Geographical Research

West Asia has been the most crisis-torn region in global geopolitics since it has gone through a nation-state system following the collapse of Ottoman Empire, in which we have consistently witnessed most violent and unprecedented conflicts, either civil or regionalized as well as internationalized.   In the meanwhile, the regional crises have increasingly been intensified in the turn of 3rd Millennium as a result of  the expansive trans-regional interventions, internationally illegitimate occupation, increasingly regionalized civil wars; either directly or indirectly, regional states in West Asia as well as trans-regional actors, either great powers or international, security organizations, have been involved in the most violent and fatal military conflicts, to the extent which these intensified geopolitical crises seem to take a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing character, exemplified by Syrian crisis since 2010. In this framework, as an innovative endeavor, the paper seeks to explain the persistence of regional geopolitical crises, not least Syrian crisis in the West Asia, by drawing on explanatory- analytical method, using the day empirical evidence as well as historical data in order to provide a comprehensive multi-variable explanation and avoid reductionism inherent in current international analyses. In doing so, having presented a three-level analysis, it can be argued that an interacting synergizing set of some constituting and permitting factors has brought about the persistence of geopolitical crises in West Asia, especially Syrian crisis. On this basis, having combined sub-national, national, and international factors into a comprehensive theoretical model which can be applied to study on Syrian crisis, the paper finds that Geopolitical Crises in West Asia turn out to persist, and due to their increasingly accumulated challenges, spill over trans-regionally as well. A practical solution to deal with such undesirable situation is to normalize the state system based on removing the permitting and constituting obstacles, which can be involved some measures as effective sustainable states, regional conflict management, and lack of the expansive trans-regional interventionism.