2011 was seen as  the year of the protestor, starting in Tunisia and Egypt eventually migrating to North America as well even for a brief time in Vancouver itself. These were different from protests in the past, especially those in North Africa, they risked all for a change and a chance for freedom. To me what these revolutions showed was that the mass public has a more powerful role in a world with social media. With the ability to communicate through mediums such as facebook and twitter allowed mass synchronization and the ability to pass encouraging messages from the outside world. These countries had been under tyranny for decades and finally lifted the yoke from their shoulders in one giant swing. This movement is still in question as Syrians battle to gain the freedom that so many have gained this year. So while most who focus on the individual tend to examine leaders such as Hitler, Che Guevera and other large personalities or the elites who mainly influence the direction of governments, I believe it is a new age in the world of international politics one which the mass public will have a much greater influence on the direction that countries take.

Here is a clip of the NATO review of the Arab Spring and its connection to social media.

In the past weeks the violence in Syria has escalated, while the country is closed off to the outside world images still leak out showing the toll the citizens have taken in trying to free their country from the dictatorship of Bashar Al-Assad. The UN security council recently drafted a resolution, like the one drafted for Libya earlier in the year, to have a change of regime in Syria. When this resolution was put to vote Russia used its veto to strike the resolution. Why would Russia do this? It can be clearly identified as the rational model of decision making depicted in Chapter 5 of Mingst and Arreguin-Toft.

This scenario is clearly a top down approach taken by the state and many reasons behind the outcome. The first reasoning that Russia uses is:

“who or what might replace Assad? The options look to vary wildly between supposedly moderate Islamists who may pretend to like the West, and much less moderate Islamists who won’t like anybody. Either option looks unattractive. Why do anything to make such odious changes more likely? Who knows? Perhaps by hanging in there toughly the Assad leadership will manage to cling on in some shape or form for quite some time to come.”

This particular quote was taken from the telegraph written by Charles Crawford.

Another of Russia’s reasons for backing Syria is that it is afraid of losing it “last Arab ally and seeking to reassert its global clout.” Russia for a long time has backed the regime of both Bashar and his father. They as this question to the UN now:”

“Where were you in 1983 when the Syrian regime committed the astounding Hama massacre, killing and torturing up to 30,000 people to smash local Islamist sentiment?”

Boris Dolgov of the Centre of Arab Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences says, “Russia and Syria have historic ties going back to the Tsars and the Soviet Union.”

It seems Russia will not abandon its ally in the middle east and will not allow it to become another domino in the revolutions occurring elsewhere in the region. However, it is more complicated than these Russian statements make it out to be. This veto is more directed towards the type of trade that the Russians are invlolved in with Syria.

“The extent of Russia’s continued support for Assad was shown in January when a Saint Vincent-flagged cargo ship, the Chariot, docked in Syria after a brief stopover in Cyprus, reportedly carrying a supply of Russian arms.While never officially confirming this delivery, Russia has openly stated it has every right to ship arms to the Syrian regime in contracts that provide a crucial income source for its weapons industry.The general director of the Russia’s Tactical Missiles Cooperation (TRV) Boris Obnosov told the RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday that Moscow had delivered two years ago to Syria an order for Kh-31 air-to-surface weapons.He revealed that TRV’s losses from broken contracts due to the change of regime in Libya in 2011 amounted to 600 million euros ($790 million).”

This excerpt was taken from Khaleej Times Online found here.

Russia has analyzed the situation and has decided that the pros of vetoing these UN vastly outweigh the cons. While it may seem other groups have a say to the Russian government, but it is my belief that it is the government alone making this decision, therefore, using the rational model.

For an inside view of the violence taking place in Syria, here is a video.

The authors believe that empire and hegemony is merely “political relationships and degrees of influence.” To help answer the question the authors define a pole as,

      ” A state (1) commands an especially large share of the resources or capabilities states can use to achieve their ends and that (2) excels in all the component elements of state capability, conventionally defined as size of population and territory, resource endowment, economic capacity, military might, and organizational-institutional ‘competence.’”

They then go on to explain that the US has fulfilled all of these requirements and, therefore, has become a unipolar state, a title that is unprecedented in the world beforehand. With America’s large armed forces and defence budget they are unmatched in the world, and although their economy has sputtered they are still believed to be the only state that can claim unipolarity and not merely an empire or hegemony over a certain part of the globe.

I have found an article that argues the time of US unipolarity has come to the end, with Europe, China and India growing at the rate they are. The author Daryl Copeland believes that we have entered into an heteropolar world, one which is even more difficult to analyze.

You can find the link here.

With the world in a bipolar state between the USSR and US, they used proxy states to further their cause. The US above all feared the spread of communism and had the belief that if countries in and around the USSR’s sphere of influence began to assimilate into Soviet’s ideology then slowly all countries would do the same, as they called it; the domino effect. This fear led the US to take the foreign policy of reacting anywhere communism began to fester. This can be seen as relative gains, in the way that they can not allow the other power in the world to gain any more power than they already have.

Realists believe that the international system is in a state of anarchy, not chaos, but no overarching sovereign to govern the rest of the countries in the system. This belief leads them to look out for themselves and only themselves. As such, with the US hiding behind the statement that they were trying to help the free South Vietnamese was merely a cover for their foreign policy of intervening in the USSR’s expansions.

I have found this video that better explains Realist theory by a professor from the University of Ohio.

The idea of democracies do not fight each other does hold true at the most stable of states, but newly democratized can be volatile and unstable to begin with. So the question is; Do the ends justify the means? This topic is very interesting to me and one i would like to learn about further if given the chance, especially with the growth of China capturing our gaze.