Reinoud Leenders
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594242 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Reinoud Leenders |
| GIVEN NAMES | Reinoud |
| FAMILY NAME | Leenders |
| SIGNATURE | LEENDERS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5725-1466 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 200 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
De Mistura ideas to reality are like windmills to Don Quixote’
This article assesses the agency of UN mediators through a single case-study of the UN mediator in Syria -Staffan de Mistura.Drawing on and contributing to an emerging research agenda, we argue that UN mediators do have significant room of manoeuvre and thus the ability to conceive, negotiate, and execute key mediation policy-decisions.Our analysis bridges the literature on levels of analysis in International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Ana…
Foreign sponsorship of pro-government militias fighting Syria’s insurgency
Exploring the role of foreign-sponsored pro-government militias in counter-insurgency efforts, this article shows how the proxy war concept maps onto the Syrian conflict as we demonstrate both its contributions and limitations. Drawing on rare access to Syrian and foreign security actors inside Syria, we argue that the Syrian war, while rightly labelled a proxy war, sits uneasily with and at times even contradicts a set of scholarly assumptions a…
Humanitarianism, State Sovereignty, and Authoritarian Regime Maintenance in the Syrian War
Through a case study of the Syrian war since 2011 this article explores how humanitarianism, state sovereignty and authoritarian regime maintenance have come to be closely intertwined. While the Syrian regime’s state sovereignty claims facilitated its tight control over a massive UN-led humanitarian aid effort, the latter in turn became a platform to project and magnify these claims, and to get them confirmed. The article details how the Syrian r…
The Onset of the Syrian Uprising and the Origins of Violence
This chapter examines the early stages of mass mobilization in Syria that sparked the Arab uprisings. Starting from December 2010 in Tunisia, Arabs from various walks of life took to the streets in protest against decades-long authoritarian rule, repression, and corruption in what came to be known as the Arab uprisings, or Arab Spring. These waves of protest reached Syria in March 2011. While Syria’s protests initially were largely peaceful, they…
Outsourcing state violence
This article engages with and contributes to a nascent debate on state-sponsored militias by way of an analysis of the formation and deployment of the Syrian regime’s National Defence Force (NDF). This militia emerged from the regime’s rich repertoire in outsourcing violence and allowing ‘heterarchical orders’ to serve regime maintenance purposes at home and abroad. During the Syrian war (2011–...), the key rationale for using such militias is pr…
The First Time as Tragedy, the Second as Farce? Lebanon’s Nascent Petroleum Sector and the Risks of Corruption
This article analyses the risks of corruption in Lebanon’s nascent governance structures established in preparation for a thriving petroleum sector. Engaging with comparative theory on the ‘oil curse’, the article assesses the risks of corruption in the institutional and regulatory measures and policy tools that have thus far been developed down the sector’s value chain and including revenue management and expenditure. Lebanon’s political settlem…
Middle East Authoritarianisms
The developments of early 2011 have left the political landscape of the Middle East changed but recognizable. Even as urgent struggles continue, it remains clear that authoritarianism will survive this transformational moment. The study of authoritarian governance, therefore, remains essential for our understanding of the political dynamics and inner workings of regimes across the region. The contributors to this volume consider the Syrian and Ir…
How the Syrian Regime Outsmarted Its Enemies
The Assad government watched how uprisings unfolded in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, took stock of international reactions to these events, and, in response, developed strategies to maximize its probabilities of survival
Response to Tatiana Kostadinova's review of Spoils of Truce
Tatiana Kostadinova's critical remarks and questions are spot on. Some of them had been on my mind while researching the book, and they all deserve to be raised. I would argue that the possible ways by which my case study could be viewed as relevant to more generalizing approaches to corruption are twofold
The Lebanese connection
Jonathan V Marshall Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2012, ISBN13 9780804781312 (hbk), ISBN10 0804781311 (hbk), 272 pp This book tells a fascinating story of the extensively covered
Social Movement Theory and the Onset of the Popular Uprising in Syria
This article takes stock of my attempt to scrutinize the onset of the Syrian uprising with the help of some key analytical concepts derived from social movement theory, including “opportunity” and “threat,” “social networks,” “repertoires of contention,” “framing,” and “diffusion.” These tools allow me to identify and disentangle the mechanisms of early mobilization and the uprising and explain why they commenced in relatively peripheral areas. S…
Popular Mobilization in Syria
This paper explores the dynamics and underlying conditions of the first few months of the uprising in Syria, from mid-March 2011 until the summer of that year. Together with the contributions from Dalmasso and Kandil, it exploits the opportunity created by the Arab uprisings to shed new light on patterns of social mobilization and collective action that research programmes focusing on authoritarian resilience had tended to overlook. Specifically,…
Collective Action and Mobilization in Dar'a
This article addresses how and why the popular mobilization in Syria took off in the "peripheral" Dar'a region. Accordingly, it focuses on the province's dense social networks involving clans, labor migration, cross-border movements, and crime. It argues that Dar'a's social networks were important early in Syrian protest for several reasons: (1) They served as sites where nonconforming views on Ba'ath subordination could develop and be shared. (2…
Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience
The spread of protests throughout the Arab world can be viewed as the product of social learning by Arab citizens—a wave effect facilitated by the rapid diffusion of ideas, discourses, and practices from one country to another and their adaptation to local contexts. Yet it less commonly recognized that Arab regimes' counter-revolutionary strategies have also been shaped by processes of learning and diffusion among regime elites, especially among …
Refugee Warriors or War Refugees? Iraqi Refugees' Predicament in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon
This essay attempts to disentangle a debate within the study of refugee crises and their security implications involving ‘refugee warriors’. It situates the debate in the context of the Iraqi refugee crisis and its purported and real manifestations in three main host countries: Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. The research's findings show a serious divergence between theorizing on refugee warriors and the important case of Iraq's war refugees. In the l…
Iraq - People, History, Politics
Iraqi Refugees in Syria
This article explores the implications of the Iraqi refugee crisis for Syria, which is believed to host up to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees. Many policy makers, activists and analysts, sometimes inspired by the conflict repercussions of refugee crises witnessed elsewhere, have warned against the regional security impact of the Iraqi exodus and consequently speculated about a possible spillover of the armed conflicts in Iraq to its neighbours. The ar…
Au-delà du « Pays des deux fleuves »
Beyond the “Land of the Two Rivers”: A Regional Conflict Formation? The “network wars”, or “Regional Conflict Formations” (RCFs) model is no more than the first step toward understanding the complex relationships between the conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Admittedly, the levels of analysis that this model offers regarding cross-border trafficking of people and goods are certainly an essential prerequisite to the study of the ties between t…
Regional conflict formations
As Iraq is plunging into civil war, politics and violence in the Middle East are increasingly perceived to be highly interconnected and entwined. This article offers an attempt to understand the nature and scope of this regional interconnectedness involving three of the region's states-Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Its approach takes advantage of the work by scholars of other regions than the Middle East, more precisely those analysing the 'new wars' …
Know thy enemy
The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims an…
Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience
The spread of protests throughout the Arab world can be viewed as the product of social learning by Arab citizens—a wave effect facilitated by the rapid diffusion of ideas, discourses, and practices from one country to another and their adaptation to local contexts. Yet it less commonly recognized that Arab regimes' counter-revolutionary strategies have also been shaped by processes of learning and diffusion among regime elites, especially among …
Popular Mobilization in Syria
This paper explores the dynamics and underlying conditions of the first few months of the uprising in Syria, from mid-March 2011 until the summer of that year. Together with the contributions from Dalmasso and Kandil, it exploits the opportunity created by the Arab uprisings to shed new light on patterns of social mobilization and collective action that research programmes focusing on authoritarian resilience had tended to overlook. Specifically,…
Collective Action and Mobilization in Dar'a
This article addresses how and why the popular mobilization in Syria took off in the "peripheral" Dar'a region. Accordingly, it focuses on the province's dense social networks involving clans, labor migration, cross-border movements, and crime. It argues that Dar'a's social networks were important early in Syrian protest for several reasons: (1) They served as sites where nonconforming views on Ba'ath subordination could develop and be shared. (2…
Know thy enemy
The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims an…
Humanitarianism, State Sovereignty, and Authoritarian Regime Maintenance in the Syrian War
Through a case study of the Syrian war since 2011 this article explores how humanitarianism, state sovereignty and authoritarian regime maintenance have come to be closely intertwined. While the Syrian regime’s state sovereignty claims facilitated its tight control over a massive UN-led humanitarian aid effort, the latter in turn became a platform to project and magnify these claims, and to get them confirmed. The article details how the Syrian r…
Social Movement Theory and the Onset of the Popular Uprising in Syria
This article takes stock of my attempt to scrutinize the onset of the Syrian uprising with the help of some key analytical concepts derived from social movement theory, including “opportunity” and “threat,” “social networks,” “repertoires of contention,” “framing,” and “diffusion.” These tools allow me to identify and disentangle the mechanisms of early mobilization and the uprising and explain why they commenced in relatively peripheral areas. S…
Outsourcing state violence
This article engages with and contributes to a nascent debate on state-sponsored militias by way of an analysis of the formation and deployment of the Syrian regime’s National Defence Force (NDF). This militia emerged from the regime’s rich repertoire in outsourcing violence and allowing ‘heterarchical orders’ to serve regime maintenance purposes at home and abroad. During the Syrian war (2011–...), the key rationale for using such militias is pr…
Regional conflict formations
As Iraq is plunging into civil war, politics and violence in the Middle East are increasingly perceived to be highly interconnected and entwined. This article offers an attempt to understand the nature and scope of this regional interconnectedness involving three of the region's states-Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Its approach takes advantage of the work by scholars of other regions than the Middle East, more precisely those analysing the 'new wars' …
Foreign sponsorship of pro-government militias fighting Syria’s insurgency
Exploring the role of foreign-sponsored pro-government militias in counter-insurgency efforts, this article shows how the proxy war concept maps onto the Syrian conflict as we demonstrate both its contributions and limitations. Drawing on rare access to Syrian and foreign security actors inside Syria, we argue that the Syrian war, while rightly labelled a proxy war, sits uneasily with and at times even contradicts a set of scholarly assumptions a…
Iraqi Refugees in Syria
This article explores the implications of the Iraqi refugee crisis for Syria, which is believed to host up to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees. Many policy makers, activists and analysts, sometimes inspired by the conflict repercussions of refugee crises witnessed elsewhere, have warned against the regional security impact of the Iraqi exodus and consequently speculated about a possible spillover of the armed conflicts in Iraq to its neighbours. The ar…
Refugee Warriors or War Refugees? Iraqi Refugees' Predicament in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon
This essay attempts to disentangle a debate within the study of refugee crises and their security implications involving ‘refugee warriors’. It situates the debate in the context of the Iraqi refugee crisis and its purported and real manifestations in three main host countries: Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. The research's findings show a serious divergence between theorizing on refugee warriors and the important case of Iraq's war refugees. In the l…
The First Time as Tragedy, the Second as Farce? Lebanon’s Nascent Petroleum Sector and the Risks of Corruption
This article analyses the risks of corruption in Lebanon’s nascent governance structures established in preparation for a thriving petroleum sector. Engaging with comparative theory on the ‘oil curse’, the article assesses the risks of corruption in the institutional and regulatory measures and policy tools that have thus far been developed down the sector’s value chain and including revenue management and expenditure. Lebanon’s political settlem…
Iraq - People, History, Politics
Know thy enemy
The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims an…
Au-delà du « Pays des deux fleuves »
Beyond the “Land of the Two Rivers”: A Regional Conflict Formation? The “network wars”, or “Regional Conflict Formations” (RCFs) model is no more than the first step toward understanding the complex relationships between the conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Admittedly, the levels of analysis that this model offers regarding cross-border trafficking of people and goods are certainly an essential prerequisite to the study of the ties between t…
Regional conflict formations
As Iraq is plunging into civil war, politics and violence in the Middle East are increasingly perceived to be highly interconnected and entwined. This article offers an attempt to understand the nature and scope of this regional interconnectedness involving three of the region's states-Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Its approach takes advantage of the work by scholars of other regions than the Middle East, more precisely those analysing the 'new wars' …
Iraqi Refugees in Syria
This article explores the implications of the Iraqi refugee crisis for Syria, which is believed to host up to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees. Many policy makers, activists and analysts, sometimes inspired by the conflict repercussions of refugee crises witnessed elsewhere, have warned against the regional security impact of the Iraqi exodus and consequently speculated about a possible spillover of the armed conflicts in Iraq to its neighbours. The ar…
Refugee Warriors or War Refugees? Iraqi Refugees' Predicament in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon
This essay attempts to disentangle a debate within the study of refugee crises and their security implications involving ‘refugee warriors’. It situates the debate in the context of the Iraqi refugee crisis and its purported and real manifestations in three main host countries: Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. The research's findings show a serious divergence between theorizing on refugee warriors and the important case of Iraq's war refugees. In the l…
Iraq - People, History, Politics
Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience
The spread of protests throughout the Arab world can be viewed as the product of social learning by Arab citizens—a wave effect facilitated by the rapid diffusion of ideas, discourses, and practices from one country to another and their adaptation to local contexts. Yet it less commonly recognized that Arab regimes' counter-revolutionary strategies have also been shaped by processes of learning and diffusion among regime elites, especially among …
Popular Mobilization in Syria
This paper explores the dynamics and underlying conditions of the first few months of the uprising in Syria, from mid-March 2011 until the summer of that year. Together with the contributions from Dalmasso and Kandil, it exploits the opportunity created by the Arab uprisings to shed new light on patterns of social mobilization and collective action that research programmes focusing on authoritarian resilience had tended to overlook. Specifically,…
Collective Action and Mobilization in Dar'a
This article addresses how and why the popular mobilization in Syria took off in the "peripheral" Dar'a region. Accordingly, it focuses on the province's dense social networks involving clans, labor migration, cross-border movements, and crime. It argues that Dar'a's social networks were important early in Syrian protest for several reasons: (1) They served as sites where nonconforming views on Ba'ath subordination could develop and be shared. (2…
Middle East Authoritarianisms
The developments of early 2011 have left the political landscape of the Middle East changed but recognizable. Even as urgent struggles continue, it remains clear that authoritarianism will survive this transformational moment. The study of authoritarian governance, therefore, remains essential for our understanding of the political dynamics and inner workings of regimes across the region. The contributors to this volume consider the Syrian and Ir…
How the Syrian Regime Outsmarted Its Enemies
The Assad government watched how uprisings unfolded in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, took stock of international reactions to these events, and, in response, developed strategies to maximize its probabilities of survival
Response to Tatiana Kostadinova's review of Spoils of Truce
Tatiana Kostadinova's critical remarks and questions are spot on. Some of them had been on my mind while researching the book, and they all deserve to be raised. I would argue that the possible ways by which my case study could be viewed as relevant to more generalizing approaches to corruption are twofold
The Lebanese connection
Jonathan V Marshall Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2012, ISBN13 9780804781312 (hbk), ISBN10 0804781311 (hbk), 272 pp This book tells a fascinating story of the extensively covered
Social Movement Theory and the Onset of the Popular Uprising in Syria
This article takes stock of my attempt to scrutinize the onset of the Syrian uprising with the help of some key analytical concepts derived from social movement theory, including “opportunity” and “threat,” “social networks,” “repertoires of contention,” “framing,” and “diffusion.” These tools allow me to identify and disentangle the mechanisms of early mobilization and the uprising and explain why they commenced in relatively peripheral areas. S…
The First Time as Tragedy, the Second as Farce? Lebanon’s Nascent Petroleum Sector and the Risks of Corruption
This article analyses the risks of corruption in Lebanon’s nascent governance structures established in preparation for a thriving petroleum sector. Engaging with comparative theory on the ‘oil curse’, the article assesses the risks of corruption in the institutional and regulatory measures and policy tools that have thus far been developed down the sector’s value chain and including revenue management and expenditure. Lebanon’s political settlem…
The Onset of the Syrian Uprising and the Origins of Violence
This chapter examines the early stages of mass mobilization in Syria that sparked the Arab uprisings. Starting from December 2010 in Tunisia, Arabs from various walks of life took to the streets in protest against decades-long authoritarian rule, repression, and corruption in what came to be known as the Arab uprisings, or Arab Spring. These waves of protest reached Syria in March 2011. While Syria’s protests initially were largely peaceful, they…
Outsourcing state violence
This article engages with and contributes to a nascent debate on state-sponsored militias by way of an analysis of the formation and deployment of the Syrian regime’s National Defence Force (NDF). This militia emerged from the regime’s rich repertoire in outsourcing violence and allowing ‘heterarchical orders’ to serve regime maintenance purposes at home and abroad. During the Syrian war (2011–...), the key rationale for using such militias is pr…
Humanitarianism, State Sovereignty, and Authoritarian Regime Maintenance in the Syrian War
Through a case study of the Syrian war since 2011 this article explores how humanitarianism, state sovereignty and authoritarian regime maintenance have come to be closely intertwined. While the Syrian regime’s state sovereignty claims facilitated its tight control over a massive UN-led humanitarian aid effort, the latter in turn became a platform to project and magnify these claims, and to get them confirmed. The article details how the Syrian r…
Foreign sponsorship of pro-government militias fighting Syria’s insurgency
Exploring the role of foreign-sponsored pro-government militias in counter-insurgency efforts, this article shows how the proxy war concept maps onto the Syrian conflict as we demonstrate both its contributions and limitations. Drawing on rare access to Syrian and foreign security actors inside Syria, we argue that the Syrian war, while rightly labelled a proxy war, sits uneasily with and at times even contradicts a set of scholarly assumptions a…
De Mistura ideas to reality are like windmills to Don Quixote’
This article assesses the agency of UN mediators through a single case-study of the UN mediator in Syria -Staffan de Mistura.Drawing on and contributing to an emerging research agenda, we argue that UN mediators do have significant room of manoeuvre and thus the ability to conceive, negotiate, and execute key mediation policy-decisions.Our analysis bridges the literature on levels of analysis in International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Ana…
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Political economy (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Authoritarianism (7 works) · Democracy (7 works) · Development economics (7 works)