Death of the Westphalia State System, Implications for Future Military Employment

Abstract

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Constructing state, territory, and sovereignty in the Syrian conflict

“…The extra-linguistic elements include the impact of the Arab Spring, the role of diplomacy, and the variance in how the same state actors shift their discourse on sovereignty to match with their interests in other conflicts such as Crimea. As sovereignty itself is taken as a mythical construct that is invented rather than an entity grounded in the ‘real word’ (McCoy, 2008), this analysis tracing the construction and reconstruction of sovereignty as a discourse obtains further significance. To problematise my argument, as the state in the Middle East has been long publicised as and ‘artificial’ territory with ‘fabricated’ borders (Fromkin, 2009), the discursive manipulation of ‘sovereignty’, based on the constructed meanings of territory and borders in the Syrian conflict, can also take shape.…”