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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Tanken, and this week we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm speaking today with Senisha Bukovich and Diane Burnby. They are the authors of Refining Interactability, a case study of entrapment in the Syrian Civil War in International Negotiation.
Professor Bukovich is a senior lecturer of conflict management and global policy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And Diane Burnby is the senior academic programs coordinator at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs. Senisha Diane, thank you both so much for taking some time to speak with me today.
We're happy to be here. Thank you for inviting us. Great. So to start out, you say that in your paper you are, quote, refining intractability, and quote.
And to start out, how do you think intractability is normally defined? And how does your paper refine, as you say, or challenge, or rework that definition? Intractability, as such, and itself has a series of qualities that previous scholarship has been unpacking in a very effective way. And for all conflicts that have bear that quality, so starting with protraction, continuing with polarized solutions, following on with very well-defined entrenched identities, zero of some identities, we can easily spot these types of conflicts around the globe.
Now, to better understand intractability, one is to know that intractability has both characteristics and also significant stages that define the level and the quality of intractability. One of the things that always comes to mind is that escalation in itself becomes a means to an end to advance a unilateral solution onto one's opponent, and to use that escalation not to get to the point in which the parties are going to get exhausted of the conflict, but in which the conflict becomes actually self-serving, it becomes normalized. So what I just described are several characteristics of intractability that traditionally, scholarship and policymakers, have taken into account when defining something as an intractable conflict. I don't only want to ask you guys to define words for the duration of the conflict, but I do think that listeners might have one understanding of what the word entrapment means, and so it's hoping that in this context you could explain what you mean by entrapment and what that has to do with intractability.
The entrapment, in fact, is something that we bring to the whole discussion about intractable conflicts. And the reason why we bring intrapment to the discussion is because we have seen this term being used very loosely, in a very liberal way, to define all sorts of conflicts that seem very difficult to manage. And if you go through the paper, we kind of give this observation with direct quotations in which we kind of see how policymakers with very strong tendency to define intractability, they went through all sorts of conflicts that potentially may not be so difficult to manage. They were destructive in nature, they were difficult to comprehend and to assign adequate management strategies, but in themselves they are definitely not intractable in that practical sense of the word.
So what we're contributing to the whole discussion is by introduction of this dynamic, which oftentimes gets overlooked, and that is how do people get stuck in a conflict, and we determine as entrapment, meaning parties, conflicting parties. And entrapment is something that conceptually becomes an integral part of these stages, how conflicts evolve over time, and precedes the main quality of intractability, and that is the routinization and normalization of all. So entrapment in itself is kind of a slippery slope to projection. It's this intention to justify over investing in a conflict.
It's this intention to rationalize costs, it's this acceptance of destruction is the only way to deal with a problem. It might be helpful in understanding the definition of the term to understand its historical background as being born out of the economic behavioral theory discipline. So in behavioral studies entrapment is this idea of continuing to invest in a failing course of action in order to vindicate sunk costs. And in order to bring that to life, I think it's interesting to mention a few of the yes that two authors in Jill Brockner and Jeffrey Rubin, who are part of the original conceptualization of this theory in international relations, used in introduction to a book they wrote called A Drapment in Escalade and Complex, which are sort of meant to help apply the theory to everyday life.
One of them is you have an old car whose parts you have been continually replacing. Do you keep buying cheap parts or do you invest in a new car? At what point do you make the decision to invest? Another vignette that I think might be helpful to sort of put yourself in that situation of that entrapping sensation is you've been waiting for a bus or the subway or a metro for 20 minutes, and you're late to work or an appointment and you can walk to where you're going and know that at some point the bus will come.
Do you walk or do you wait? Do you have no idea how I will take, but do you walk or do you wait? And being able to identify those things in our everyday lives, that's entrapment. And what the point of our paper was really was to look at how that sensation can be applied to the way decision makers or policymakers might feel or behave in a crisis or conflict scenario.
I was doing a lot of work, how we did that with a series of a lot. Now, it's exactly where I was going. Yes. So moving from the bus station or from your building down car to the series of war, the experience of the war was the study of in this paper, and you write in the abstract that what's largely missing is a nuanced explanation of at what point resistance turns into intractability.
And you were saying that it can be difficult in a conflict to identify that point, right? So in the case of the series of the war, but at what point was it? People are just waiting at this bus stop. Just to simplify things.
What we were actually saying in our paper is in fact that resistance to any type of compromise may be the symptom of these intractable and difficult conflicts resistant to any type of change. However, what we are also trying to highlight in using the Syrian case as an example is to say that just a mere resistance to compromise, just a mere resistance to any type of negotiation in itself is not enough to think about conflicts as intractable or even that they're in the entrapment phase. Entrapment has that type of tension that parties are not considering compromise as a viable option. So I'm not going to walk because I will continue doing what I've been doing so far.
I will just wait for the bus. I will not buy a new car. I will continue doing what I've been doing. And that is buying cheap parts and just kind of patching up things while they're still holding.
So the idea is to continue on your original strategy, even though you have objective indicators that things are not going the way you plan. And we use the case of Syria just to say that Syria, even though it has been described by policymakers, by academics, by media, is an intractable conflict that cannot be resolved. And it's so difficult because of the sheer amount of destruction and the sheer amount of tensions that arose over the past nine years. We are saying, well, things are not so difficult because it did not get the conflict did not go through all of the necessary phases that will make it eventually intractable.
It's still not too late to reverse the trends. And this is basically where we get to answer the original question. That is what needs to be done in order to reverse the trend that leads conflict, such as the Syrian one interactability. There's a few, as a case study, there's a few reasons why the Syrian civil war lends itself well to understanding and illustrating entrapment as a theory.
First, it just very clearly exemplifies a lot of the characteristics that we've identified in entraping scenarios. There are subjects that engage in some sort of goal-oriented behavior. There are successful and initial attempts to attain that goal. They experience conflict about the prudence of escalating their commitment to maybe their objective is farther away than they expected, or their investments are not as powerful as they anticipated.
They have a choice about whether or just their commitment. The probability of goal attainment is uncertain to them. And in the Syrian civil war, then the players that we're looking at predominantly are United States and Russia. And we're looking at this relationship solely in the paradigm of the civil war and not necessarily involve any sort of counter-tire or counter-ISIS campaign.
But just looking at that dynamic, we see the phases of entrapment come to life over the first nine years of the conflict. There's this initial phase of reward pursuit where each party identifies an objective for Russia and Iran that is supporting the Assad regime and keeping us on power. For the United States, the Obama administration, that is literally announcing for the sake of the Syrian people the time has come for President Assad to stay outside, which was an announcement released in August of 2011. But then there's a phase of cost justification where we see each party continue to escalate and entrench themselves in their initial positions over time.
And in all the trapping scenarios, that's really characterized by this decision-making process that's bent on proving a political but sense to that previous investment or initial reputational investment in the conflict by choosing and backing a side. And it's a very escalatory phase by nature. In the Syrian civil war, this began with the US making a lot of reputational and diplomatic investments and backing the rebel forces. They levied sanctions against the Assad regime.
They joined a coalition of 100 countries that recognized the National Councilless. This body of different militia groups that beat them legitimacy. The Secretary Clinton began negotiations in the UN-led Geneva process, organizing language that she believed would recognize a transitional government that would remove Assad from power. On the other side, you have Iran and Russia continuing to escalate their involvement in the conflict.
Iran extended a $3.6 billion line of credit to the Assad regime between 2012 and 2013 Assad used chemical weapons, notably Russia blocked arms boycotts in the UN Security Council. So there was a lot of escalation in this preliminary phase of the war where you had these outside sponsors backing their proxies on the ground. And those escalations were very significant. What is interesting though is that during that period of time, we had a negotiation process to look at that served as evidence of how entrenched each party was in their position.
And so how confident they felt that they would achieve their goal. And I'm particularly talking about the Geneva process, Geneva 1 and 2, and the Geneva communicate that was born out of the first days of the Geneva process, where the US and Russia starkly disagreed over the interpretation of language about whether or not the Assad regime would be part of a transitional government. And you had the United States refusing to accept that he would, and you had Russia refusing to accept that he wouldn't. And there was a very, we call this the zone of possible agreement.
There was no zone of possible agreement around how this language could be interpreted during that point in time. But a series of incidents happened that really changed the balance in the conflict. And this brings us to a phase of turning points that in entrapment we identify as this punishment and loss minimization phase, where a more entrapped party will begin to recede from the conflict because they realize the failing trajectory of their own conflict. And that's that in this case would be the United States realizing that there was no longer, it was no longer worth their investments to continue to stay so engaged in the war, whereas you had another party that felt like it was closer to his objective, and was willing to invest more, more willing to continue to increase and make those investments.
So you have completely changing the balance of power in the region. He invaded Crimea. He ended weapons negotiations with the United States. He increased troops in Syria on the ground to 2000 people.
Whereas the United States and its allies were in a very different position, feeling like they didn't want to continue to invest in this conflict for a variety of other reasons. They didn't want to exacerbate the migration crisis in Europe. They felt like they wanted to do a couple that they're involved in the series of the war from the final stages of the GCPOA negotiation. And of course they felt like they had to redirect their efforts from removing a sovereign power to countering ISIS, which was a new threat born out of the preliminary phases of the war.
So we reached this new asymmetric part of the conflict where there's one party willing to invest more than the other. And again, parallel to this, we have a new set of peace efforts that again allow us to measure how confident states are in their ability to achieve their original objective. And by this point in the war, we have the tail end of the Geneva process and the Astana process, which was completely under the offices of Russia and Iran. It was convened under the offices of Russia and Iran.
And it was the first negotiation process that had the political objective of creating a new government with Assad in place, which shows this massive shift in what states parties were willing to accept from a negotiation process with two parties that were unwilling to allow it overlap and their zone of possible agreement to a negotiation process that fell squarely within the interests of the parties convening it, Russia and Iran, that did not include the other main party to the conflict, the United States, and that only recognized an outcome with their primary objective of keeping Assad placed. So you've been talking about how resistance can lead to interactability or to borrow your parlance from the paper itself. Entrapment is a phase that, or it's a phase on the way to potential attractability, but it is not itself necessarily the same thing as interactability. So a final question for you is how, and you were sort of just speaking about this, but just to put a finer point on it, what is the way back from interactability?
So is it as simple as one side realizes the other side cares more, right? Is it saying, you know what, I can't continue to spend money on this? Is it what stopped the Syrian conflict from your analysis becoming intractable? I guess is the question.
Is that replicable in other cases of entrapment? So there are two ways to think about this. One is, exactly as you just described, and that is just to consider that your investment, aggressive investment into the conflict into your unilateral solutions, seems not to be yielding expected results. And you know, this realization may prompt you to start reconsidering your priorities, and to kind of, instead of focusing on the prospective gains, to start focusing on the actual costs that you are experiencing in the real time.
Now, what is very important to understand using exactly Syrian cases and illustration is that the reason why this entire phase of getting stuff, getting entrapped in the conflict, is a useful indicator of this burden that the stage of entrapment carries with itself that may lead the party's interactability gets complemented by another element that we deem a necessary condition for the work, intractable conflicts. And that is the normalization of conflict. So for some parties, the realization, like the United States, the realization that they have been betting on the wrong force, or they have been doing something that is not generating a desired outcome, made it easy for the decision makers to start reconsidering if this is the right course of actions to be taken. And to get out of the conflict as quickly as possible.
Others, on the other hand, started realizing, well, we might not be getting what we wanted in absolute terms, but we're still on the positive path because all of these investments are leading us hopefully eventually into the conflict. We're talking about Russia now. This diverging path between Russia and the United States gets them to another critical juncture, a critical point where they have to start realizing whether or not it is beneficial to them to stay in this situation. And we're calling this the stage of institutionalization of conflict.
This is the condition that we deem necessary for a conflict to become intractable, so that really the projection can take full motion. What do we mean by it? It is the creation of underlying structures, support mechanisms, institutions, legal frameworks that consolidate the conflict making a way of life, making it a normal daily routine in which participating in the conflict is completely rational. It's something that we do with something who we are.
It can be both seen on the local level, so within the community and on the decision making level in which conflict is the backdrop against all, against which all decisions are being made. So conflict is just a way of life as we said. Now, Syria is still not in that phase, and this is what we're pointing out in the paper, because it still has not reached that point of institutionalization of the conflict in which there is, in order to get out of the conflict, you need to deinstitutionalize it. You need to create entirely new institutions and systems and structures to get out of it.
We're talking about conflicts that may resemble, for instance, Kashmir, the conflict in Kashmir or the conflict in Cyprus or the conflict in Northern Ireland, the conflict in Bosnia to a certain degree. So we're talking about conflicts that have become entrenched because of the superseding institutional frameworks that have routinized conflict dynamics, narratives, perspectives, perceptions, priorities and preferences by the parties. So you see, Syria from our analysis is still not there yet, and it opens up the possibilities for the parties if they can understand the consequences to reverse their investments and not get stuck in a very protracted and difficult conflict to deinstitutionalize. I've been speaking with Sneisha Bupudich and Diane Burnby.
They are the authors of the really quite excellent paper, Refining Interactivity, a case study of entrapment in Syrian Civil War, which you can find and I encourage you to, combined in the publication, International Engotiation. Sneisha and Diane, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and knowledge and insight today. Thank you, Emily. It was our pleasure.
Thank you very much.