Predicting the End of the Syrian Conflict: From Theory to the Reality of a Civil War

The Syrian civil war has confounded all predictions on its end date and is still ongoing. Valuable explicative work has been done on civil war duration; however, scholars have failed to reliably predict the end of ongoing conflicts. This article argues that faulty predictions on termination date of the Syrian conflict did not necessarily result from statistical errors in modeling civil wars data and better models might not necessarily mitigate the prediction problem. Rather, three factors contributed to the misperceptions: the conflict’s cartography problem, the splintering of the opposition, and the multi-partner foreign intervention in the conflict. The last two factors can also be held accountable for prolonging the conflict. Incorrect predictions or descriptions in scholarly works on ongoing conflicts can have disastrous implications for the present and future of states and populations beset by protracted conflict. Had it been made clear that neither the insurgents nor the government had the capacity to win the war within the predicted timeframe, the international community may have taken a more decisive role in bringing belligerents to the negotiation table, improving prospects for a peaceful diplomatic settlement.