Abstract
The Syrian civil war gave birth to a wide range of new generation VNSAs, among which ISIS as a global revolutionary nonethnic VNSA and the YPG as an ethnic and nationalist VNSA are the most visible. This article first intends to offer a comprehensive portrait of ISIS and the YPG as the new generation of VNSAs. Second, it employs a three-layered framework of actorness, powerfulness, and effectiveness in order to position these two actors in the Middle Eastern and Syrian contexts and to assess their distinctive characteristics and behaviors distinguishing them from the old generation VNSAs. Third, it will explore how the actorness, powerfulness, and effectiveness of ISIS and the YPG have been constructed and reconstructed within the deepening Syrian civil war. Finally, it will explore how global and regional actors have envisaged the rise of these two new VNSAs.
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Oktav, Ö.Z., Parlar Dal, E., Kurşun, A.M. (2018). Reframing and Reassessing the VNSAs in Syrian Conflict: An Introduction. In: Oktav, Ö., Parlar Dal, E., Kurşun, A. (eds) Violent Non-state Actors and the Syrian Civil War. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67528-2_1
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