Agonal Autism in the Syrian Conflict: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

With the Syrian conflict in its seventh year, chances for any one side to end it by outright military victory have faded, thus making it a matter of formal logic that the relevance of other means of conflict resolution - especially communicative ones - should be heigthened. In practice, that is more easily said than done, though. To switch from the sword to the negotiating table has never been easy, but in the new age of small, asymmetric, and unconventional warfare (cf. Daase 1999, 2001), it seems to have become all but impossible. Diplomatic talks broke down in 2012 and 2014, and more recent attempts have also remained essentially fruitless.

In a situation where more than half of Syria's population has been displaced, where Syrian refugees challenge the neighboring countries' intake capacity, and chances for any kind of restoration of an effective central government have been declared dead (Jenkins 2014), millions of citizens of various countries, non-governmental organizations, and even sometimes governments have been known to step in with humanitarian aid of various, if insufficient, aid. On the other hand, the influx of foreigners has created a certain socio-political backlash in many countries. Moreover, and in addition to the failure of negotiating attempts on the diplomatic level, there is strangely little interest in finding out more about the Syrian catastrophe's causes and consequences. Comprehensive analyses like Michal Lüders' (2015) ''Wer Wind sät'' have found an interested audience, but failed to reach a breakthrough against the political establishment's glass ceiling of defense and denial. The following argument tries to add some provisional ideas to Lüders' analysis in the hope that one or the other conceptual tool might be of some limited use to reach a fuller understanding of what went wrong - and what could prevent a repetition of the Syrian tragedy in other areas of tension.

Even though the country lies in ruins - and chances are that no government will ever be able to rule all of what used to be the modern state of Syria (Jenkins 2014) - communication attempts under the auspices of the United Nations failed in both 2012 and 2014, and none of the more recent talks at different places yielded substantive results. One of the reasons for failure has been seen in the West's reticence to talk with all regional stakeholders, combined with its attitude of self-righteousness that forbids negotiations with "Axis of Evil" governments as well as with terrorist organizations (Lüders 2015: 63).