The Levant in Turmoil ― Syria, Palestine, and the Transformation of Middle Eastern Politics

Since the early weeks of the so-called Arab Spring, high hopes for democratic, social, and political change in the Middle East have been met with varying degrees of frustration. Particularly in the subregion of the Levant, regional uprisings have turned to violent conflict in places such as Syria, Iraq, and the Gaza Strip. In Syria, popular unrest has caused one of the most brutal civil wars the region ever has witnessed and enormous human suffering, yet the international community has shown an appalling inability to act. The Syrian people have become the pawn in a complex setting of brutal regime repression, militia warfare, and the diverging interests of regional states and international great powers. Taking the war in Syria as its central point of reference, this book raises the question of whether the developments in the Levant might lead not only to processes of regime change, but also to a fundamental alteration of its entire state system.

Martin Beck is Chair of Contemporary Middle East Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. He has published extensively on Middle Eastern affairs.

Dietrich Jung is Professor and Head of Department at the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark. He has widely published on wars and conflicts in the Middle East, as well as on modern Islam.

Peter Seeberg is Associate Professor and Director of the DJUCO-project, an academic cooperation project in Amman, Jordan, since 2009 funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (www.djuco.org).