Bente Scheller is Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation's Beirut-based Middle East office. She is a Marshall Memorial Fellow of the German Marshall Fund, and holds a PhD from the Free University in Berlin. Between 2002 and 2004 she was posted at the German Embassy in Damascus.
Ms. Scheller will be in Washington DC and Halifax from November 18th-25th, 2013. She will be participating in events and bilateral talks regarding Syria and regional security, including events in cooperation with the Center for American Progress, POMED, and Ambassador Fred Hof. Scheller will also be a participant at the Halifax International Security Forum.
Scheller recently published a book titled "The Wisdom of Syria's Waiting Game: Foreign Policy under the Assads."
Syrian foreign policy, always opaque, has become an even greater puzzle during the Syrian revolt. Irrespective of the regime’s international isolation in the wake of its violent response to domestic protest, it has paid lip-service to international peace plans while unperturbedly crushing the rebellion. The rare televised appearances of President Assad have shown a leader detached from reality. Has he—in his own words—‘gone crazy’? In this book long-time Syria analyst and former diplomat Bente Scheller contends that Bashar Assad’s deadly waiting game is following its own logic: whatever difficulties the Syrian regime has faced, its previous experience has been that it can simply sit out the current crisis.
The difference this time is that Syria faces a double crisis—internal and external. While Hafez Assad, renowned as an astute politician, adapted to new challenges, his son, Bashar, seems to have no alternative plan of action.
Scheller’s timely book analyses Syrian foreign policy after the global upheavals of 1989, which was at the time a glorious new beginning for the regime. She shows how Bashar Assad, by ignoring change both inside Syria and in the region, has sacrificed his father’s focus on national security in favour of a policy of regime survival and offers a candid analysis of the successes and shortcomings of Syrian foreign policy in recent years.
See more at: http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-wisdom-of-syrias-waiting-game/