Last week, the United States Institute of Peace and Foreign Policy hosted its first in a series of PeaceGames, bringing together top experts in a high-level role-playing game to brainstorm how peace could be achieved in Syria.
“We were talking one day and wondering, ‘why do Washington and the many organizations that reside here spend so much effort on war games and how to fight and deter and end wars, but so little effort on how to ‘game out’ peace?” says Kristin Lord, USIP’s executive vice president. “Why do we not devote same level of resources to get to peaceful resolutions to conflicts? We selected people who were already bringing quite substantial expertise to the table.”
Throughout the day and a half-long game, meant to achieve peace, with as much creativity and seriousness as is currently devoted to war games by governments and think tanks, participants assumed roles representing 19 different stakeholders in the Syrian war, including Russia, Iran and the U.S.
The 45 participants included former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer; Robert Malley, the Program Director for Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group and Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Task Force.
In the short-term, as outlined by Foreign Policy, they debated whether or not Assad would decide to compromise should Russia end its support, with Ted Kattouf, the former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, and the Syrian National Council’s Murhaf Jouejati saying the President wouldn’t cave unless he lost the support of allies Iran, Hezbollah, and his own Syrian Alawite community. (They agreed that there could be a coup before then.)
Looking ahead, Esther Brimmer, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, said that making a peace agreement sustainable would take a generation and require substantial international funding.
“It was interesting in what it said about Syria — that peace is extremely difficult to come to there,” Lord says. “Unfortunately the participants recognized all of the many obstacles in the continuing situation, and they recognized that the situation is just intolerable and tried really hard to see how the current stalemate could possibly be broken.”
The game players explored four scenarios representing different phases of a peace process: achieving a near-term political solution, pacification, transformation and institutionalization, and stabilization.
“The most surprising takeaway for me was how the rise of jihadist fighters could actually change the incentives of some of they key parties in ways that would potentially lead them to achieve a more peaceful outcome,” Lord says. “Russia, Iran and the West — and even some Assad regime members — might become so concerned over the rising power of the jihad fighters that they might be motivated to seek another outcome.
“We looked at the potential for Iran to be willing to make a deal [with Assad’s enemies], especially if nuclear talks go forward in a productive manner, and the willingness of the Russians to come to the table as well, particularly if they grow more concerned about the rise of the jihad, which is a big concern for Russia.”
Lord says her only surprise “was that we came up with more potential paths to peace than i would have imagined. Not that we thought peace was more likely than we thought going in, or that getting to peace would be easier than we thought, but we identified more avenues to a peaceful outcome.”