Making peace to sustain war: the Astana Process and Syria’s illiberal peace

In the aftermath of large-scale Russian military intervention in Syria in 2015, Iran, Russia, and Turkey established the Astana Process to manage the conflict and negotiate a post-conflict transition. The tripartite-led Astana Process has supplanted United Nations efforts through the Geneva Process to negotiate a peace agreement and political transition in Syria, highlighting important shifts in geopolitical power. As such, the Astana Process provides an opportunity to examine how peace emerges when liberal actors and norms are peripheralized and when power shifts to alternative, illiberal constellations of power that are able to craft peace. I situate my inquiry into the emergence of the Astana Process at the intersection of literature on authoritarian conflict management (ACM), civil war settlement, and peacebuilding to ask how we can understand the exercise of power in contexts in which constellations of illiberal actors are able to shape conflict and post-conflict outcomes. The Astana Process eschews liberal principles of peace-making and post-conflict transition while advancing illiberal norms and practices that reject power sharing and inclusion in favor of a post-conflict order in which society remains bifurcated and which continued violence is sanctioned. The specific constellation of domestic and international power that is reflected through Astana is contributing to the emergence of new norms of conflict management and peacemaking that directly challenge liberal norms and actors’ power to shape post-conflict outcomes. Astana thus advances a new vision for conflict management that is materializing in the emergence of an illiberal peace in Syria.