Conflict resolution - Admission/Application Essay Example

In an attempt to suppress the mass protests, the government forces escalated violence – besides the arrests of political activists and intellectuals on a massive scale, tanks were sent to Deraa in March 2011, followed by heavy bombardment of Baba Amr district in Homs in February 2012 (Rodgers et al.; Shadid). Seven hundred people died as a result of the bombardment; while the fighting gradually reached Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo later on that year (Rodgers et al.). Although the conflict in Syria could be regarded as a part and late consequence of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – a series of civil unrest and resistance involving mass rallies, demonstrations, marches, strikes, etc.

across the region Middle East – the long-standing Alawite-Sunni tensions, along with the conflict between Baathists and Sunni Islamist groups, appear to actually constitute (in historical terms) the contextual framework of the current situation (“Profile: Syria’s Ruling Baath Party“; “The ‘Secretive Sect’ in Charge of Syria”). The secular-religious strains, in turn, have a history of violence, namely during the late 1970s and early 1980s, whose culmination is the rebellion in Hama in 1982, with some ten to twenty five thousand casualties (“Profile: Syria’s Ruling Baath Party“).

The above-mentioned constituents of the conflict’s historical context could be also regarded as its structural causes; insofar as, according to the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response (FEWER) and International Alert and Saferworld, the structural causes of a conflict are considered those pervasive factors that have become built into the structures and fabric of a society, thus influencing certain policies and creating the preconditions for the conflict (3). The proximate causes of the Syrian conflict – factors contributing to the conflict’s further escalation – would appear the Arab spring, which