Selling War and Peace Syria and the Anglosphere

By analysing Anglosphere foreign policy debates during the Syrian Civil War from 2011 to 2019, this book is a significant contribution to the literature in three fields. First, the book analyses the entirety of the Syrian Civil War in an innovative four-phase chronology, as the conflict evolved from calls for democracy, through chemical weapons concerns, to the rise of ISIL and the onset of Great Power proxy war. Second, the book maps and theorises Anglosphere foreign policy, charting the history and future of the US-UK-Australian military alliance during a key period of political uncertainty, defined by Donald Trump's presidency and the UK's Brexit negotiations. Third, the book develops a post-constructivist framework for the analysis of transnational political debates which determine war and peace in Syria and beyond. This framework emphasises the hard nature of soft power and the coercion of political opponents through forceful words.

Introduction; 1. The Syrian civil war; 2. The Anglosphere; 3. Selling war and peace; 4. Democracy and human rights; 5. Chemical weapons; 6. Islamic State; 7. Proxy war; Conclusion; References; Index.

Jack Holland is Associate Professor in International Security at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Selling the War on Terror: Foreign Policy Discourses after 9/11 (2012) and co-author of Security: A Critical Introduction (2014). He is also co-editor of Obama's Foreign Policy: Ending the War on Terror (2013) and The Obama Doctrine: A Legacy of Continuity in Foreign Policy? (2016). Alongside these books, he has published in journals such as European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology and Review of International Studies.