Panelists Look at Syria War “From Ground Up”
In a recent discussion of the ongoing conflict in Syria, three scholars examined domestic and regional actors, the role of women, and how rebels view and interact with civilians on the battlefield.
Featured panelists at the event, entitled “The War in Syria: A View from the Ground Up,” included Adam Baczko, an Order, Conflict and Violence Fellow at Yale University and a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris); Nimmi Gowrinathan, an expert on gender and violence, and the creator of deviarchy.com; and Michael Shaikh, an independent consultant based in Yangon, Myanmar, who had previously worked in Afghanistan.
The October 20 panel was moderated by Dipali Mukhopadhyay, an assistant professor of international and public affairs at SIPA, and sponsored by the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Baczko spoke about interactions between different groups in Syria—including the regime, the insurgency, the PKK, and ISIS—and the impact of the conflict on regional actors. He described how the war in Syria has become a site of intense interaction between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Baczko said he thinks the war in Syria will be the major geopolitical event that counts for neighboring countries for the next decade to come.
Gowrinathan began her discussion by questioning the popular narrative of the girl from Minnesota or Paris who joins ISIS. She noted the problems of looking at this issue through a western lens and posited that there is more of an adventure narrative at play for women joining then one necessarily linked to ideology.
Rebels may have drawn on feminist liberation narratives but “these women are not fighting for women’s rights at this particular moment,” Gowrinathan said. Instead they are fighting because they are Sunni and because the normal framework of life in conservative areas has been destroyed by war.
Comparing Syria to conflicts elsewhere, she noted that ISIS has a patriarchal structure and that similar groups, like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, have also been repressive to women.
Shaikh noted the U.S. congressional authorization to use force in Syria, and said that arming the rebels will carry many costs—among them more civilians harmed with advanced weapons, more armed actors, and the issue of what happens to weapons after the conflict ends.
He noted how non-jihadist rebels exhibit a sense of good-guy exceptionalism and downplay harm done to civilians because it is not as bad as what the regime has done. There’s “a modicum of a civilian protection mind set,” Shaikh said. He suggested that rebel groups would participate in training from a group like the Red Cross if it was tied to a material reward.
All three panelists noted the difficulties in conducting research, with Baczko stating that access to the conflict and parties involved is much different and difficult today than one or two years ago.