This presentation is about the making of French-Jazira in the French colonial ruling ideology and practice which both emphasised the particularity and distinctiveness of the land and people of Jazira. The colonial discourse is played out in different fronts: The region was granted an autonomous administrative status like the other three autonomously administered governorates in French-Syria. Racial taxonomies accompanied the French political project in Jazira. As well as this, essentialist categories about the ethno-religious groups in the region emphasized each group’s uniqueness and dissimilarity from each other and from the rest of Syria. For the French in Syria, the Jazira region was bound up in three fundamental, yet contested Syrian questions, namely the refugee issue, the religion issue (later transformed into the minority issue) and the nomads (Bedouin) issue. The autonomous administration granted to Jazira was the end result of a particular settlement of these three issues borne out of a certain amalgamation of the French political, economic and ideological interests in French-Syria which are intrinsically tied to French imperial concerns in the French empire. The Jazira plain, along with the Orontes valley and the Euphrates valley were viewed as the most viable places for the intended maximization of economic returns. Several reports about the economic prospects of these regions indeed revealed the intersectionality between the economic concerns and the French social and political concerns. The French mandatory authorities undertook the task of strengthening the power of pro-French tribal elites in the region, fostered the empowerment of urban elites and simultaneously promoted small-peasantry through building secluded villages, distributing land or providing agricultural material to the new villagers. If the infrastructural measures—like building roads, extending the railroad from Nusaybin in Turkey and pluralizing economic centres in the region—addressed the general agricultural public, religion emerged as a key feature in the distribution of land or the organization of villages. This presentation will focus on the inherent contradictions intrinsic to these policies and their political implications which, arguably, laid the material ground for the emergence of a culture of sectarianism and elite-dominated sectarian rule in French-Jazira.