Peacemongering : Russian intervention in the Syrian conflict

Abstract

The Syrian civil war has been raging for over a decade. Russian military intervention in the conflict is the first of its kind outside of the former Soviet Union, since its collapse, offering a rare insight into peacemaking and peacebuilding processes guided by alternative peace logics to (potentially declining) hegemonic liberal powers. Towards this end, this thesis asks: (1) what has motivated Russian intervention in the Syrian conflict and what are Russian actors’ intentions with regards to this?; (2) what have been the Russian approaches to intervention in the Syrian conflict?; (3) to what extent have Russian approaches altered or reframed the belligerents’ strategic cultures towards conflict transformation and what has been the political, social, humanitarian, and economic impact of Russian interventions in Syria?; and (4) how can these approaches be typified in comparison to existing peacemaking and peacebuilding models? This thesis proposes an analytical model that combines a role theoretic ontology and epistemology with the methodological tool of strategic culture in a unit of analysis, termed the strategic matrix to identify how Russian interventions impacted the conflict’s trajectory. Through process-tracing using multi-lingual scholarly and media sources, it identifies that Russia, motivated by a revisionist, messianic, assertive, yet calculated strategic culture, assumed the roles of statist diplomat and coercive mediator in the Syrian conflict. These roles bolstered the Asad regime and eroded embryonic alternatives to it. This entrenched conflict actors’ strategic cultures, inhibiting conciliatory behaviour. While Russian military intervention coincided with a decline in direct violence, the causes of the conflict, emanating from decades of authoritarian rule, have been exacerbated. The hybrid nature of the emerging social transformation as violent conflict winds down is a product of third-party intervention that is biased, coercive, and promotes and protects the interests of the intervenor, which this thesis terms peacemongering.