Syria - A Decade of Lost Chances

by Carsten Wieland

Overview

When Arab Spring swept the region, Syria’s President Bashar al-Asad thought that he was safe. Over the previous five years, the moderate opposition had been crushed. Unlike Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, Syria had taken an anti-US stance since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Syrians were used to living under sanctions and being called “terrorists.” Asad told Brad and Angelina that he did not need personal security, because ordinary Syrians were protecting him. The Syrian president was convinced that Syrians loved him.

And not only Syrians. Vogue agreed in its March 2011 puff piece that described Asad's wife as a "rose in the desert." What of Syrian naysayers? Asad counted on his ruthless and all-seeing mukhabarat to keep them in line.

Tackling politics, society, religion, and economy, Syria - A Decade of Lost Chances explores the eleven years of Asad’s rule between the clampdown on Damascus Spring in 2001 and the challenge of escalating street protests in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012.

Author Carsten Wieland interviewed the major opposition figures year by year over this decade. A valuable complement to the growing body of indigenous reporting (youtube videos, blog commentary), Syria - A Decade of Lost Chances provides context and expert insight that reveals the essential struggle unfolding here between the Mediterranean and the TigrisRiver.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014968737
Publisher:	Cune Press, LLC
Publication date:	07/19/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	130
File size:	599 KB

About the Author

Carsten Wieland (Ph.D.) is a diplomat with the German Foreign Office. Before he entered the Ministry he worked as a political consultant, analyst, author and journalist. He spent several years in the Middle East. Being a Syria expert for more than a decade, he published numerous articles and books on the Levant. Wieland also worked at the Goethe Institute in Cairo and Munich.

From 2006 to 2008 Wieland was the country representative of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Colombia where he is still guest professor for International Relations at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá and guest professor for Political Science at Santiago University in Cali. Wieland was international election observer on invitation of the Colombian Government and leader of a consultancy group for the Government and the Congress of Colombia. He also did consultancy for the German Foreign Office, the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US Institute of Peace and Freedom House...

Previous research and media missions had led him to conflict areas such as Bosnia, India/Pakistan and Colombia. For the German Press Agency (DPA) Wieland worked as a correspondent in Washington, Tel Aviv, Colombia, and later as DPA head of corporate communications and public affairs in Berlin. For some time Wieland joined the Institute for Organizational Communication (IFOK) in Berlin and Washington D.C. In 1994, he had worked as a freelance journalist in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.

Wieland is Advisory Board Member of the Syrian Center for Political & Strategic Studies (SCPSS), Damascus, member of the editorial board of Jahrbuch für Verfassung, Recht und Staat im islamischen Kontext, Berlin, and member of the editorial board of Papel Político, Javeriana University, Bogotá.

Wieland studied history, political science and philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin, Duke University in North Carolina, and at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was later a fellow at the Public Policy Department at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Wieland wrote his dissertation at Humboldt University about a comparison of ethnic conflict and Muslim nation-building in Bosnia and India/Pakistan.