The first months of the Syrian uprising saw the spread of mobilizations in most regions of the country, from one village, small city or urban neighborhood to another. Three years later, the revolution has evolved into an armed conflict and the Syrian territory is divided into a patchwork of areas dominated either by the regime forces or by one of the many armed opposition groups. Most of the media attention is directed towards the evolution of the rapport de force on the ground, an ever-difficult task as the events are spiraling-up. Some commentators borrow analogies from other conflicts to depict the Syrian crisis: “libanization”, “irakization” or even, more recently, “somalization”. Not only is the use of these analogies loose, but it also preempts the analysis, in that they suggest a trajectory of Syria towards collapsing and/or territorial partition along sectarian lines. The paper does not attempt to foresee the future – and the level of complexification of the on-going situation in Syria in 2014 leaves indeed the door open to many scenarii. However, based on an original work of mapping of the contestation and of its repression, it analyses the spatial dynamics of the Syrian crisis through an argument based on social change theory. Social change in Syria is understood through the prism of three main structural and long-term trends - the demographic transition, the generalization of literacy and access to basic education, and the fact that the Syrian population has gone from being rural to being urban. Therefore, rather than resorting to sectarian logics (although the sectarian narrative and “geography” are clearly exploited since the beginning of the crisis), the argument builds on the major reconfigurations of the Syrian society and of its territorial organization over the last decades to inform the spatial dynamics of the conflict – the “bottom-up” diffusion of the revolutionary movement, the modalities of the repression, the territorial fragmentation. The paper shows that if the current territorial fragmentation is indeed a result of the development of the armed conflict, the fluidity of the interactions and the overlaps that take place at the local scale contradict a more geopolitical type of analysis.