ANKARA
Syrian civil war, which began as civil peaceful uprising in 2011, is unlikely to end soon despite killing more than 100,000 people and driven millions from their homes, US academics said.
Marc Lynch, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, convened a workshop last month at same university’s Project on Middle East Political Science with the participation of a dozen leading scholars of civil wars to write memos applying their research to the Syrian case.
“All civil wars end, but many of them last for an extremely long time before that end. Historically, most civil wars have ended in military victory,” David E. Cunningham from University of Maryland said adding that “However, since the end of the Cold War, there has been an increase in the proportion of civil wars ending in negotiated settlement.”
According to Cunningham, for civil wars to end in negotiated settlement, one of two things has to happen — all the actors that have the ability to continue the conflict unilaterally have to agree to a settlement and actually stop fighting, or international actors have to be willing to impose a peace on unwilling veto players.
But the problem in Syria is that there are too many veto players while on the other hand, level of international commitment required to impose a peace is lacking.
“The civil war in Syria, therefore, is likely to last much longer and the prospects for any sort of negotiated settlement are extremely low,” Cunningham said.
The University of California’s Barbara F. Walter pointed out that civil wars don’t end quickly. “The average length of civil wars since 1945 has been about 10 years but the average duration has declined somewhat since the end of the Cold War”.
“The greater the number of factions, the longer a civil war tends to last” is another conclusion of Walter and that is bad news for Syria, where the civil war is “being fought between the government of President Bashar al-Assad and at least 13 major rebel groups whose alliances are relatively fluid.”
Syrian civil war began in 2011, initially as an effort of opposition groups to topple Syrian President, Bashar Al-Assad. Much more than 100,000 people were killed, the majority civilians, some of them in the first chemical weapons attack of the 21st century, carried out by Assad regime in August 2013.
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