Lecture Series | Siarhei Bohdan (Regensburg) | Continuation of Foreign Policy with Other Means: Syria's support for armed opposition movements abroad during the Cold War

This talk forms part of the lecture series War. Peace. Security. organised by Dr Cindy Wittke (IOS Regensburg) with Dr Paul Vickers (ScienceCampus) and Prof. Ulf Brunnbauer (IOS Regensburg). The lecture will be held in English.

Download the calendar file here.

Abstract:

Despite its weak economic foundations, geopolitical vulnerability and internal instability, the Syrian Baath Party government succeeded in supporting for decades armed movements in the Middle East that have transformed the region. Damascus obtained resources from larger countries to pursue such risky and costly policies and secured their military and diplomatic cover. Rather than becoming a proxy in the “Global Cold War,” it preserved its autonomy by forging dynamically shifting alliances with seemingly incompatible partners—the Soviet Union and conservative Arab regimes, Gaddafi’s Libya and Iran under the Shah and the Ayatollahs. Some murky deals were also made with the West.

Paradoxically, Damascus became better known for its support of foreign armed groups that have failed (e.g., different Palestinian factions) than for backing those that have succeeded. Meanwhile, it has facilitated the rise of several major players in the region and the victory of some of them. So, the Shiite Islamist revolutionaries toppled the powerful Shah’s regime in 1978–79 thanks also to Syrian support at the most critical stage of their struggle. The leading Kurdish parties of recent decades in Iraq and Turkey—the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—emerged and grew with Syrian support in the 1970s–1990s.

The lecture will examine the ability of even smaller nations to pursue an interventionist course by backing armed opposition groups in other countries—during the Cold War and now. Concurrently, we will discuss the factors that drive and enable them to do so. These issues will be investigated primarily on the examples of the Assad regime’s relations with Shiite Islamists in Iran and Lebanon, as well as its ties with Kurdish organisations in Turkey and Iraq.

Bio:

Dr Siarhei Bohdan has been a research associate at the Professorship for Transregional Cultures of Knowledge, Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies (DIMAS), University of Regensburg, since 2024. He was awarded a PhD in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin (2016). Before that, he studied in Vilnius, Minsk and Teheran. He recently returned to Regensburg having been Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center in Hokkaido, Japan. From 2019 to 2021, he worked as a research associate with the Freigeist Junior Research Group The Cold War's Clash of Civilizations at the Center for Global History (Friedrich Meinecke Institute) at the Free University of Berlin. 

Siarhei’s intellectual background combines studies of Middle Eastern and (post-)Soviet history as well as many years of experience analysing contemporary political and societal topics in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Recently, his research interests have specifically focused on developments following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his 2017 doctoral dissertation, Limits of Defiance? The Role of Post-Soviet Nations in Modernisation of the Iranian Armed Forces and Defence Industries, he investigated how the rise of the post-Cold War global order influenced cooperation between Iran and (post-)Soviet nations. In his research he has explored themes of human rights, the transregional history of religion, and interactions between radical regimes and actors in the Middle East (Syria, Libya, Iraq, PLO) and the socialist world (USSR, Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, PRC), as well as the history of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.