“The media refused to see the Syrian revolt as anything other than the continuation of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, at a time of enthusiasm over the Arab Spring. Journalists didn’t understand the sectarian subtleties in Syria, or perhaps they didn’t want to understand.” That was Fabrice Balanche, a leading French scholar of Syria who specializes in political geography, in an eye-opening interview with the Carnegie Endowment’s Aron Lund last Friday. Balanche’s research mapping Syria’s uprising-turned-civil-war is mostly in French, as Lund noted, and so has only recently entered into English-language Syria analysis, which should be all the better for […]