Franco Galdini

The Balkanisation of Syria: Myth or Reality?

In recent weeks, as the number of casualties in the Syrian civil war has been soaring exponentially, so have comparisons of the situation in the country with the wars that ravaged and, ultimately, resulted in the break up of the Yugoslav federation into several smaller and purportedly ethnically more homogeneous states in the 1990s – a process commonly referred to as Balkanisation. Such comparisons vary greatly in degree and are often little articulated: from drawing ...