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Barakat, Sultan; Siri Aas Rustad; Mona Hedaya; & Sansom Milton (2021)
Conflict Trends in the Arab World, 1946–2019Doha & Oslo: Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies (CHS) & the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).
Report - External Series
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Blog Posts
The earthquake in Turkey and Syria on 6 February is tragic beyond what we are able to fathom. The World Health Organization’s Europe branch has labelled the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and a secondary 7.6 magnitude aftershock as the region’s “worst natural disaster” in 100 years. By 17 February, there have ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Wednesday, 30 November 2022
The 2022 World Cup has been dominating global news, and no one is missing the Russian team among the 32 participating nations, unlike, for instance, Italy or Egypt. Neither has Moscow said anything regarding the controversies surrounding this paramount sporting event in Qatar (Novayagazeta,eu, November 25). This absence from a ... Read more »
Posted by Carsten Wieland on Wednesday, 4 May 2022
One of the tragic side-effects of the war in Ukraine is that at long last – and unfortunately only now – the last person in the West may have come to understand what really happened in Syria, especially after Russian intervention. This does not help those Syrians who have been ... Read more »
The predictable and yet shockingly brutal Russian invasion into Ukraine on 24 February 2022 has in the course of three weeks sent many tremors across the world system. Major stock markets experience strong corrections, oil prices register new highs, importers of wheat and sunflower oil are nervously checking their stocks, ... Read more »
Posted by Pinar Tank on Thursday, 3 March 2022
It’s not difficult to imagine Turkey’s President Erdogan watching Putin’s failures in Ukraine with a solid dose of schadenfreude. Putin has been the kingmaker in Syria since 2015 and Erdogan, not one for compromise, has had to negotiate with Putin to secure Turkey’s interests. The most critical of these has ... Read more »
Posted by Kristian Berg Harpviken & Bjørn Schirmer-Nilsen on Friday, 6 August 2021
The plight of Syrian refugees is worsening day by day. They face increasing pressure in all of the primary host countries. The route to a safe haven in Europe is closed. Returning to a Syria in ruins, where the conflict remains unresolved, is seen by most refugees as far too ... Read more »
Our research looks at 10 years of truces in Syria. A missile attack last weekend in northern Syria left a hospital in ruins and further casualties in a residential area. But these types of attacks have become less common in Syria. Although this civil war remains among the most devastating ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Thursday, 3 June 2021
The UN Security Council is due to make a decision on a particular and particularly controversial issue pertaining to the humanitarian disaster in Syria by July 10, and Russia positions itself as the key part of the problem and a necessary contributor to a solution. The discord in the UN ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik, Larissa Fast, Adèle Garnier, Katja Lindskov Jacobsen & Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert on Sunday, 11 October 2020
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the World Food Program for its “efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and ... Read more »
Posted by Carmen Geha on Sunday, 3 November 2019
Lebanon’s protests have brought the country to a pivotal moment. It’s now paramount we act carefully and with the lessons from the past in mind. This piece originally appeared online in The New Arab. In the week since then the situation has continued to rapidly evolve. We will publish a new ... Read more »
Posted by Zenonas Tziarras & Ioannis-Sotirios Ioannou on Monday, 21 October 2019
On 9 October 2019, Turkey launched its third invasion in Syria dubbed “Operation Peace Spring”, this time in north-eastern Syria. The previous two operations, “Euphrates Shield” and “Olive Branch” took place in north-western Syria (west of river Euphrates) and established a Turkey-controlled zone between the cities of Jarablus to the ... Read more »
Are there any similarities between the bloody war in Game of Thrones (GoT) and modern conflicts? The battle fields are certainly quite different, and dragons have very little to do with today’s conflicts (although they may allude to weapons of mass destruction). However, if we look beyond the fighting and ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Monday, 24 September 2018
The destruction of an Il-20M radio-electronic surveillance aircraft with 15 crew members in the late evening of September 17 was not the worst tragedy in the records of the three years long Russian military intervention in Syria but it is perhaps the most difficult one to explain away. It was ... Read more »
In the war in Syria, the two globally most militarily active superpowers – Russia and the United States – have soldiers actively deployed on opposite sides on the same battlefield. This is the first time this has happened since the end of World War II, and it is a dangerous ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Friday, 2 March 2018
The annual presidential address to the parliament is usually a rather dull affair in Russia, but President Putin has certainly managed to make an impression with the speech delivered on March 1, 2018. He elaborated at great length about Russia’s military might, but before describing new weapon systems (some of ... Read more »
Posted by Pinar Tank on Friday, 23 February 2018
Turkey’s military incursion into Kurdish-controlled northern Syria risks straining diplomatic ties and exposing Turkey to increased terror threats. The Turkish offensive on Afrin that began on January 20 had long been anticipated. But while the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) may hope this campaign can drum up anti-Kurdish nationalism ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Tuesday, 23 January 2018
The civil war in Syria will soon enter into the seventh year, with around 400,000 people dead and over 12 million displaced. Although the so-called Islamic State has been militarily defeated in Raqqa, no one party is in control of the country—and there is hardly much hope that the tragedy ... Read more »
Most of the world’s attention has recently been directed towards Syria. In the shadow of Syria, the conflict in Yemen has been left to its own devices, and Yemen is now set to experience an even greater humanitarian catastrophe than Syria. In Syria, we witness the beginning of the end ... Read more »
Posted by Marte Heian-Engdal on Friday, 20 January 2017
In the north-eastern corner of Jordan, thousands of Syrians are left stranded. In the north-eastern corner of Jordan, where the country borders both Iraq and Syria, a barrier resembling a mound of earth extends across the desert. Running parallel to this barrier is a second mound of earth, this time ... Read more »
Posted by Marte Heian-Engdal on Wednesday, 21 December 2016
“I’ll be the first Palestinian woman to land on the moon,” she states with a wry smile. The world – and space – lies at her feet, as in theory it does for children all over the world. But these particular legs are standing on shaky ground. Her legs are ... Read more »
Posted by Marte Heian-Engdal on Friday, 4 November 2016
Hillary Clinton is not seeking attention for her views on Syria. And she has her reasons for not doing so. One area that has been more or less devoid of attention is foreign policy We can safely say that the 2016 US election campaign has been one of a kind. ... Read more »
Posted by Marte Heian-Engdal & Martin Tegnander on Tuesday, 4 October 2016
In the long dark night that is the Syrian nightmare, the White Helmets have become the only ray of light. In an earlier PRIO blog post, Erica Chenoweth observed that “there are really two types of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates – elites (or elite-led institutions) and ordinary people.” This year, ... Read more »
Posted by Marte Heian-Engdal on Friday, 30 September 2016
At dawn on 23 September, Syrian and Russian fighter jets roared over eastern Aleppo, bringing new death and destruction to the city’s besieged inhabitants. The attacks followed several days of relative quiet, but the ensuing days and nights were worse than ever. The chaos makes it difficult to determine exactly ... Read more »
Posted by Åshild Kolås & Katrine Fangen on Wednesday, 22 June 2016
Foreign fighters returning from Syria have emerged as a looming security threat in many European countries, so also in Norway. As well as preventive measures against radicalization and mobilization by the Islamic State, there have been calls for the withdrawal of citizenship and deportation of returned foreign fighters. This raises a number of questions: Are Norwegians more secure ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Thursday, 25 February 2016
Just a couple of weeks ago, Aleppo was seen as a crucial battlefield in the Syrian civil war and was compared with Sarajevo as a tragedy of intolerable proportions not only by hard-hitting journalists but also by such responsible politicians as Michael Fallon, UK Defence Secretary. Yet presently, this devastated ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Friday, 8 January 2016
At a time when most Russians were taking a long break from politics until after the Orthodox Christmas on January 7, there has been no respite in Russia’s air operations in Syria, nor in the quarrel with Turkey. Rather than focus on the bread-and-butter issues of making ends meet, Russian ... Read more »
Posted by Jessica Stanton, Ragnhild Nordås & Dara Kay Cohen on Thursday, 7 January 2016
Refugees are fleeing Syria in such astonishing numbers because armed groups continue to target civilians with violence. That’s what we heard in September when the U.N. Human Rights Council discussed the most recent report of the Commission of Inquiry on Syria. The commission’s chair, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, made a plea ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Thursday, 5 November 2015
The Russian military intervention in Syria—launched in a great rush just over a month ago — came as a surprise; perhaps not as shocking as the swift occupation and annexation of Crimea, but a surprise nevertheless. But does Russia’s ability to surprise and to project force in Syria prove, as ... Read more »
Posted by Anita Gohdes on Monday, 26 October 2015
Social Media has rightly been celebrated as an empowering tool for ordinary citizens to mobilize against repressive rulers, and make marginalized voices heard. But a crucial question remains unanswered: why should power-hungry states, with de facto control over access to the Internet, impassively concede to defeat? The simple answer is: they ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Saturday, 10 October 2015
For observers who are confined by the boundaries of conventional strategic sense, every day of Russia’s military intervention in Syria brings fresh surprises. Indiscriminate strikes against Turkey-backed and CIA-trained opposition groups (which could not possibly be mistaken for ISIS) were followed by deliberate violations of Turkey’s airspace, and then by ... Read more »
Posted by Pavel Baev on Monday, 21 September 2015
Russia’s apparent escalation in Syria is less dramatic than it seems, but it still represents another depressing development in the ongoing nightmare of the Syrian civil war. While it appears no Russian troops are engaged in fighting, the volume of military cargo delivered from Russia to Syria by sea and ... Read more »
Posted by Kristoffer Lidén on Friday, 10 April 2015
The tragedy in Syria bears witness to the deep crisis afflicting the international commitment to the “protection of civilians”. But there is a way out. Against the background of a politically divided Security Council, there is a need for a new international strategy to protect civilians caught up in armed ... Read more »
Posted by Halvard Buhaug on Tuesday, 10 March 2015
Does climate change constitute a threat to peace and security? Many agree that it does. The US administration’s new National Security Strategy, launched last month, portrays climate change as ‘an urgent and growing threat.’ And this week, a new study appears to add scientific credibility to this concern, suggesting human-caused ... Read more »
Posted by Kristoffer Lidén on Monday, 8 December 2014
It was not until the advances of IS in Syria and Iraq turned into an international security threat that a military intervention was launched in September 2014. A horrendous civil war had then killed tens of thousands Syrian civilians and displaced millions without provoking any similar reaction. In this blog ... Read more »
Posted by Nic Marsh on Tuesday, 18 November 2014
Last week a video surfaced on YouTube which showed children being fired upon in a battleground in Syria. It shows a boy rescuing a girl from what looks like certain death. Dubbed the ‘hero boy’ video it was rapidly shared on social media and by the end of the week ... Read more »
Posted by Kristian Skrede Gleditsch & Idean Salehyan on Tuesday, 11 February 2014
The Syrian refugee crisis has been heartbreaking to watch. According to the United Nations, over 2.4 million people have fled the country, and many more have been displaced internally. This human tragedy has shocked the world’s conscience and has led for appeals for humanitarian relief. However, does the influx of ... Read more »