ACRPS launches four-day conference on civil wars

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Doha: The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies' (ACRPS) Strategic Studies Unit has launched its third conference on“Protracted Arab Civil Wars: Causes and Challenges”. 

The conference, which is being held remotely via the Zoom platform until September 14 will examine the protracted Arab civil wars and their causations; exceptionality; security, humanitarian and environmental ramifications; impact of both female and foreign fighters' participation; changing character of civil wars in terms of tactics and strategies; role(s) of international and regional powers; impact(s) of spoilers; and comparative non-Arab cases of ending civil wars and post-civil war management. 

The conference will also address a set of important research questions, such as: Is there any exceptionalism in Arab civil wars in terms of causes, duration, intensity, scale and scope? If yes, why? What are the strategic implications of protracted civil wars for regional and international security? How can external powers influence the trajectories of these civil wars? Can they improve governance in areas that have been afflicted by civil

wars? 
The day began with an opening intervention by ACRPS researcher and director of the Strategic Studies Unit, Omar Ashour, who provided context for the conference. Ashour referred to the multiple civil wars that the Arab world witnessed before and after the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011, while today there are at least six Arab countries still suffering from internal wars that have engendered humanitarian suffering, environmental damage, mass exodus, major internal displacement and uncontrollable refugee spill over. 

Stathis Kalyvas, expert scholar of civil wars, delivered an introductory lecture in which he offered a general theoretical framework of the topic. In his lecture,“Some Reflections on the Arab Civil Wars,” Kalyvas shed light on problems when researching“civil wars” and raised intellectual and methodological questions related to the“exceptionalism” of Arab civil wars. 

Following Kalyvas's intervention, political scientist, Tamim Al Barghouti, gave a lecture entitled,“One War, Different Battles”, in which he addressed a key question: how cultural norms and expressions of collective memory and sentiments in the Arab region can be employed in understanding outcomes of political and military conflicts. 

The first panel on“Protraction and 'exceptionality': Causations, Complications and Cases” was chaired by Abdelwahab El Affendi, Acting President of the Doha Institute. The first speaker, Sidahmed Goudjili, Assistant Professor for the Doha Institute Critical Security Studies programme, presented his paper“Literature Gaps, 'Exceptionalism' and Data Issues in Arab Civil Wars”, in which he presented a macro analysis of the Arab civil wars between 1945 and 2020, and a comparative analysis across cases and time. 

The second speaker, Hamid Eltigani Ali, Associate Professor and Dean of the School of Public Administration and Development Economics at the Doha Institute, discussed his paper“Causes of Protracted Sudanese Civil Wars.” 

Following this, ACRPS researchers Majd Abuamer and Hani Awad, addressed their paper on“What Civil War is and is Not: Lessons from the Arab World”, addressing the conceptual chaos resulted from disagreement among researchers over the definition of these wars as the concept of civil war has been used to refer to or combined with other concepts such as sectarian war, ethnic war, irregular warfare and proxy war. 

The conference will continue until September 14 with a group of researchers and experts discussing pressing questions and present academic interventions related to civil wars in the Arab region.  

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