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-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.
+Two facts emphasize the need for a negotiated end to the Syrian conflict. The first one is the fact that Syria is aready so war-torn that the country is beyond repair. With the conflict in its seventh year, Syria now lies in tatters. So deep was its fall in political, social, and economic terms that - once the fighting stops - something new will have to emerge. Something that will start from the diagnosis that no central government will be able to restore a functioning rule over the whole territory (cf. Jenkins 2014), and something that will probably not be very similar to Western democracies (cf. Aoun 2013; Lüders 2015). The second one is the fact that military victory of any one of the warring factions is a delusion. Even if the war went on for decades to come, there would never be a single winner given the ever deeper divisions along sectarian, political, and ethnic lines.
+Why then have all chances for a negotiated settlement disappeared as swift as they had emerged - not only in the early years of the conflict, but also over the last three, when talks were held in Lausanne, Astana, and Geneva?
+Theoretically, it should be the hour of negotiations. But in practice, that is more easily said than done. 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 some governments have gone to great lengths to provide assistance. 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 the Syrian catastrophe's causes and consequences. Comprehensive analyses like Michal Lüders' (2015) ''Wer Wind sät'' have found an 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 use to reach a fuller understanding of what went wrong - and what could prevent a repetition of the kind of thought, actions, and strategies that caused the Syrian tragedy in the first place.