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21. R2P Monitor, Issue 56, 15 March 2021

Author:
Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
R2P Monitor is a bimonthly bulletin applying the atrocity prevention lens to populations at risk of mass atrocities around the world. Issue 56 looks at developments in Afghanistan, Cameroon, Central Sahel, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Myanmar (Burma), Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan.
Topic:
International Law, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), Norms, Atrocities, and International Humanitarian Law (IHL)
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, China, Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Syria, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Myanmar, South Sudan, Cameroon, Sahel, and Central African Republic

22. R2P Monitor, Issue 57, 1 June 2021

Author:
Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
R2P Monitor is a quarterly bulletin applying the atrocity prevention lens to populations at risk of mass atrocities around the world. Issue 57 looks at developments in Afghanistan, Cameroon, Central Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger), China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Myanmar (Burma), Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan.
Topic:
International Law, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), Norms, Atrocities, and International Humanitarian Law (IHL)
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, China, Sudan, Israel, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine, Mozambique, Syria, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Myanmar, South Sudan, Cameroon, Sahel, and Central African Republic

23. R2P Monitor, Issue 58, 1 September 2021

Author:
Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
R2P Monitor is a quarterly bulletin applying the atrocity prevention lens to populations at risk of mass atrocities around the world. Issue 58 looks at developments in Afghanistan, Cameroon, Central Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger), China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Myanmar (Burma), Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan.
Topic:
International Law, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), Norms, Atrocities, and International Humanitarian Law (IHL)
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, China, Sudan, Israel, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine, Mozambique, Syria, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Myanmar, South Sudan, Cameroon, Sahel, and Central African Republic

24. R2P Monitor, Issue 59, 1 December 2021

Author:
Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
R2P Monitor is a quarterly bulletin applying the atrocity prevention lens to populations at risk of mass atrocities around the world. Issue 59 looks at developments in Afghanistan, Cameroon, Central Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger), China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Myanmar (Burma), Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Sudan, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Nigeria and South Sudan.
Topic:
International Law, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), Norms, Atrocities, and International Humanitarian Law (IHL)
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, China, Sudan, Israel, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine, Mozambique, Syria, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Myanmar, South Sudan, Cameroon, Sahel, and Central African Republic

25. Educating Refugees in Lebanon

Author:
Wissam Fakih
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS)
Abstract:
MAAS student Wissam Fakih explores how Lebanon’s triple crises—economic collapse, the port explosion, and the pandemic—have impacted the education of thousands of Syrian refugee children living in the country.
Topic:
Education, Children, Refugees, Crisis Management, and Economic Crisis
Political Geography:
Middle East, Lebanon, and Syria

26. Informal settlements in Syria: What approach after the conflict?

Author:
Ahmad Sukkar, Sawsan Abou Zainedin, and Hani Fakhani
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
A large proportion of Syria’s population lives in informal housing, with estimates that informal housing represented 30 to 40% of total dwellings before the 2011 uprising. Such housing was particularly prevalent in the peri-urban areas that have suffered most of the destruction and displacement during the subsequent conflict. Despite its prevalence, informal housing and the rights of its residents have not received sufficient attention in recent policy discussions around Syria’s reconstruction or with respect to protecting the rights of Syrians to housing. In recent years, the government has approved tens of regulatory master plans in different cities for ‘reconstruction’ and ‘development’. While little actual reconstruction has taken place because of the economic crisis, the economic sanctions, and the absence of international funds, these master plans have paved the way for the government to begin with deliberate mass-scale demolitions in many areas. An examination of the few approved reconstruction projects that have proceeded shows some commonalities: most of the approved master plans are targeting areas of informal urban settlement, and the few projects that have advanced on the ground have tended to be in informal urban settlements. These patterns raise many questions about the government’s intentions and plans for reconstruction and make it clear that informality needs to be a core element in the reconstruction debate. This policy research report aims at mapping and analysing the government’s approach towards informality. It starts by laying a pre-2011 historical background about the interlinks between the rise of informality in Syria and the Ba’ath government’s socialist approach towards housing provision and land management. It provides a critical reading of the trajectory of the legal framework, which underpinned the government policies on land management, arguing that informality was a natural product of the government’s chronic and systematic failure in coping with the increased needs for housing. The report then examines the evolution of the government’s post-2011 approach to informality. It maps a series of planned and ongoing reconstruction projects in several neighbourhoods across different cities in Syria while closely observing the legal foundations underpinning each case, the official narratives around them, the implementations procedures, the progress made, and the impact of these projects on the population. The research deepens this analysis through two detailed case studies: al-Qabun district in Damascus suburbs and al-Haydariyya district in east Aleppo. This selection is based on profound similarities between the two areas that were both opposition strongholds severely impacted by the military campaigns waged by the government to retake them but also the significant difference in the legal frameworks governing the reconstruction, the phase of implementation of the reconstruction project, and, most importantly, the type of land ownership, with al-Qabun existing on private land in contrast to al-Haydariyya where the authorities expropriated the land long before the conflict. Drawing on the interlinks between the different case studies and the historical contexts of the conflict, the research concludes with observational patterns about the political, economic, and technical interests and motivations that might have shaped the government’s approach to informality. It finds that the government has found in the massive informal reality of Syrian cities — which predates the conflict — a loophole through which it can advance a major politically loaded gentrification process that would reconfigure the reality of post-conflict Syria in favour of capitalist cronies at the expense of the rights of local residents. This insight has not yet gained sufficient attention in the important work conducted by Syrian and international actors attempting to tackle the consequences of the government’s urban planning system and its legislative framework that is currently paving the ground for wider reconstruction. Addressing the situation is not just a matter of acknowledging some forms of informal land-tenure in the current legal frameworks. It requires reframing our understanding of informality beyond its mere articulation as a form of illegal tenure.
Topic:
Migration, Diaspora, Settlements, and Humanitarian Crisis
Political Geography:
Middle East and Syria

27. Activism in the Context of Reconstructing Nahr al-Bared Refugee Camp: Lessons for Syria’s Reconstruction?

Author:
Ismael Sheikh Hassan
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
The reconstruction of the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in Northern Lebanon, destroyed in 2007 after fierce battles between the Lebanese army and an armed Islamist group, is sometimes suggested as a useful case study that can inform reconstruction processes in Syria. Such impressions usually emerge due to the relative success of the local activists – who hailed from a refugee camp where residents lived in informal housing with little formal legal protection – in confronting the security visions of the Lebanese State and military for the reconstruction of the camp. This paper aims to discuss the usefulness but also the limitations of the Nahr al- Bared reconstruction experience to the Syrian context.
Topic:
Political Activism, Refugee Crisis, Settlements, and Humanitarian Crisis
Political Geography:
Middle East and Syria

28. Community perceptions on violent extremism and repatriation of Kosovo Citizens' from ISIS battlegrounds

Author:
Skender Perteshi and Shpat Balaj
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Kosovar Centre for Security Studies (KCSS)
Abstract:
This report provides an overview of Kosovo citizens’ perceptions on violent extremism. The report specifically focuses on their views on the repatriation of Kosovo citizens from the battlegrounds of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, as well as the citizens’ perception on the efforts of institutions and CSOs in regard to the reintegration and rehabilitation of the returnees and their families. The report, presenting both qualitative and quantitative analyses, provides first-hand insights gathered on the ground through extensive research of KCSS. The key data that shape the qualitative aspect of the report derive from the discussions with local communities in eight municipalities of Kosovo, organized by KCSS within the project Building Resilience: Communities against Violent Extremism. On the other hand, the quantitative results derive from the Kosovo Security Barometer (KSB), a KCSS program that measures public opinion on various security issues.
Topic:
Security, Public Opinion, Violent Extremism, Islamic State, and Repatriation
Political Geography:
Iraq, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Kosovo, and Syria

29. Band-aids, not bullets: EU policies and interventions in the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars

Author:
Erwin van Veen and Nancy Ezzeddine
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Clingendael Netherlands Institute of International Relations
Abstract:
Engaging in the conflict cycle in other countries to gain outcomes favourable to one’s own interests is akin to playing in the champions league of foreign policy. Doing this effectively and responsibly requires a coherent and full-spectrum political strategy as well as the diplomatic, financial, developmental and military means to deliver it. It is clear from the scope of the security interests articulated in the European Union’s (EU) Global Strategy (2016) and its many associated foreign policy statements that the EU intends to meet these requirements. However, study of EU institutional policies and interventions in the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars highlights that it falls well short of doing so. As a result, EU institutions are not well placed to intervene effectively in high intensity conflicts with existential features such as these two civil wars. With this problem in mind, the core recommendation of the paper is to increase the effectiveness of EU interventions in high-intensity conflicts by institutionalising full-spectrum decision making, policy implementation and force deployment modalities for the EU as a whole, as well as for EU coalitions of the willing. The parallel existence of such tracks will enable the EU to act jointly in conflicts where Member States have more or less compatible foreign policy preferences with matching intensity preferences, and to act in part in conflicts where Member States have more or less compatible foreign policy preferences with a mixed distribution of intensity preferences (like Iraq or arguably Syria). EU foreign policy inaction, including institutional paralysis, will continue to occur where Member States’ foreign policy preferences are largely not compatible and have high-intensity preferences.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, European Union, Military Intervention, Conflict, and Institutions
Political Geography:
Iraq, Europe, Middle East, and Syria

30. Henchman, Rebel, Democrat, Terrorist: The YPG/PYD during the Syrian conflict

Author:
Erwin van Veen
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Clingendael Netherlands Institute of International Relations
Abstract:
This report analyses the role of the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the associated Democratic Union Party (PYD) during the Syrian civil war. The purpose of our research is to obtain a better understanding of the nature, objectives and methods of the YPG/ PYD as a combined paramilitary and rebel force that is involved in a quasi-statebuilding project during an internationalised civil war. We start by examining the critical factors that enabled the swift rise of the YPG: informal arrangements with the Assad regime, support from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and a pragmatic partnership with the US against Islamic State. This sets the scene for an inquiry into how core YPG strategies to maintain its dominance once it was established – coercive, deal-making, identity and basic service strategies – both shape the group’s behavior and result from its current organization. Finally, we dissect a number of major challenges to future YPG rule, such as its relation with the PKK, intra-Kurdish reconciliation, the US presence in northeast Syria and its interaction with the Arab populations over which it rules. Based on our analysis, we anticipate a scenario of ‘muddling through’ in which unconditional support from the US will continue at current levels, combined with an abiding US military presence. This will provide the YPG/ PYD with a security umbrella against both regime forces and Turkey, continue the status quo of the YPG/ PYD ruling northeast Syria in authoritarian fashion, make the civil war more ethno-sectarian in nature and prolong the conflict. While such a scenario is arguably more attractive for northeast Syria than a return of the regime, it is also unlikely to improve the area’s current underdevelopment. It will keep other external actors, like the EU, away and allow the PKK to continue to take its share of the area’s revenues. The primary audience of the report are Western opinion-, policy- and decision-makers engaged with the Syrian civil war and we hope it will help them to craft policies and initiate interventions that are feasible and appropriate to the situation in northeast Syria.
Topic:
Conflict, Syrian War, and YPG
Political Geography:
Middle East, Syria, United States of America, and European Union