Abstract
International Relations literature has given little attention to thoroughly conceptualizing the interconnectedness between external hegemonic interventions and conflictual polities with a disintegrated state system and structural cleavages. No sub-region can epitomize this complexity more than the Levant where extra-regional hegemons along with their local agents are shaping the emerging dynamics rather than unitary state actors only.This thesis introduces the Web of Influence theory to highlight how multiple hegemons cease the opportunity of political change to mobilize agents and divide their overlapping influence within the same polity, which forms a complex social structure that cannot be understood and explained by assessing individual actors separately. The dissertation explores under what conditions the Web of Influence has emerged in contemporary Syria.
Neither epistemology nor the conceptual framework of the Sphere of Influence concept encompasses the complex dynamics of how multiple local agents, and their hegemonic enablers divide influence in a polity with a disintegrated state.
This thesis combines the English School’s understanding of hegemony with the American structural realists’ understanding of international political change, it also integrates sociologists’ understanding of social structure. It explicates the transition of Syria to Web of Influence in the 2015-2020 period with theory- building process tracing and document analysis as the overarching methodological approach that combines constitutive and causal mechanisms.
The general hypothesis is that third-party multiple hybrid interventions in conflictual polities with a disintegrated state system are leading to Web of Influence when there is an interplay between contested hegemony and mixed sovereign arrangements.
| Date of Award | 4 Dec 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Timo Kivimaki (Supervisor) & Mattia Cacciatori (Supervisor) |