This presentation intends to explore the re(production) of ethnoreligious and political difference in Syria under the French mandate by looking at conflicts over and through land. In modern-Syria, or in any nation-state, land issue is intertwined with claims of sovereignty, economic/political power, the governing of socio-political order, and the formation of various sectarian/nationalist imaginations. Similarly, ideas about cultural and political difference have been bound up with political and economic projects of difference-making, an aspect which is underestimated by social historians working on property and law as well as sectarianism. This presentation will delve into the debates on land and land conflicts, and demonstrate the ways in which they are played out in the politics of cultural and political difference in two different regions in French-Syria: Hawran, a rural frontier region in the southwest with a mixed land tenure system and a relatively homogenous population; and Aleppo, a mixed urban centre with a wide rural hinterland and huge number of refugees in the north.