Multipolarity and non-state actors in conflict resolution: Russia and the Syrian opposition

The Syrian civil war has raged for just under ten years. The outbreak of the war coincided with the seeming
decline of US, or western, hegemony in the Middle East, opening opportunities for alternative powers to come to
the fore. The Syrian civil war provides the most detailed and complex case of rising power, namely Russian,
intervention in one of the most internationalised and first socially mediated civil war. This project seeks to
understand Russia's role in conflict transformation in the Syrian civil war and the impact of its actions on conflict
dynamics.
Since the fall of the USSR, Russian decision-makers have, at various points instrumentalised foreign policy to
seek rapprochement with the West, diversify relations, and project power. Putin's second term as president has
ushered a nationalist and assertive foreign policy to rebuild Russia's global power status and promote global
multipolarity. Given Russia's relatively weak economic position amongst the BRICS, a diverse portfolio of policy
initiatives has been relied upon, such as the rhetorical contestation of liberal universalism and western
hegemony, and the instrumentalisation of civil conflict. Russia's military and non-military intervention in the
Syrian conflict, in which the UN peace process was sidelined by Russia's Astana and Sochi initiatives and
military intervention, have ensured Russia's indispensability in matters of international security, precluding its
international isolation after its annexation of Crimea. Moreover, Russia's criticism of previous US-led 'liberal'
peacebuilding initiatives in the Middle East and elsewhere, where ruling regimes were toppled, leading to state
failure, instability and, at times, conflict re-emergence, attempts to recast norms of peacebuilding and
intervention with sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs at their core. Thus, this project seeks to
assess whether Russia's peacebuilding initiatives challenge liberal peacebuilding norms. Additionally, this project
seeks to place the peace process in Syria within the growing works identifying typologies of peacebuilding,
conflict management, and peace.
While the research focus is on Russian intervention in the Syrian conflict, the assumption that cyclical reciprocity
between actors facilitates and constrains agency necessitates not only the analysis of domestic and external
actors' influence over conflict transformation but also of the impact of their interaction on this shift. Additionally,
Russia's role is co-constituted with other actors involved in the conflict; facilitated and restrained by reciprocal
interaction with other actors. Thus, this project takes on a constructivist ontology and rationale for investigating
the composition of the groups involved in Syrian conflict transformation, as well as the reciprocal impact of their
actions and interactions on the international and local strategic environments. This compositional analysis is
necessary to understand the rationale behind actors' interpretations of their strategic environment and their
preferences for action, as well as the effects of these elements on conflict transformation; that is the shift from
violent to non-violent conflict. To analyse the evolving coercive and diplomatic environments, which are
inextricably connected, and their impact upon the mutual perceptions of Russian and Syrian actors engaged in
peace processes, this project will amalgamate concepts of strategic culture, bounded rationality, and game
theory to assess the ways in which previous actions and interactions shape perceptions of feasible strategic
choices. This analysis seeks to gauge the extent to which Russia's international and local peacebuilding
initiatives and military intervention have induced a shift from violent to non-violent conflict and how these
reciprocal interactions have altered opportunity structures for domestic actors to engage in peacebuilding
initiatives and violent co