical homeland, supplies to foreign compatriots of printed, video and audio materials, broadcasting ra-dio programs to the Circassian diasporas in the countries of the Middle East were mainly per-formed in the Circassian language, which largely contributed to the preservation of the ethno-cultural specifics of the foreign Circassian diasporas. The cooperation of the KBB with non-governmental organizations (NGO) of foreign compatriots also contributed to the study of the Russian language, Russian and Soviet culture by a considerable number of them.

China's foreign policy towards the Syrian issue represent the policy of its ruling party, the Communist Party of China (CPC), which espouses a special vision on foreign policy issues. This research highlights the party's status and influence in China's foreign policy making and its reflection on the Syrian issue . This policy of not to exceed the use of veto power to impede the draft resolutions against the Syrian political regime, And seeking to develop new ways and tools that may succeed in increasing China's intervention in the Syrian issue or retreat from the current level of intervention, This research likely the possibility of increasing Chinese intervention as a result of the increasing interests of China over world, And especially in the Middle East after the adoption of the "Belt and Road" initiative by the Chinese political leadership since 2013 .

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. 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The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. 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Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-19.Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.Hassan, Hassan. “The True Origins of ISIS.” The Atlantic 30 Nov. 2018. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/>.Kermode, Mark. “American Sniper Review – Bradley Cooper Stars in Real-Life Tale of Legendary Marksman.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/18/american-sniper-review-bradley-cooper-real-life-tale-legendary-marksman>.Kluger, Jeffrey. “America's Anger Is Out of Control.” TIME 1 June 2016. 17 Feb. 2019 <http://time.com/4353606/anger-america-enough-already>.Kyle, Chris. American Sniper. New York: Harper, 2012. Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. 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Sense and Sadness is a story of the living practice of Syriac chant in Aleppo, Syria. To understand and explain this oral tradition, the book puts forward the concept of the emotional economy of music aesthetics, an economy in which the emotional and the aesthetic interrelate in mutually indicative ways. The book is based on observing chant practice in the Syrian Orthodox Church in contemporary contexts in the Middle East and beyond, while keeping as its nexus of analysis the Edessan chant of St. George’s Church of Hayy al-Suryan and focusing on Passion Week. It examines written sources on the music of Syriac chant in light of ethnographic analysis, thus combining various modes of knowledge on this problematic subject. This historically informed reading of an early Christian liturgical tradition reveals contemporary modes of significance in the dynamic social and political surroundings of a community that endures exile after exile. The book thus places the music, and its subject(s), in a global context the only stable element of which is uncertainty. The first of the book’s four parts addresses issues of contextuality, such as geographic and temporal situationality, along with musical complexity in conceptions of modality. The second and third parts address overlapping modes of knowledge and value, respectively, in the musical ecclesiastical enterprise. The final part brings together the book’s subthemes. Spirituality, ethnic religiosity, authority, and value-based forms of identification and sociality are brought to bear on analyzing ḥasho: the mode, emotion, and time of commemorating divine suffering and human sadness.

Syria has struggled and been divided by a civil war for over a decade. Cultural heritage is part of human identity and needs to be protected and preserved for the sake of the Syrians and the international community alike. Memories of places and artefacts, social connection and peace can be built on heritage that is common and can be shared. This volume is based on the CIPA workshop organised during the 10th ICAANE held in Vienna in April 2016. The contributions collected therein discuss present challenges in the region and provide an overview of strategies and applications to use various techniques and methods to record and document heritage of Syria, also offering possible prospects for the future.

This book examines how the Kurdish diaspora in Denmark supported the Kurdish struggle in Syria from the battle of Kobane (2014) to the defeat in Afrin (2018). It contributes to our understanding of mobilisation and identity formation in the periphery of the Kurdish diaspora by examining the small but well-established community in Denmark. Arguing that the diaspora is treated differently by Danish authorities – in comparison to neighbouring Sweden and Germany – the book examines the political lobbyism, the courtroom activism and the humanitarian actvism of the various Kurdish diaspora groups. Drawing on social movement theory, the book introduces strategic interactionism to the study of diaspora mobilisation, which exposes ambiguous aspects of the interaction between the diaspora and political decision-makers. The book also provides new knowledge on transnational actors in war by examining how the Kurdish diaspora engaged in the war against Islamic State, like Danish military forces were engaged, but on different terms. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among Kurdish groups and organisations, the book uncovers the rivalry between the two main Kurdish movements, called the Öcalan movement and the Kurdistan movement. Moreover, the book zoom in on the position of the Syrian Kurds within the diaspora who, like the Kurds in Syria, have been largely ignored until recently. Finally, the book coins the term ‘alter-territorial’ identification to describe identifying with political entities in other parts of the homeland than the area of origin.

Dura-Europos, a Parthian-ruled Greco-Syrian city, was captured by Rome c.AD165. It then accommodated a Roman garrison until its destruction by Sasanian siege c.AD256. Excavations of the site between the World Wars made sensational discoveries, and with renewed exploration from 1986 to 2011, Dura remains the best-explored city of the Roman East. A critical revelation was a sprawling Roman military base occupying a quarter of the city's interior. This included swathes of civilian housing converted to soldiers' accommodation and several existing sanctuaries, as well as baths, an amphitheatre, headquarters, and more temples added by the garrison. Base and garrison were clearly fundamental factors in the history of Roman Dura, but what impact did they have on the civil population? Original excavators gloomily portrayed Durenes evicted from their homes and holy places, and subjected to extortion and impoverishment by brutal soldiers, while recent commentators have envisaged military-civilian concordia, with shared prosperity and integration. Detailed examination of the evidence presents a new picture. Through the use of GPS, satellite, geophysical and archival evidence, this volume shows that the Roman military base and resident community were even bigger than previously understood, with both military and civil communities appearing much more internally complex than has been allowed until now. The result is a fascinating social dynamic which we can partly reconstruct, giving us a nuanced picture of life in a city near the eastern frontier of the Roman world.

The ʻAlawis, or Alawites, are a prominent religious minority in northern Syria, Lebanon, and southern Turkey, best known today for enjoying disproportionate political power in war-torn Syria. This book offers a complete history of the community, from the birth of the ʻAlawi (Nusayri) sect in the tenth century to just after World War I, the establishment of the French mandate over Syria, and the early years of the Turkish republic. The book draws on a wealth of Ottoman archival records and other sources to show that the ʻAlawis were not historically persecuted as is often claimed, but rather were a fundamental part of and Turkish provincial society. It argues that far from being excluded on the basis of their religion, the ʻAlawis were in fact fully integrated into the provincial administrative order. Profiting from the economic development of the coastal highlands, particularly in the Ottoman period, they fostered a new class of local notables and tribal leaders, participated in the modernizing educational, political, and military reforms of the nineteenth century, and expanded their area of settlement beyond its traditional mountain borders to emerge from centuries of Sunni imperial rule as a bona fide sectarian community. Using an array of primary materials spanning nearly ten centuries, the book provides a crucial new narrative about the development of ʻAlawi society.

This contribution analyzes the 1967 hostilities that began when Israel attacked Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula. It sets out the relations between Israel on the one hand and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria on the other that provided the background for the hostilities. It recounts actions by Egypt that provided the immediate context for the hostilities. It examines Israel’s claim made in the United Nations Security Council that Egypt opened the hostilities, and Egypt’s rejection of that claim. It examines the reaction of the international community when the hostilities were assessed first in the Security Council and then in a special session of the General Assembly. These hostilities have been widely taken as having involved anticipatory self-defense on Israel’s part, and as a precedent justifying anticipatory, or preventive, military action. This contribution examines the extent to which that analysis is warranted.

The images of the destroyed Buddha statues of Bamiyan, of the ancient city of Palmyra lying in ruins, and of destroyed World Heritage sites in Timbuktu have received much attention from the international public. At the same time, these cases also reflect a new dimension in the conduct of armed hostilities today, which is increasingly aimed at destroying cultural identities or heritage. Therefore, in addition to the issue of preserving the world's cultural heritage, especially in the context of human rights protection and international humanitarian law, the protection of cultural property is seen as an increasingly important task for the United Nations and its institutions. Pieces of Art, significant written documents, memorials, and places of worship are deliberately destroyed in conflicts by armed or terrorist groups, such as the so-called Islamic State, as they represent core elements of cultural identity. The increasing number of reports on the loss of priceless cultural assets in Syria, Iraq and Mali exemplify this. Increasingly, violent non-state actors are deliberately using the destruction of cultural property as a means of warfare and even "ethnic cleansing." For the international community, this makes the protection of cultural property in armed conflicts and in the field of restoring statehood at the same time increasingly significant. The preservation of this global human memory is one of the greatest challenges of modern social, political, and legal discourses. Although the use of the destruction of cultural property to divide societies, even to erase a collective memory or destroy social structures, has long been part of warfare, this aspect has been insufficiently considered by the media public and especially in academic discourse. With contributions by Frederik Becker, Dr. Manuel Brunner, Paul Fabel, Dr. Martin Gerner, Dario Haux, Ruth Lechner, Prof. Dr. Antionette Maget Dominicé and Vincent Widdig.

AbstractTargeting and destroying Syria’s cultural heritage have become a common concern, especially in the case of Palmyra. The ruined city enjoyed a significant position in the country’s history and bore a large share of the violence in Syria’s protracted tragedy. Since 2014, militants of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) have committed many acts of terrorism, claiming thousands of lives and shattering others, looting antiquities and destroying historic sites, including World Heritage sites. In 2015, ISIS extremists destroyed Palmyra’s major monuments, and, since then, this destruction has been the focus of debates on the academic and professional levels and in the media. This chapter has two parts. The first part briefly reviews Palmyra’s long history, in which monuments have been subject to selective narratives and official instrumentalisation. The second part looks at the current debates on Palmyra’s heritage loss in the light of the actual conflict, in which the local community has been unheeded. This chapter suggests that future efforts need to (re)consider the role of local communities in heritage debates and the right(s) to their heritage to bridge the discontinuity between the past and the future caused by the terrorism and conflict.

AbstractThis chapter assesses the compatibility of Turkish and EU foreign policies between 1959 and 2020. Based on the analysis of key international developments and Turkey’s alignment with the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), the chapter identifies four periods that were characterized by different degrees of convergence and divergence. In the period between 1959 and 1998 compatibility was relatively high as Turkish foreign policy was guided by the goal of remaining part of the Western community of states throughout the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Between 1999 and 2002, Turkish foreign policy became regionally more active, in a similar way to that of the EU, but produced few results. The period between 2003 and 2010, up to the Arab Spring, is identified as the ‘golden age’ of compatibility between Turkish and EU foreign policies. Turkey’s prevailing ethos of this period, i.e., relying on soft power and cooperation with neighbors, was generally in line with the EU’s foreign policy approach. Since 2011, divergences between the EU and Turkey have increased, in particular with regard to Syria, Cyprus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. As Turkey defined its norms and interests differently from the EU, its rate of alignment with the EU’s CFSP decreased remarkably. The chapter concludes by looking to the future, arguing that cooperation between the EU and Turkey is likely to focus on issues where there is strong compatibility in selected areas only, such as pandemics, counterterrorism, migration, and energy, and will be primarily based on ad hoc mechanisms.

The formation of the United Arab Republic in February 1958 was an unprecedented demonstration of pan Arab unity. Syria’s voluntary sacrifice of its national sovereignty stoked fears that Nasser, Egypt’s ‘Hitler on the Nile’ would stop at nothing to expand his pan-Arab empire. Chapter 2 explores the intelligence community’s first encounter with the drive towards Arab unity. It reveals that analysts were initially sceptical about the prospect of any form of political unity, partly due to their perception of Syrian political culture as inherently factional and self-serving. They recognized that a fear of Communist influence in Syria was the primary motivating force behind the union. At the same time, the JIC in particular could not shed the panic of policy-makers that the move was the beginning of Nasser’s imperial expansion, potentially absorbing Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The penultimate chapter offers a discussion of the prospects for a genuine transitional justice process in Syria. Chapter 10 begins with a short history of the development of the archetypal tools within the transitional justice toolkit—criminal accountability, truth commissions, reparations, amnesties, lustration, institutional reform, and guarantees of nonrecurrence—and the way in which transitional justice efforts have become increasingly internationalized. This enhanced involvement of the international community in promoting transitional justice reflects the belief—premised on historical case studies and emerging empirical research—that societies in transition must address the crimes of the past in some capacity or risk their repetition. The chapter surveys the most recent research testing these claims, which has benefited from the creation of a number of new databases gleaned from states in transition. The chapter then describes ways in which the international community has tried to prepare for a future transitional justice process in Syria even in the absence of a political transition, including by training Syrian advocates, surveying Syrian communities to understand their knowledge of transitional justice and preferences for Syria, promoting psychosocial rehabilitation and solidarity among victims, and preparing for truth-telling exercises and institutional reform measures. The conclusion suggests ways in which the international community could still promote some form of transitional justice as part of the reconstruction process, even if Assad remains in power, which seems increasingly likely.

This chapter analyses the emergence of the main actor included in this study, that is, the Kurdish diaspora in Denmark. The chapter traces the emergence of the Kurdish diaspora in Denmark from the arrival of the first labour migrants from Turkey in the late 1960s to the influx of Kurdish refugees from Syria during the Syrian Civil War. As part of the examination of the socio-economic position of the Kurdish community in Denmark, who constitutes at least 30,000 people, a reference is made to the development of the Kurdish diasporas in Sweden and Germany, the two Kurdish mobilisation hubs in Europe. The chapter provides an overview of the actors and organisations in the Kurdish diaspora milieu in Denmark, identifying two main movements, being the Öcalan and the Kurdistan movements, and a few independent activists, which reflects the key divisions of the transnational Kurdish community. The chapter also dedicates a section to the position of the Syrian Kurds in Denmark.

This chapter looks at how scouting features were manifested within Syria and Lebanon respectively, and brings out the specificities arising from differences in the Syrian and Lebanese political landscapes. The variegated and multi-layered nature of scouting in Syria and Lebanon can be seen in the intertwined networks that took part in it. These networks included French scout associations, fascist youth leagues, government authorities, community leaders, and, not least, the local scout participants. While the scout networks throughout the two nations shared many features, including similar foreign influences and local ideologies, they were also marked by national specificities which affected how scouting evolved as a political tool. The wide appeal of scouting in so many different cultures effectively ensured that no government could claim the right to monopolize or police its use.

Abstract The conclusion revisits the main theoretical and empirical findings of the chapters and places them in comparative context. The book has explained why the politics of ideas is central to understanding trends of internecine contention, as well as authoritarian stability and collapse in hegemonic and dominant party regimes more generally. It concludes that ruling parties have often been inciters of internal dissent in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as beyond the region, sometimes contributing to the collapse of authoritarian regimes. Cases include the Chinese Communist Party, the communist parties of the Soviet Union (importantly, in Nicolae Ceausęscu’s Romania), Egypt’s National Democratic Party, and the Baath parties of Iraq and Syria.

Abstract The Copts once formed a vast Christian community which stretched up the Nile deep into Nubia, with churches in the Egyptian towns and monasteries in the Nile Delta, along the great river and in the Eastern and Western Deserts. Part of the far broader movement of ‘Mono- physites’, consisting of Armenians and Syrian Jacobites in the north and Ethiopians, in communion with the Egyptians, in the south, the Church of Alexandria broke away from the main Christian Church after the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Even if the Copts became a minority at some time after the Muslim occupation of Egypt in the seventh century, they have always been an integral part of the Egyptian world.

Abstract This chapter studies interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) for Syrian refugees and Lebanese host in Lebanon. Across Lebanon, the treatment gap is largely caused by the low availability of specialized mental health care resources and community-based mental health services. Especially with the influx of displaced Syrians, local communities have been under unprecedented pressure to provide for the massive new and high-need population, overstretching resources and infrastructures already insufficient for the hosting communities. To address these needs, in 2015 the National Mental Health Program at the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) of Lebanon initiated a 5-year mental health strategy (2015–2020), currently extended until 2030, to provide comprehensive, integrated, and responsive mental health services in community-based settings for vulnerable populations. Also in 2015, as part of the MoPH in collaboration with the Global Mental Health Lab (GMHLab) at Teachers College (TC), Columbia University, set the foundation for sustainable national capacity-building in IPT through the implementation of a series of trainings, with the aim of training psychologists working within the humanitarian response service system. The chapter then looks at the approach and adaptation of IPT adoption in Lebanon before considering the major barriers and facilitators of IPT implementation.

This report explores the Sayfo genocide, also known as the Asyrian genocide, and a youth-led project that brought together the Syriac Orthodox community in Syria to remember and memorialise those who were killed in the genocide. Produced as part of the IDS-led and British Academy funded research project Heritage Repertoires for Inclusive and Sustainable Development in Egypt, Syria, and Beyond.

Approximately 300 Americans are estimated to have traveled or attempted to join the Islamic State (ISIS) as part of the group’s campaign in Syria and Iraq between 2013 and 2019. These individuals joined more than 53,000 men, women, and minors from roughly 80 countries. Often referred to as foreign (terrorist) fighters (FTF), these are individuals from third countries who travel to join a terrorist group to support its activities. In the United States (U.S.) context, the FTF designation does not denote the act of fighting itself, but rather the support of a designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO). While many of these radicalized individuals traveled alone to the conflict zone, others brought their families or formed new ones in-theater. As ISIS’ selfdeclared caliphate collapsed, many were killed, some fled to other locations, and many were captured and held by Kurdish forces. Men and some teenage boys were primarily placed in prisons, while women and minors were often moved into detention camps. Today, an estimated 10,000 male FTFs remain held in northeastern Syria including 2,000 men and boys from 60 countries outside Syria and Iraq (third country nationals, or TCNs). In addition, local camps hold close to 55,000 female FTF and FTF-affiliated family members, including roughly 10,000 TCN women and children. Some of these individuals have now been in detention for four years or more. The indefinite detention of FTF and FTF-affiliated families in northeastern Syria is not a tenable solution. In addition to clear humanitarian concerns, there is a significant security risk that the facilities’ inhabitants provide a groundswell of recruits to the still active ISIS campaign in the region. A 2022 U.S. military report puts it bluntly, “These children in the camp are prime targets for ISIS radicalization. The international community must work together to remove these children from this environment by repatriating them to their countries or communities of origin while improving conditions in the camp.” In lockstep, U.S. diplomatic leaders have made repatriation a policy priority empowered by a general domestic partisan consensus that the repatriation of FTF and FTF-affiliated families from northeastern Syria should be done expediently. Progress has been slow, while many Western nations were strongly resistant to bringing their detained citizens home, there is recent evidence for cautious optimism. Approximately 9,200 persons – including 2,700 TCNs and 6,500 Iraqis repatriated since 2019. This year, 13 countries have repatriated roughly 2,300 persons, including more than 350 TCNs. However, more work remains to be done. As of July 15, 2023, 39 U.S. persons have been officially repatriated, including both adults and minors. At least 11 additional U.S. persons have returned on their own accord, ten of whom remained in the U.S. following their return. Furthermore, the U.S. has made the decision to bring several non-U.S. persons to the U.S. to stand trial.

This literature review aims to explore the evidence on the effects of social assistance on gender, familial, and household relations and power dynamics among refugees and (internally) displaced populations in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon. It examines the findings from an intersectional gender perspective allowing the authors to build on the knowledge of ‘what works’ in interventions in general and hopefully improve gender equality and social inclusion. Out of 1,564 papers initially identified and screened, 22 were included in the final stage. A question that emerged as the papers were analysed was whether the arduous work of targeting individuals was efficient or necessary, given that the available evidence suggests that beneficiaries generally tend to share their stipend with other family members for the collective good. Most studies tended to conflate gender with women and girls – making distinctions between widowed, married, unmarried and divorced women – but ignoring other dimensions such as class, health status, religion, ethnicity, education, prior work experience, political affiliation, and civil participation. Many programmes and research fail to disaggregate data. Social assistance programmes focus on individuals and households, with little attention to the wider context and overall conflict. Most studies paid negligible attention to familial infrastructures and strategies for sustainable interventions. Access to, and use of, cash transfers are part of broader familial strategies to mobilise or increase resources including, for example, (male) migration in pursuit of remittances, or (female) dependency on ‘community charity’. Short-term cash transfers can, in some circumstances, disrupt individuals’ and families’ access to more sustainable income or ‘charity’. Thus, important questions are raised about the purpose of social assistance: does it aim to preserve or transform families through targeting?

In 2014, reports suggested that a surge of foreign jihadists were participating in armed conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. The United Nations Security Council responded by imposing in Resolution 2178 (2014) an array of obligations on member states to counter the threat posed by “foreign terrorist fighters” (FTFs). In the intervening year, those states have taken a range of actions — though at various speeds and with varying levels of commitment — to implement the FTF obligations imposed by the Council. Meanwhile, many states continue to fund and otherwise throw their support behind life-saving humanitarian relief for civilians in armed conflicts around the world — including conflicts involving terrorists. Yet, in recent years, members of the humanitarian community have been increasingly aware of the real, perceived, and potential impacts of counterterrorism laws on humanitarian action. Part of their interest stems from the fact that certain counterterrorism laws may, intentionally or unintentionally, adversely affect principled humanitarian action, especially in regions where terrorist groups control territory (and thus access to civilians, too). The effects of these laws may be widespread — ranging from heightened due diligence requirements on humanitarian organizations to restrictions on travel, from greater government scrutiny of national and regional staff of humanitarian organizations to decreased access to financial services and funding. Against that backdrop, this briefing report has two aims: first, to provide a primer on the most salient issues at the intersection of counterterrorism measures and humanitarian aid and assistance, with a focus on the ascendant FTF framing. And second, to put forward, for critical feedback and assessment, a provisional methodology for evaluating the following question: is it feasible to subject two key contemporary wartime concerns — the fight against FTFs and supporting humanitarian aid and assistance for civilians in terrorist-controlled territories — to meaningful empirical analysis?