Five things international community must give Syria after Bashar al-Assad

Transition in Syria after Bashar al-Assad will be impossible without constructive international support. From outsiders, Syria will need these five key things:

2. A working group of advisers

Syrians will need the support of a small, atypical working group comprising political and development advisers from the US, the former colonial powers Britain and/or France, Russia, and neighboring Turkey and Iran.

As improbable as such a coalition seems, unless interests are harmonized – or at least checked – across the range of diverse and adversarial outside actors with deep historical ties to Syria, there will be no effective way to curtail counterproductive and possibly destabilizing external meddling.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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