The Crisis in Syria, International and Regional Sanctions, and the Transformation of the Political Order in the Levant

Abstract

In the early months of 2011 the Syrian regime answered demonstrations and protests, escalating from mid-March, with armed retaliation and later on with an extremely violent civil war fought by the Syrian army, secret services, and regime-loyal militias against uncoordinated groups of anti-regime fighters. This reality led a number of both international and regional state actors to impose a wide range of sanctions against Syria, with the intention of weakening the regime in Damascus or contributing to a regime change. The sanctions thus became a part of attempts at influencing political transformation processes in the Middle East region following the uprisings there. For the most significant international actors, the United States and the European Union (EU), the sanctions intended to affect the regime in a “rogue” Syrian state, which for decades had been on a collision course with the United States and which the EU had not been able to involve in its Neighborhood Policy agreements. For the regional actors, first of all the League of Arab States (Arab League) and Turkey, the sanctions became an element in the power struggle in the region.