{"id":24722,"date":"2017-04-03T17:47:18","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T21:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/?p=24722"},"modified":"2017-04-03T17:57:49","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T21:57:49","slug":"24722-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/24722-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Century Foundation Roundtable on Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"
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by Aron Lund<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"A lot of Syria writing<\/strong> tends to be focused on current events, veering toward the very small, the very recent, and the very local. We’re all breathlessly racing to keep up with the latest developments in a stunningly complicated conflict, and only rarely do journalists and researchers get a chance to step back and look at the bigger picture.<\/p>\n

Instead, we find ourselves debating questions we won’t even remember a week later. Did that rebel group just split from this rebel group or was it the other way around? Did the army retake three cow sheds in rural Hama today, or four? It’s hard to put the daily minutiae in context if you do not step back to look at the longer-term trends every now and then.<\/p>\n

Just over a year ago, I wrote an unpardonably long Syria Comment<\/a> post on the ten most important developments in 2015 and what I felt was important to watch for in 2016. Whether that particular text was any good is not for me to judge<\/a>, but what struck me was the number of people who told me they’d been looking for that type of long-form, big-picture analysis. They included several diplomats and others who work on Syria for a living in positions of some influence, but who, apparently, do not have time to discuss anything that didn’t happen yesterday. So I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s actually a real need for that stuff.<\/p>\n

The esteemed readers of <\/strong>Syria Comment may therefore be interested to know that The Century Foundation just released a long four-author roundtable on the evolution of the conflict, with contributions from Thanassis Cambanis, Sam Heller, Michael Wahid Hanna, and myself. It’s basically a long series of shorter texts or comments, where we all respond to each other as we go, with Mr. Cambanis gently shepherding the rest of us toward intelligible conclusions. In the process of doing that, we seek to expand on what seems like relevant or interesting subtopics, collectively fleshing-out our sometimes-diverging views on the conflict. We did the same thing last summer, about what we felt was important back then, so this is a kind of second chapter, but it can certainly be read on its own.\u00a0 You can access both texts here:<\/p>\n