Professor Tilman Brück is an internationally leading scholar of the economics of conflict and reconstruction, focusing especially on how people cope with violence and displacement. He is Founder and Director of ISDC - International Security and Development Center in Berlin, Germany - the world’s only research institute exclusively focused on studying conflict and development. He vividly remembers his first trip to Syria in May 2007 when, amid a general euphoria for reform, he had a strong sense of something going wrong. But little did he realise how terribly wrong things would go.
Overlapping crises are threatening the political, economic and social stability of Lebanon. As this column explains, the disaster in Syria provides insights into how grievances can accumulate to a point at which single events can trigger conflict.