Chapter 2 provides background on the WPS Agenda and UN mediation. It first discusses the politics of the WPS Agenda in the UN by focusing on three main dynamics: how UN actors articulate what the WPS Agenda is, how the UN's mediation architecture has adopted the Agenda, and how actors within the UN resist the Agenda, both passively and actively. It then provides an overview of the UN's mediation role and how it is institutionalised. The chapter illustrates the different forms UN mediation can take by describing three processes that come up throughout the book: the Great Lakes of Africa (which deals with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict in the DR Congo), Syria, and Yemen. This chapter is especially useful for readers who may not be familiar with the WPS Agenda in the UN system and/or UN mediation.

Chapter 6 analyses narrative representations of local women, who feature throughout UN mediation texts as ‘the women’. This subject position is multifaceted and articulated differently according to different logics of UN mediation. Especially within the logic of UN mediation as a science, ‘the women’ are expected to play a legitimating, information-providing role to support the UN. This is an extractive, rather than an empowering, relationship. UN narratives position ‘the women’s’ labour as central to mediation effectiveness, but they also question their abilities and authenticity as representatives of their communities. Capacity-building training is one method that the UN, and particularly gender advisors, use to discipline women into appropriate forms of participation. The logic of UN mediation as an art has less use for 'the women' in its narratives and instead questions whether they are 'political enough' to be appropriate representatives in negotiations. In turn, local women resist and navigate the subject position of ‘the women’ through strategic essentialism, critique, or opting out.

This chapter explores whether the arguments in this book can extend to the third type of strategic displacement – depopulation – and not just forced relocation. To do so, it examines the use of displacement by pro-government forces during the civil war in Syria. This chapter analyzes quantitative and qualitative data from a range of sources, including media reports, human rights records, data on violence and displacement collected by nongovernmental organizations, and interviews with activists, journalists, combatants, and regime defectors that were conducted in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon. The findings question the common characterization of state-induced displacement in Syria as ethno-sectarian cleansing and challenge the notion that these tactics have been intended solely, or even primarily, to achieve demographic change. The regime induced displacement to separate and differentiate the loyal from the disloyal, improve the “legibility” of local communities, and extract much-needed revenues, military recruits, and symbolic benefits from the population – showing that strategies of depopulation can also exhibit the sorting logic of strategic displacement, similar to strategies of forced relocation.

The framing of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in relation to the postwar Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region grafted a political geography onto a broad range of ecological areas. Planners, drawing on climate models, classified the region in agro-ecological terms devised in reference to the tropics. Functionally, their logic shored up a focus on rainfed, or unirrigated, agriculture in semi-arid and arid lands. But their rendering of dry areas masked the geopolitical framing of international agricultural research in the postwar period. Born of the Cold War, ICARDA emerged from exercises of European imperialism, Great Power rivalries, and the improvisation of modern nation-states in Western Asia and North Africa. The chapter charts the imperial origins of international agricultural research in Syria, the Cold War on hunger, and CGIAR’s classification of arid regions, towards an account of (1) the geopolitical logic of international agricultural research and (2) dryland agricultural science as the ground for technological and political intervention in decolonized lands.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

This chapter investigates how civilians sort truth from lies in the context of the Syrian civil war. In particular, it plumbs a rich batch of semi-structured interviews conducted with Syrian refugees in Turkey that was generously shared by Schon (2020). These interviews include people’s confidence in their truth discernment ability – their ability to distinguish true vs. false information – during the war, along with detailed information on what they heard and experienced while they were in Syria. The chapter analyzes these interviews with a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analyses show that those who spent longer in Syria, witnessed a wider range of events in the war, and explicitly rely on personal experience to assess new information are much more confident in their truth discernment ability. This is supported by ample qualitative material from the interviews, which demonstrates how Syrian refugees put stock in many of these same factors and drew many of these same connections themselves when discussing informational dynamics in the war.

This chapter analyzes the history of preventive attacks against nuclear programs. It identifies when nuclear latency invites military conflict. It includes four detailed case studies: US-considered use of military force against Iran, the North Korea Nuclear Crisis, Israel’s preventive strike against Syria, and the US-considered use of force against Syria.

Part III centers on eastern Mediterranean places loosely designated as the “Holy Land” in British heritage discourse. Sites in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria were especially important within Christianity, generating new biblical historicisms in the face of geological deep time and a booming tourism industry. However, the same cultural heritage that underwrote British imperialism and articulated a mission to modernize the “East” maintained that some historically significant places should be preserved. This tension is central to the temporal forms of ruin and profanation, which I define in Part III. The desire to claim Eastern sites as the origin of Western culture conflicted with the simultaneous desire to distance current populations there as “Other.” Laying claim to the history of a place like Palmyra, an ancient Roman city in Syria still popular with Western observers, both complicated and facilitated the relationship with present life there.

The Roman conquests in the western Mediterranean saw the arrival of Roman coins, but in the east the local coinages at first remained and were manipulated.

Since the 1930s, archaeologists have excavated over 300 mosaics at Antioch and its environs. This essay explores the developments and historiography on Antioch’s mosaics as well as new methodological approaches.

This chapter recounts how the 1973 war in the Middle East became a test case for Brezhnev's vision of a condominium with the United States. The Yom Kippur War highlighted the fragility of detente and pointed to the inevitably competitive nature of the Soviet–American relationship. Although both the United States and the Soviet Union were interested in detente, competing pressures and the need to cater to diverse audiences created constraints on joint action. The Soviet Union craved American recognition but also wanted to be respected as a superpower with a wide clientele. The Kremlin's imperial overextension in the 1970s stemmed from a search for attributes of a superpower. For a time, the Soviets mistakenly believed they could achieve this hand in hand with the United States rather than in competition.

This chapter examines Lakhdar Brahimi’s agency as a mediator in Syria, while also clarifying how his strategic perceptions affected his mediation behavior. Adopting a slightly different structure than its predecessor, it consists of two sections. The first assesses the mediator’s agency in determining the main mediation policies and responses from his appointment on August 17, 2012 till his resignation on May 13, 2014. During this period, five policy responses stand out—the Eid al Adha Ceasefire, the May 7 Communiqué, responding to the use of chemical weapons, Geneva II, and the mediator’s resignation. A first-level analysis is applied to clarify the mediator’s input on each. The second section moves to explain the dynamics behind his decision-making. To do so, it focuses on the mediator’s perceptions regarding the four categories outlined in the contingency model—the identity of the mediator, the context of mediation, the parties, and the process of mediation. Such analysis helps shed light on the links between the mediator’s perceptions on these four categories and his decision-making in Syria as well as the formulation of more generalizable principles.

This chapter brings to light the main conclusions of this work, while also presenting generalizable principles for future research to expand on. This part of the book contributes to the theoretical study of mediation and aims to encourage further first-level analysis approaches to the study of mediation and mediators. Most importantly, it clarifies the actual input of Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura to the mediation efforts in Syria. It leaves readers with a detailed record of what Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura have done in their roles as mediators in Syria and presents a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that shaped their decision-making. Outside the cases of these three mediators, it introduces a method by which to forensically identify a mediator’s fingerprints on the mediation process and charts a map to guide investigations into the decision-making processes of mediators. In doing so, it hopefully serves to encourage steps toward developing institutional mechanisms to evaluate the performance of these mediators – to hold them accountable for their successes and their failures.

The Introduction outlines the main objectives of the book: to pinpoint the agency of UN mediators as decision-makers and explain the strategic-thinking behind their decision-making. To do so, it bridges the literature surrounding levels of analysis in international relations and foreign policy analysis with scholarship focused on mediation. By bridging knowledge from scholars who have focused on first-level analysis, or the role of the individual in shaping policy, this chapter finds that mediators are an opportune case-study for such a method. Ultimately, by exploring the world of the mediator, with the tools developed in foreign policy analysis, the political behavior of these individuals and the phenomena of mediation can be better explained. Given the focus on UN mediators and the Syrian conflict, the chapter ends with an institutional analysis of the margin of maneuver UN mediators have as well as a detailed discussion on why the UN’s mediation process in Syria is linked to its raison d’être.

This chapter presents an analysis on Kofi Annan’s mediation efforts in Syria and focuses on his agency when overseeing the UN’s entry into the Syrian conflict. The chapter is divided in three main sections. The first offers a concise background of the main mediation initiatives pursued during Annan’s time as mediator. Of which there were five main mediation policies and responses – the mediator’s entry into the conflict, the Six-Point Plan, the nationwide ceasefire and deployment of UNSMIS, the Geneva I process, and the mediator’s resignation. Using a first-level analysis, the second section continues to elucidate the agency of the mediator in shaping each of these mediation outcomes. Finally, the third section explores the dynamics behind the mediator’s decision-making. Specifically, it examines how the mediator’s key strategic perceptions influenced his decision-making. Drawing on the contingency model, four categories of perceptions are studied – the identity of the mediator, the context of mediation, the parties, and the process of mediation. Building off this analysis, the chapter proposes general links between each category of perceptions and specific mediation behaviors.