The historical emergence of the concept and practice of sectarianism is indissociable from the historical emergence of the concept and practice of the modern state. Political scientists, sociologists, and historians have repeatedly refuted primordialist understandings of sectarian, ethnic, and national identities by demonstrating that these forms of communalism are contingent upon the socio-economic, world-historical, institutional, and discursive conditions unique to modernity, including the modern state (e.g. Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Calhoun 1997; Makdisi 2000; Wimmer 2013). These modernist approaches help explain how processes of state formation do not simply mobilize latent sectarian identity, but produce ‘sect’ as a valid category upon which to ground social action. Against the backdrop of the modern state, sect becomes the expression of an essentially local communal identity. As practice, sectarianism threatens to fragment politics at the national scale or, conversely, emerges as a sub-state response to state weakness, state failure, or civil war (Zartman 1995). This approach has been well represented in serious scholarship on Syria, which generally eschews essentialist analysis and instead argues that sectarian identity becomes relevant in situations of peripheral resistance to central state expansion (Landis 1997), political fragmentation and weak state institutions (Van Dam 1981), class conflict (Batatu 1981), and struggles to control the Bonapartist state (Hinnebusch 1990). Breaking from this consensus, this paper argues that both disciplinary and Syria literatures share a problematic understanding of the state that prevents them from conceptualizing the state/sect relationship in anything but antithetical terms. The scholarship implicitly adopts a quintessentially Weberian concept of the state as a territorially bounded set of institutions that wields a monopoly of legitimate coercion and acts with varying degrees of organizational autonomy from society. Yet this overlooks the fact that Weber’s concept of the state is an ideal type, not empirical description. Neo-Weberian approaches not only disorient our understanding of the state, I contest, but consequently misdirect our understanding of sectarianism. This paper offers an alternative account by reinterpreting 20th century Syrian state formation through the post-Marxist concept of the state (Poulantzas 1980; Jessop 2007; Hay 1996). Drawing on wide-ranging empirical evidence from memoirs, newspapers, government publications and secondary sources, my paper explores how to define sectarianism in Syria after reconceptualizing the state as a spatial, emergent, strategic-relational, and semiotic institutional ensemble. If Poulantzas famously defined the state as a ‘social relation,’ does that mean that the Syrian state expresses a sectarian relation?