Syria Betrayed

Syria Betrayed

Author: Alex J. Bellamy

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-09-06

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0231550081

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The suffering of Syrian civilians, caught between the government’s barrel bombs and chemical weapons and religious fanatics’ beheadings and mass killings, shocked the world. Yet despite international law and political commitments proclaiming a responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities, world actors stood aside as Syria burned. Again and again, neighboring states, global powers, and the United Nations opted for half-measures or made counterproductive choices that caused even more harm. Alex J. Bellamy provides a forensic account of the world’s failure to protect Syrian civilians from mass atrocities. Drawing on interviews with key players, documents from the United Nations and other international organizations, and sources from the Middle East and beyond, he traces the missteps of the international response to Syria’s civil war. Bellamy systematically examines the various peace processes and the reasons they failed, highlighting potential alternative paths. He details how and why key actors prioritized their own national interest, geopolitical standing, regional stability, local rivalries, counterterrorism goals, or domestic politics rather than the welfare of Syrians. Some governments settled on unrealistic strategies founded on misguided assumptions while others pursued naked ambition; the United Nations descended into irrelevance and even complicity. Shedding new light on the decisions that led to a vast calamity, Syria Betrayed also draws out lessons for more effective responses to future civil conflicts.


The Precarious Lives of Syrians

The Precarious Lives of Syrians

Author: Feyzi Baban

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2021-09-15

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0228009189

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Turkey now hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world, more than 3.6 million of the 12.7 million displaced by the Syrian Civil War. Many of them are subject to an unpredictable temporary protection, forcing them to live under vulnerable and insecure conditions. The Precarious Lives of Syrians examines the three dimensions of the architecture of precarity: Syrian migrants' legal status, the spaces in which they live and work, and their movements within and outside Turkey. The difficulties they face include restricted access to education and healthcare, struggles to secure employment, language barriers, identity-based discrimination, and unlawful deportations. Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan, and Kim Rygiel show that Syrians confront their precarious conditions by engaging in cultural production and community-building activities, and by undertaking perilous journeys to Europe, allowing them to claim spaces and citizenship while asserting their rights to belong, to stay, and to escape. The authors draw on migration policies, legal and scholarly materials, and five years of extensive field research with local, national, and international humanitarian organizations, and with Syrians from all walks of life. The Precarious Lives of Syrians offers a thoughtful and compelling analysis of migration precarity in our contemporary context.


The Geography of Serbia

The Geography of Serbia

Author: Emilija Manić

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-24

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 3030747018

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This is a comprehensive regional geography synthesis of the most important physical and human spatial processes that shaped Serbia and led to many interesting regional issues, not only to Serbia but to the Balkans and Europe. The book provides an overall view on the Serbian physical environment, its population and economy. It also highlights important regional issues such as regional disparities and depopulation, sustainable development and ecological issues and rural economy in the context of rural area development, which have been shaped by different political and historical processes. This highly illustrated book provides interesting and informative insights into Serbia and its context within the Balkans and Europe. It appeals to scientists and students as well as travelers and general readers interested in this region.


The Syrian Refugee Crisis

The Syrian Refugee Crisis

Author: Danilo Mandić

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-10-21

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1000755444

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The Syrian war, the 21st century’s most protracted and second-deadliest conflict, has driven 5.6 million refugees and 6.6 million internally displaced into flight. As the civil war draws to a close, an autopsy of this historic and unprecedented refugee episode becomes feasible. Why did the war generate so many refugees? How did so many of them get to Europe? Who are these people, and why did they leave? From whom were they fleeing and why? Did European policymakers alleviate or aggravate the refugee crisis? The Syrian Refugee Crisis argues that Syrian forced migration has been deeply misunderstood. Against conventional wisdom, it suggests that refugees engaged smugglers not just as traffickers or criminal exploiters but as natural allies and means to affirm asylum rights; that the politicization of refugees according to major actors’ foreign policy priorities obfuscated the role of US and European foreign policy in generating massive displacement; and that restrictionist border policies on the Balkan Route were inhumane, incoherent, and counter-productive. Relying on extensive, rare fieldwork data from five countries comprising the Balkan Route (Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Serbia, and Germany), this book sheds light on the understudied, counter-intuitive, and often-misunderstood dynamics of forced migration, refugee agency, border restrictionism, anti-smuggling policy, and migrant decision-making in the 21st century.


Palestinians in Syria

Palestinians in Syria

Author: Anaheed Al-Hardan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0231541228

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One hundred thousand Palestinians fled to Syria after being expelled from Palestine upon the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Integrating into Syrian society over time, their experience stands in stark contrast to the plight of Palestinian refugees in other Arab countries, leading to different ways through which to understand the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, in their popular memory. Conducting interviews with first-, second-, and third-generation members of Syria's Palestinian community, Anaheed Al-Hardan follows the evolution of the Nakba—the central signifier of the Palestinian refugee past and present—in Arab intellectual discourses, Syria's Palestinian politics, and the community's memorialization. Al-Hardan's sophisticated research sheds light on the enduring relevance of the Nakba among the communities it helped create, while challenging the nationalist and patriotic idea that memories of the Nakba are static and universally shared among Palestinians. Her study also critically tracks the Nakba's changing meaning in light of Syria's twenty-first-century civil war.


Extremism and Violent Extremism in Serbia

Extremism and Violent Extremism in Serbia

Author: Valery Perry

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 3838212606

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The topics of extremism, violent extremism, and radicalization leading to terrorism have constituted an increasingly prominent area of policy interest and donor support in recent years, globally and in the western Balkans. Counterterrorism initiatives, as well as efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism (P/CVE), often reveal the need for broader reform, peacebuilding, and democratization strategies. While foreign donors and domestic authorities tend to focus on ISIS-inspired violent jihadism, in many countries in the region, and particularly in the case of Serbia, there are other forms of extremism—namely far-right nationalism, violent hooliganism, and neo-Nazi movements—that are often considered to be more of an imminent threat, particularly as they are often viewed as examples of “normalized” political expression. The dynamics of reciprocal radicalization, in which competing extremisms feed off of, reinforce, and even need one another, can create seemingly intractable conflict spirals of escalation and violence. This volume explores these dynamics in Serbia through original research, taking fresh perspectives that demonstrate that Serbia is vulnerable to many types of extremism, which can best be prevented by achieving the liberal, democratic, rights-based reforms that have remained elusive for more than two decades. This broad and holistic approach is important for Serbia and its neighbors as the security lens through which most research has been focused to date has done little to explain the deep and structural dynamics of radicalization and extremism in the region.


Strangers Either Way

Strangers Either Way

Author: Jasna Čapo Zmegač

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2007-08-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0857453181

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Croatia gained the world's attention during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In this context its image has been overshadowed by visions of ethnic conflict and cleansing, war crimes, virulent nationalism, and occasionally even emergent regionalism. Instead of the norm, this book offers a diverse insight into Croatia in the 1990s by dealing with one of the consequences of the war: the more or less forcible migration of Croats from Serbia and their settlement in Croatia, their "ethnic homeland." This important study shows that at a time in which Croatia was perceived as a homogenized nation-in-the-making, there were tensions and ruptures within Croatian society caused by newly arrived refugees and displaced persons from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Refugees who, in spite of their common ethnicity with the homeland population, were treated as foreigners; indeed, as unwanted aliens.


The Mobility of Displaced Syrians

The Mobility of Displaced Syrians

Author: World Bank

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2020-01-27

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1464814023

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The war in Syria, now in its eighth year, continues to take its toll on the Syrian people. More than half of the population of Syria remains displaced; 5.6 million persons are registered as refugees outside of the country and another 6.2 million are displaced within Syria's borders. The internally displaced persons include 2 million school-age children; of these, less than half attend school. Another 739,000 Syrian children are out of school in the five neighborhood countries that host Syria's refugees. The loss of human capital is staggering, and it will create permanent hardships for generations of Syrians going forward. Despite the tragic prospects for renewed fighting in certain parts of the country, an overall reduction in armed conflict is possible going forward. However, international experience shows that the absence of fighting is rarely a singular trigger for the return of displaced people. Numerous other factors—including improved security and socioeconomic conditions in origin states, access to property and assets, the availability of key services, and restitution in home areas—play important roles in shaping the scale and composition of the returns. Overall, refugees have their own calculus of return that considers all of these factors and assesses available options. The Mobility of Displaced Syrians: An Economic and Social Analysis sheds light on the 'mobility calculus' of Syrian refugees. While dismissing any policies that imply wrongful practices involving forced repatriation, the study analyzes factors that may be considered by refugees in their own decisions to relocate. It provides a conceptual framework, supported by data and analysis, to facilitate an impartial conversation about refugees and their mobility choices. It also explores the diversified policy toolkit that the international community has available—and the most effective ways in which the toolkit can be adapted—to maximize the well-being of refugees, host countries, and the people in Syria.


The Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria

The Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria

Author: Yasmine Nahlawi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-14

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 0429865708

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This book offers a novel and contemporary examination of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine from an international legal perspective and analyses how the doctrine was applied within the Libyan and Syrian conflicts as two recent and highly significant R2P cases. The book dissects each of R2P’s three component pillars to examine their international legal underpinnings, drawing upon diverse legal frameworks – including the laws of the UN, laws of international organisations, human rights law, humanitarian law, criminal law, environmental law, and laws of State responsibility – to extract conclusions regarding existing and emerging host and third-State obligations to prevent and react to mass atrocity crimes. It uses this legal grounding to critically examine specific aspects of the Libyan and Syrian R2P cases, engaging with some of the more traditional debates surrounding R2P’s application, most notably those that pertain to the use of force (or lack thereof), but also exploring some of the less-researched non-military methods that were or could have been employed by States and international organisations to uphold the doctrine. Such an analysis captures the diversity in the means and actors through which R2P can be implemented and allows for the extraction of more nuanced conclusions regarding the doctrine’s strengths and limitations, gaps in enforceability, levels of State support, and future trajectory. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of international law and human rights law.


Political and Military Sociology

Political and Military Sociology

Author: Karthika Sasikumar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 0429871627

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This special edition of Political and Military Sociology: An Annual Review encompasses a full range of coverage on the European refugee crisis. Contributions include a focus on the characteristics and motivations of modern-day migrants, an analysis of the inconsistent standards displayed by the European Union, and the militarization happening across parts of Europe in response. The volume leads with a discussion on the identity of the refugees: who are they and what are their reasons for leaving their homelands? Following chapters cover the response across Europe in countries including Serbia, Greece, Turkey, and Italy. The penultimate chapter examines the European Union’s inadequate response to the unfolding crisis, and the book concludes with a central analysis of the agreements between the EU and transit countries with remarks on the unintended consequences that have emerged.