The Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs publishes policy-focused reports, white papers and proceedings addressing a variety of subjects that reflect contemporary global issues and the outstanding research and scholarship of our faculty. Some of these are produced in cooperation with other organizations that the school partners with.
In the wake of the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria late last year, on March 5, 2005, the Václav Havel Program for Human Rights & Democracy in the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs at Florida International University (FIU) presented the webinar, “Assad’s Syria: A Legacy of Torture and Human Rights Abuses.” This occasional paper is an account of that event.
The rapid downfall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad astonished even Middle East experts who had studied Syria for decades. A recent panel discussion at the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs explored why the regime collapsed so quickly, who is governing Syria today, and how the recurring violence and human rights abuses can be stopped.
Since 2009, Jeremy Julian Sarkin (Distinguished Research Professor, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) has worked with Syrians to find their relatives who had disappeared into the “morass of the Syrian detention centers;” he was instrumental in creating a U.N. program in 2023 to locate those “disappeared.” Aaron Y. Zelin (Gloria and Ken Levy Senior Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy) is an expert on jihadi groups. And moderator Eric Lob (Associate Professor, Department of Politics & International Relations, FIU) focuses on Middle East politics and lived in Syria for a year and a half.
