23 NOV 2021 · With Professor Raymond Hinnebush, University of St Andrews 17 November 2021 Syria’s conflict has metamorphised into a hybrid: a partially frozen proxy war over territory combined with a battle over sanctions and reconstruction. This lecture will explore three aspects of this contest. The lecture will look at the stalemated proxy war; the effort of the regime to use reconstruction to consolidate its power and marginalize opposition and the US effort to obstruct this. At stake is whether Syria’s sovereignty will survive and in what form or whether it’s statehood will further fail, with likely waves of spill-over to neighbours. But Syria is also a test case of the global order: whether the US can use its dominance of the world financial system to sustain its world hegemony or whether its reinvention as a “sanctions hegemon” is the last episode in the transition to a multipolar world.

18 NOV 2020 · With Dr Gerasimos Tsourapas, University of Birmingham 18 November 2020 How do states’ foreign policy goals affect their policies towards refugees? What is the impact of forced displacement on host states’ political development? Gerasimos Tsourapas draws on elite interviews conducted across Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis to examine the particularities of migration diplomacy in the Levant. He identifies how the three states sought to secure economic aid from the international community, relying on both bargains and threats, in exchange for hosting Syrian refugees within their borders. In fact, the absence of a functioning global refugee regime and the reluctance of Western countries to host refugees led to the commodification of forced migration and the emergence of a new type of state, in which forced migration constitutes an instrument of economic leverage – the refugee rentier state. In this talk, Gerasimos discusses the effects of such processes on the international politics of the Levant, as well as on the future of refugee protection across the world.