The civil war in Syria has generated an unprecedented refugee crisis in the Middle East. According to the United Nations there are now over 4 million documented Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom have settled in the three border states of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Received wisdom on these and other refugees is that their experiences of dispossession and dislocation undermines their ability to exert political agency in exile. Refugees are viewed as populations in need of care and protection; rarely do we expect them to mobilize or protest. Yet in the Za’atari Refugee camp in Jordan, refugees have engaged in consistently high levels of political contention since the camp opened in 2012. In Za’atari refugees protest, throw stones, stage riots, hold sit-ins and frequently challenge the management approaches adopted by the myriad organizations that serve as authorities in the camp. In contrast, the Syrians who have settled in Lebanon and Turkey have exhibited strikingly low levels of political mobilization. This paper exploits the variation in levels of contention across these three sites of refugee resettlement to identify the mechanisms that conspire to bring about contention and mobilization among marginalized or displaced populations. I argue that the refugee management regime governing the Za’atari Camp was marked by a particular configuration of space and authority that facilitated refugee mobilization. The refugees in Za’atari were concentrated in one place under the governance of myriad authorities whose actions were, at least at first, deeply uncoordinated. This combination of concentration in space and uncoordinated governance allowed the refugees to build communal structures capable of supporting sustained contentious mobilization through 2013 and 2014. This unique configuration was absent in both Lebanon and Turkey. In Lebanon, refugees faced a deeply uncoordinated management regime, but were prevented from concentrating in any one place. In Turkey, refugees were concentrated in camps like in Jordan, but were faced with a well-coordinated and largely monolithic governance authority that was able to tightly control social life in the camps. These arguments are supported with empirical evidence collected during the summer of 2015 in refugee camps and informal tented settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Data comprise 85 interviews with both refugees and authority figures, as well primary source documents and quantitative data from the United Nations and various implementing partners.