SYRIAN CIVIL WAR – GEOPOLITICAL FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Syrian civil war is world`s largest armed conflict in the second decade of 21-st century. It started with the spillover of „Arab Spring” unrests into this Near East country, progressively developing into the real ethnic and confessional „sectarian war”. This paper studies stages of the conflict and the spectre of this complex, multidimensional crisis: original, starting level of crisis linked with the society`s discontent with the current political system, its corruption and the repression; level of violent attempt of regime`s overthrow; ethnic and confessional and ideological level; ethnic minorities level and regional / international level; level of geostrategical outplay between neighbouring regional and Great powers that all have their favorites in the civil war. By analyzing all crisis levels, second part of the Paper focuses on its geopolitical dimension – on the classical geostrategical position of Syria in the Levаnt as the space of permantent rivalry between the regional powers, nowdays mostly in the context of regional power disbalance that had it significant impact on decisions of many of regional and global geopolitical subjects to take their part into the conflict and turn this civil war into the typical „proxy war”.