Policy and Complex Systems
involving all the countries ; ( 2 ) the instability affecting only part of the system — the countries of the dissolved coalition leading to semi-stability . We illustrate below the two cases with historical examples .
4.1 Dissolution of the Global Alliances in Syria — An Unstable System
Syria includes many different ethnic and religious communities unified under one government by the French mandate . While Sunnis , Druzes , Alawites ( a branch of Shia ), Shiits , and Christians are the largest religious communities of Syria , the Alawite minority has occupied most of the key government and military positions . The politics is exclusively based on cronyism , which is characteristic of the entire East , so that the Alawite community and their allies get a good part of the political and economic benefits .
The religious composition of Syria is schematically illustrated in Figure 3a showing the original propensities as they appeared in the beginning of the twentieth century . Several conflicting ( negative ) circles are present in the system , so that the system does not have a rational stability , a stable optimal configuration .
Today ’ s conflict in Syria exhibits a sharpest split between the ruling Alawite minority and the country ’ s poor religious periphery — Sunni majority mostly aligned with the opposition where the prosperous part of the Syrian people for whom religion is not of an absolute vital importance passes from one side to another .
As stated in several historical sources ( Fisher 2013 ; Escobar 2012 ), the problem is rooted in socio-economic dimensions , rather than in the religious context . Those different religious communities find themselves united under conditions of extreme poverty with neither economic nor social safety prospect , as opposed to the prosperity of the governing class . Such a discrepancy has fueled the civil uprising .
It is worth underlining that in the second half of the twentieth century , the Syrian stability has been settled by the materialization of a global alliance calling against a common enemy , the newly created state of Israel . The global alliance , denoted by I , has unified the frustrated population of Syria . The alliance has neutralized all the antagonistic communities , in contrast to the Israeli success in unification of its different ethnic and religious branches , were not able to come up with their own autonomy . The alliance I is shown in Figure 3b .
In the beginning of the twenty-first century , Egypt , Tunisia , and Libya came up with a public protest against their present regimes . The uprising against the government in Egypt and Tunisia was quick and decisive . In Libya the protest led to a short civil war that induced the overthrow of the government . Those examples inspired the resistance and rebellion of the unfavored Syrian population , which has been suffering from social and economic inequalities .
The social awakening led to the dissolution of the anti-Israel global alliance , freeing the powerful instabilities of the internal conflicts . A new global alliance , denoted by B , has installed immediately in opposition to the government of Bashar al-Assad with the simultaneous forming of the opposite alliance , which supported the regime ( see Figure 3c ). The opposition has attracted together most of the Sunnis and a large part of the Druze community . The global alliance B splits the population into two parts so that the system is stabilized , as shown in the figure ( all the circles are positive ).
However , division of Syria into two opposite alliances could not produce a stable configuration . As soon as the current
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